It’s a sign, possibly, of my increasing age and bad temper that I find myself harking back to an imaginary past in which tradesmen could be relied upon to know what they were about. A time when people took pride in their work. You know the sort of thing: back in the good old days a plumber or electrician  would diagnose and fix the problem on the first call-out; you didn’t have to spend six months trying to get your builder to come back and reopen all the windows he painted shut; and if you got a brutal warlord marching on the capital with 25,000 hairy-bottomed ex-cons, he wouldn’t leave his coup half-finished and bugger off to Belarus. A great disappointment, I call it.

Are we really to imagine that the Kremlin is concocting high-risk intelligence operations in the hopes of destabilising Somerset and Frome?

And forget about the police starting to look younger: they’re starting to look less police-like. I can’t get all ventilated about police forces celebrating Pride or shaking a tailfeather at the Notting Hill Carnival, but properly investigating potential wrongdoing still seems to be an important part of the job description. Yesterday it was reported that they had decided not to investigate David Warburton, the Tory MP photographed looking sagacious next to a glass of whisky and an upturned baking tray with lines of white powder racked out on it.

As the police have argued in making their determination not to investigate, there’s no way of proving that those white lines were anything more potent than bicarbonate of soda. (Judging by how streetwise the member for Somerset and Frome seems to be, we can’t rule it out.) But they could always just have asked him. He has been quite happy to admit to the Mail on Sunday that they were, at least as far as he knew, cocaine; and that – deeply though he may now regret this moment of madness – he snoofed them up his hooter very cheerfully.

As much as Mr Warburton’s adventures show up what, as I say, seems like a dismaying lack of gumption in the police, they show up even more the very flaky qualities of today’s MPs. Quite aside from the whole business of snorting cocaine, Mr Warburton has been accused of sexual harassment by three separate women, including the unimprovably Patridgean accusation that he squeezed a lady’s thigh at the British Kebab Awards. All these accusations, we should say, he denies.

Mr Warburton and his loyal wife have taken the view, rather, that all this was a ‘honeytrap’ operation, claiming that the young lady in whose flat he was snorting this coke spoke ‘fluent Russian’. But the razorblade he should have been using to chop out his lines was Occam’s. Are we really to imagine that the Kremlin is concocting high-risk intelligence operations in the hopes of destabilising Somerset and Frome? Or that if it did, it might not warn its Mata Hari to go easy on the Russian-speaking so as not to arouse suspicion?

Flirting with young women not your wife, we can understand. Taking drugs and drinking too much whisky, we can understand. But deciding that when you’re caught doing it that you’re the victim of what Mr Warburton calls a ‘Kafkaesque witch-hunt’, or that, still more absurdly, you have been toppled by agents of a foreign power: come off it. I’m afraid the plain interpretation available to all of us here is that, sympathise though we may with his human weaknesses, Mr Warburton is a very run-of-the-mill wally.

Is it really too much to hope for more than just run-of-the-mill wallies as MPs? 650 people serve in that role, out of the 67 million-odd who live in this country. That’s one in a hundred thousand. Can it really be impossible to find a higher number of slightly above average people in so narrow a process of selection? Week in, week out, what seems like a suspiciously high proportion of them turn out to be heroically uninterested in doing their jobs with any real conviction – and, what’s more, pathetically dim and unimaginative in the dodges they use to get out of it. There are the pinchy ones, the gropey ones, the drunk ones, the druggy ones. There was the Labour member who seems not only to have snorted a whole bunch of cocaine but used taxpayer money to fund his habit. There are the many who don’t show the first sign of having bothered to master their briefs. And there are the very many who bound like Babycham fawns towards every investigative hack in a false moustache offering an unethical freebie or an imaginary lobbying post.

It’s as if being an MP isn’t a job that even the people who do it, half the time, take half as seriously as they take their side-hustles appearing on reality TV shows or running shouting matches on GB News. And there’s no discernible rise in quality that goes with seniority. It’s not even clear if Nadine Dorries still has a house in her own constituency and ‘it’s not known if, or when, she undertakes constituency surgeries’. She’s voted in the Commons only half a dozen times in as many months. Between leaving Downing Street and leaving the Commons her great hero Boris Johnson missed 187 out of a possible 190 votes.

We may hope in vain for MPs of genius and high principle. Personally, I’d settle for dull competence and a conscientious attitude to what remains an important job. We’re always hearing about the importance of ‘restoring trust in politics’. Recruiting fewer useless politicians would surely be a start. Whether you do that by paying them more and banning them from taking outside jobs, by paying them less and encouraging them to take more outside jobs, or simply by offering them all a Scotch and a line of coke and weeding out the ones who say ‘Da!’, I cannot claim to know for sure. But there’s got to be some sort of quality filter available. It’s too depressing to imagine that we really do get the politicians we deserve.