There is a superficially pleasing symmetry about the resignation of mayoral appointments in the Great Wen. A few months ago the right-wing press scalped Ken Livingstone's black man, Lee Jasper, and last week the liberal press bagged Boris Johnson's, Ray Lewis. Major tales of minor Labour scandals are to be replaced by overblown stories of Tory ones, for the moment at any rate. The score is Labour 1, Conservatives 1. Or press 2, politicians 0.

Weeellll, we told you so, didn't we? Didn't you read in this very column that Boris was an entertaining cove, but not a serious politician? I could be forgiven for coming over all smug. I could join in with the BBC early-morning radio correspondent and the chairman of the Fabian Society in describing this as a blow for the entire Cameroonian project.

“Given that Boris is Boris,” the latter said, “this failure of due diligence reflects directly on Project Cameron.”

But the little, awkward internal voice peeps, as it so often does, and asks: “Is that what matters here?” It seems to be true that the Bishop of Chelmsford at some point wrote Mr Johnson a letter and somewhere in it - the first sentence of paragraph six, or something - allowed that Mr Lewis was no longer permitted to hold public ministry in the Anglican Church. Boris, for once cloth-eared to the nuances of the Establishment, failed to realise that, in terms of the understated Church of England, such a reference amounts to a fatwa. Until 2005 Mr Lewis, had indeed been on the feared Lambeth and Bishopthorpe Register, the Church's equivalent of Devil's Island. “This,” explained his Grace, “was because a misdemeanour of such seriousness had been committed that in the opinion of the Archbishop, the person concerned should not exercise his ministry for the time being.”

But what had Mr Lewis done? It doesn't seem to have been anything illegal, for he wasn't prosecuted. Tales of vulnerable parishioners entrusting their wealth to him are doing the rounds, but somehow were not thought to be any impediment to his working in the prison service or later starting up his Eastside Young Leaders Academy in Newham, the project that so impressed new-style Conservatives when they came looking for magic answers to the problem of disaffected youth.

This point was made by Mr Johnson in an initial defence of his deputy. If you're moral enough to be allowed to set up something like Eastside (which the Church must have seen Mr Lewis doing) you are probably moral enough to help the mayor. But then came the second part of Mr Lewis's degringolade, his claim to have been a magistrate. “I have never knowingly done anything that would be inconsistent with my position as a Justice of the Peace,” he had said, before the world learnt that nothing could be consistent with that non-existent position.

It was at this point that BJ tossed Mr Lewis overboard, pronouncing his confidence in his deputy “shaken”.

So Mr Lewis had bigged himself up. It is possible that, before signing on with Team Johnson, he had not read Andrew Gimson's forgiving but revealing biography, Boris, a book perhaps revealing precisely because it was forgiving. Mr Lewis may have been shocked by the many tales of cut corners and deliberate journalistic inaccuracies that accompanied his leader's rise to the heights. Some of them are rather shocking; the electorate, however, chose not be shocked. Why could not Boris show the same latitude towards Mr Lewis, given the importance of the job he had given him? Didn't that transcend these accusations?

You probably know where I am with this argument by now. The laying low of political figures (and some others) through non-scandals, is becoming something of a scandal itself. Far from leading to good government and good politics, it is in danger of creating neutered government and supine politics. On every programme that I saw and heard, Mr Lewis's departure was discussed as an “embarrassment” for the Tories, not as a possible setback for the fight against youth crime. Mr Lewis should have stayed with his academy; once he had stepped into politics, he was doomed.

Elected politicians - a necessity in a democracy - are routinely rubbished and abused by press and public in this country, despite being no worse (and usually much better) than those in other nations. And they collude in this treatment, offering their tormentors the same kind of ordure-eating grin that savaged contestants in The Weakest Link try to hide behind. Or worse, by joining in the abuse when it's the other side that is getting slaughtered. Try this idiocy from Ken Livingstone: “I suffered only one enforced resignation of any of my most senior officials - and that only after seven years. This extreme contrast shows vividly the incompetence of Boris Johnson and his administration.”

In Scotland a couple of weeks ago Labour's leader, Wendy Alexander, bowed out of the bear pit of Edinburgh politics, because some small donations were not declared on the MSP's register, on the advice of the clerks. As soon as she knew that they had to be registered, they were. Technically it was a breach of rules. The three Scottish National Party members of the Scottish Parliament's Standards Committee, together with a Lib Dem voted, despite Ms Alexander's clear lack of malintention, to suspend her from Parliament for a day.

Her position impossible, Ms Alexander beamed herself out of office with these words: “My pursuers have sought the prize of political victory with little thought to the standing of the Parliament. Some may feel they have achieved a political victory but wiser heads will ask, at what price.” Yah! said the Scottish press. Alex Salmond smirked.

No wonder Labour's preferred candidate for Glasgow East took a rain-check, deciding not to replace the retiring MP who, himself, is suffering from that political unmentionable, depression. One day soon, it will be Mr Salmond himself. We don't know what for, but it need not be anything serious, and his bloodied (though still smirking) visage will adorn a media pike. Better by far (as Boris may soon recall) to wield the pike than to supply the head. Worse, though, for Britain.

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