Can a political leader keep getting exposed for conveying obvious untruths and yet be judged a fit person to occupy 10 Downing Street or even just a seat in the House of Commons? That’s been the theme of a week at Westminster which has seen Boris Johnson excoriated as someone not fit even to hold a pass giving him access to the Parliamentary Estate as a former MP. So it is odd then that almost nobody has commented on Keir Starmer’s exposure for the commission of a new political fraud – even though it came in the high-profile setting of PMQs.

While lambasting Rishi Sunak for permitting Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list to go through, Starmer argued that the result would be that:

‘Those who spent their time helping to cover up Johnson’s lawbreaking are rewarded by becoming lawmakers for the rest of their lives.’

But how can this be so given that Starmer himself claimed as recently as December that he is committed to abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected second chamber, as envisaged by the report of Gordon Brown’s constitutional commission? He told Sky News that he wanted to get the reform done in a first term ‘because when I asked Gordon Brown to set up the commission to do this, I said what I want is recommendations that are capable of being implemented in the first term’.

Starmer often refers to himself as someone of the utmost integrity

Starmer is also quite clear that he believes he will be prime minister by the end of next year, for instance declaring after the local elections that Labour was on course to win a majority.

If he was remotely serious about abolishing the Lords, he would have remembered this going into PMQs and have made a virtue of contrasting his plan for urgent democratic reform with the cronyism of the Tories. Yet he didn’t even mention it. Instead, we learned that he continues to regard the appointed House of peers as a permanent part of the constitutional furniture.

In reality, I suspect he is as serious about scrapping the Lords as he was about abolishing student fees or nationalising utilities. That is to say, not serious at all. At best we can now expect the pledge to abolish the Lords to be downgraded to the Neverland of a second-term goal. Brown will soon realise that all his worthy work has been in vain and that his report is destined to be filed on a shelf to gather dust alongside past charades, such as the report of the Jenkins Commission on electoral reform. It will be interesting to see if he is capable of further furrowing his already-heavy brow.

As with so much of Starmer’s output, it is all quite reminiscent of the late Peter Cook’s joke that: ‘I met a man at a party. He said: ‘I’m writing a novel’. I said ‘Oh really? Neither am I.’’

Of course, this is the same Keir Starmer who was once going to ensure ‘as a matter of principle’ that Labour did not try to block Brexit but then spearheaded Labour’s fight to block Brexit. Then he was going to fight to keep free movement yet later decided that he had a ‘red line’ against bringing back free movement.

Amusingly Starmer often refers to himself as someone of the utmost integrity. At least Johnson has never gone full Malvolio after his various Toby Belch excesses. Starmer, by contrast, is so deeply in the grip of personal vanity that he is unable even to contemplate that he too might have committed shockingly dishonest political misdeeds.

The political system and the political media has ultimately not permitted Johnson to get away with his shenanigans. So why are Starmer’s so often allowed to pass unlamented and even studiously un-noticed?