There is something faintly ridiculous about the Privileges Committee’s report on partygate. Sixteen pages in, you encounter the following sentence:

‘We have evidence that trestle tables were set up for drinks to be laid out.’

You have barely caught your breath from this nightmarish vision of a trestle table being erected in the Downing Street garden before you are informed that there is evidence that, at another get-together, ‘a cake and alcohol were provided’.

It gets worse. In the annex to the report we learn of ‘platters of sandwiches’. Was there no end to the Bacchanalian debauchery of the Boris Johnson regime?

Surely I am not alone in thinking this is all a tad absurd? It’s hardly the Marquis de Sade, is it? It’s not even Profumo. It isn’t even David Mellor. It’s such a substandard scandal. Britain has a proud tradition of political intrigue. We gave the world Guy Fawkes, the regicides, the slaying of young princes, beheadings, honours-for-cash, a war minister getting it on with a showgirl. Now all we have to offer are trestle tables on which there might have been ‘cheese and wine’, in the breathless telling of the committee’s report. I’m embarrassed for us.

This is why in the more democratic sphere of justice, we have juries

I know – the Privileges Committee’s investigation of partygate fundamentally concerns the question of whether Boris misled parliament about the parties, not the parties themselves. (Though the report does spend page after page on the shindigs, including much excruciating analysis of whether staff entering a room to wish Boris happy birthday was ‘necessary for work purposes’.) Yet the fact is we are talking about whether a PM misled the Commons, not over a war, not over a dangerous liaison, but over the consumption of cake and quaffing of wine. The more you read of the report, the more ridiculous it all seems.

Misleading parliament is misleading parliament, people will say, whether it’s over a tryst that threatens national security or a gathering at work that was a party on the sly. And yet even the committee’s findings on Boris’s dishonesty are not wholly convincing – or, at least, other interpretations of Boris’s behaviour are available.

Consider the garden gathering on 20 May 2020, which Boris attended for 28 minutes, we’re informed. Boris says it was a necessary work event because the aim was to ‘boost staff morale… after what had been a very difficult period’. No, decrees the committee – ‘we do not consider that a social gathering held purely for the purposes of improving staff morale can be regarded as having been essential for work purposes’. Okay, but others will disagree. In good faith. To some of us, workplace morale is incredibly important, and boosting it is always a good idea.

Then there’s the question of whether Boris really did receive ‘repeated assurances’ that the gatherings were within the rules. He says he did, the committee says he did not, because he only received assurances from two people, both of whom were employed in communications at Downing Street. ‘The assurances he received were not accurately represented by him to the House’, the report says. Again, okay – but isn’t it possible that Boris’s description of the assurances he did indeed receive was made in good faith, or perhaps just speedily, rather than being a suspension-worthy act of deception?

This is why in the more democratic sphere of justice, we have juries. Twelve men and women unlikely to be infected by the kind of political jaundice that can understandably swirl around judges who hear about terrible human behaviour all day long, or indeed around those ensconced in the backstabby world of Westminister. I can easily envision a jury coming to a different conclusion on partygate to the one reached by the committee. But he did receive assurances, they might say. But work morale is essential, they might protest.

Indeed, many an ordinary citizen is likely to agree with Boris that Downing Street is a unique workplace where social distancing is not always possible. In the words of Jack Doyle, Boris’s director of communications from 2021 to 2022, it’s ‘an old building with limited space’.

It’s a ‘peculiar’ workplace, Boris himself said, in that ‘the prime minister and his family live in the same building’. I found myself unconvinced by the committee’s drawing of a sharp moral distinction between people entering a room to discuss the pandemic and people entering the same room to say ‘Happy birthday, Boris’. I certainly think a 90-day suspension is extreme, and likely to be shaped as much by political calculations as by any sense of justice.

I fear that the fallout from partygate poses a larger threat to democracy than partygate itself. Who will shoot from the hip in the Commons now that they know their comments might one day be branded ‘inaccurate’ and deserving of punishment?

‘Will [this] inquiry have a chilling effect on ministers’ willingness to speak at the Dispatch Box?’, the report asks, before answering with a firm: ‘No.’ They protest too much. As for chastising Boris and other MPs for ‘impugning the committee’ by calling it a ‘kangaroo court’ – who does this committee think it is? A new Star Chamber? Our elected representatives must be free to criticise every manifestation of state power.

It feels like a new layer of political authority has been forged off the back of partygate. An all-powerful committee that can haul all before it, even former PMs, and current PMs too, one presumes, and propose their admonishment for inaccurate or vague speech. Isn’t holding politicians to account our job?

Forget Boris, I’m worried about how this all impacts on our rights, in particular our right to determine the fate of governments for ourselves, at the ballot box.