After all that practise, sorry remains the hardest word

Arguably, it's important to remember that while Downing Street partied most of us weren't burying our parents in a funeral that could only be shown on Zoom.

- TOM PECK

We weren't nurses on Covid wards, still, years later, unable to cope with the horrors we witnessed. And thank goodness for that.

Most of us haven't got a clue what we were doing on 13 November 2020, or on 16 April 2021 or on any of the other days in question in Sue Gray's finally published report. Because we were sitting at home, bored far beyond tears, watching the days and weeks and months and years of our lives mush into a great ball of nothing. Millions of people lived vicariously through their pot plants.

Most of us weren't working in Downing Street. So most of us didn't get a chance to get drunk with our work colleagues til 4.20 in the morning. We didn't chuck red wine up the office walls. We didn't abuse security staff and cleaning staff, for having the temerity to quietly point out that we were very clearly breaking the laws which, for an added twist, we had been making up ourselves. And then we didn't, at the end of it all, send texts to each other saying: "We seem to have got away with it."

Maybe it's because we weren't that lucky, but certainly it's because we weren't that venal or that stupid. It's hard to pick out which line is the most damning. At one point in the report, the ethics adviser, Helen McNamara, arrives with a karaoke machine, an absurd act that has caused her to leave her role in the civil service for a much more lucrative job in the private sector, working for the Premier League.

There are the WhatsApp messages relating to the logistical difficulties of setting up their BYOB party in the Downing Street garden at the exact time at which journalists would be leaving the Downing Street press conference, during which they had been broadcasting clear instructions to the nation, telling them not to do the exact thing they were about to do. And they knew it.