Illegal parties and gatherings held at Number 10, Downing Street during the UK lockdown - when many thousands of people were dying a week without contact with their loved ones, funerals were strictly regulated, and weddings and other gatherings were being postponed indefinitely - have outraged much of the population. And, as was the case with Watergate, the cover-up has done even more damage than the original offences.

The effect of both cases has been the same. Nixon gave as his reason for stepping down the log-jam effect his continuance in the role was having on the processes of government. He knew that while ever he was President, little or nothing would get done.

That is what is happening in Downing Street. One Tory told the BBC on Thursday: "Government is totally gummed up - it's horrible, nothing gets done or signed off [on]". The difference between Johnson and Nixon is Johnson seems determined to brazen it out. This couldn't be happening at a worse time. The UK is in the grip of a full-blown Omicron outbreak that is pushing case numbers, hospitalisations, and deaths skywards. It is also a more than interested party in a global crisis, with fears a Russian invasion of Ukraine is imminent.

Johnson, the author of a colourful - but widely criticised - biography of Churchill, has fallen far short of being Churchillian. For those who have studied his form, this could not come as a surprise.

In an interview with the BBC's Booktalk in 2006, he famously explained his Trumpian modus operandi: "I've got a brilliant new strategy, which is to make so many gaffes that nobody knows which one to concentrate on," he said. "They cease to be newsworthy, you completely out-general the media in that way and they despair ... It's like a helicopter throwing out chaff, and then you steal on quietly and drop your depth charges wherever you want to drop them."

The trouble is that at the time he wasn't even the mayor of London; just a former magazine editor, the Conservative MP for Henley, and an author with a new book on weaponised Roman history to flog.

What may have worked then is neither effective nor appropriate when you are the Prime Minister of a country of 68 million people in the grip of a crisis, and one of the most recognisable leaders on the world stage.

If "party gate" and the subsequent clumsy cover-up was a "strategy", it was a particularly misguided one. Rather than being remembered as a Churchillian hero, Johnson is being excoriated as a latter-day Nero.

It's hard to believe this is the same man who was elected Prime Minister in his own right in 2019 with the largest Conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher in 1987. But as long as Mr Johnson and his dwindling band of defenders maintain their spurious claims the parties were "work functions" and these are "trivial matters", the outrage will grow.

Leadership is about character. The "above the law" mentality both the parties and the attempt to cover them up demonstrate shows there has been a serious shortage of this at Number 10 since the beginning of the pandemic.

The longer Mr Johnson refuses to acknowledge the extent to which he has let his country down by refusing to relinquish the leadership, the more obvious it becomes that he is unworthy of his office.

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: