The anti-Boris jury will now consider its verdict of... GUILTY

LADIES and gentlemen of the jury, you will now retire, carefully to consider your verdict of ‘Not Guilty’. Spoken by the late, great Peter Cook, and written by the equally late, great Christopher Booker, occasionally of this parish, these were the famous last words of the judge’s summing up in their fabulous parody of the Jeremy Thorpe trial.

Thorpe, then leader of the Monster Raving Liberal Party, had been accused of conspiring to murder his homosexual lover Norman Scott — a notorious affair brought back to life recently by the TV drama A Very English Scandal, based on John Preston’s brilliant book.

Cook’s performance, at the 1979 Secret Policeman’s Ball charity stage show, captured superbly the widespread incredulity that Thorpe had been acquitted despite an avalanche of damning evidence against him.

The judge had been perceived throughout as being openly hostile to the prosecution and instinctively biased in favour of Thorpe, a fellow member of the old Establishment. Fast forward four decades and I can’t help wondering what Cook and Booker would have made of the current prosecution of Boris Johnson playing in Westminster to an audience of practically no one.

In a complete reversal of the Thorpe trial, the modern Establishment comes not to praise a former party leader, but to bury him. Once again, the verdict has been decided in advance. Boris is guilty as charged and must be dragged off to the Tower and hanged by the neck until dead.

Instead of circling the wagons to defend one of their own, the Establishment has decided to display his head on a pike.

A rigged jury of Remainers and Boris-haters, under presiding judge Mrs Justice Harriet Harman, has come together to convict BoJo of, er, your guess is as good as mine. Just as long as something can be made to stick.

HATTIE appears to have already made up her mind, thanks to her handing down her carefully considered verdict of guilty in advance on social media. She described Boris’s evasions over the so-called Partygate business as ‘unspeakable’.

The allegedly impartial jury also contains an ex-Corbynista shadow minister and one of Wee Burney’s Toytown Tartanistas who has accused the Prime Minister of telling a ‘litany of lies’ about Downing Street’s lockdown lash-ups.

The Tories are led by Bernard Jenkin — a so-called grandee who never achieved high office and who told Boris the game was up. They also include a couple of Red Wall non-entities, who have made no secret of their abhorrence of what went on in No10 after work.

Tory MP Laura Farris was also on the case, until she stepped down last month. But Farris says she has ‘full confidence in the committee’. Curiously, though, for reasons best known to herself, Farris once worked for Democratic senator Hillary Clinton and subsequently voted for a motion of no confidence in Johnson.

And here’s where it gets interesting. What we’re witnessing is Westminster’s version of Washington’s deranged parti pris impeachment hearings, which seek to convict sitting and past Presidents of high crimes and misdemeanours.

Having not impeached a President since Andrew Johnson in 1868, the Boys In The Beltway (the U.S. answer to our very own Boys In The Bubble) have developed a bloodthirsty appetite for vengeance.

First up was Hillary’s husband Bill Clinton, dragged through a demeaning series of Capitol Hill hearings over his ‘I did not have sex with that woman’ Monica Lewinsky. Admittedly, it provided great sport, especially over Clinton’s claim that his innocence depended on ‘what the meaning of “is” is’. That was the spectacularly evasive defence dreamed up by his sidekick Sidney Blumenthal, a slippery character with whom I once shared a BBC Question Time panel in Miami. (But that’s a story for another day.)

Whatever Billy Bob Clinton got up to in the Oval Office pales into insignificance compared with his ultra-priapic predecessor John F. Kennedy, including his alleged involvement with the death of his one-time lover Marilyn Monroe, who was passed round like a tray of biscuits. But no one ever thought of impeaching the revered JFK.

Yet Bad Orange Man Trump has been impeached not once but twice, even though he’s left office.

The hearings into whether or not he incited the Capitol Hill riot on January 6 last year are still dragging on in front of a hostile jury containing not a single Trump supporter. The outcome has never been in doubt.

In retaliation, when the Republicans take back control of Washington in November, stand by for the impeachment of Sleepy Joe Biden over his dodgy business dealings with his drug-taking, whore-hiring son Hunter and nefarious foreign actors. There will be no end to this modern madness, which has now crossed the pond.

Surely some perspective is long overdue. Lloyd George never suffered the indignity of being hauled before a jury of his peers, despite the fact that he was well known for saving fallen women and is alleged to have fathered a football team full of illegitimate children.

And despite Boris’s well-documented dalliances — including one with a pole-dancer he put on the payroll when London Mayor — there was no suggestion until recently that he should have to answer for his affairs to a Commons committee, hell-bent on hounding him beyond the grave. You couldn’t get a better Kangaroo Court if Rolf Harris was in the chair.

Hattie’s lynch mob have even moved the goalposts so they can continue their vendetta — despite the fact that Boris has already admitted inadvertently misleading the Commons over beers and birthday cake in Downing Street. And anyway, he’s history. So what’s the point?

The trouble is, both here and in Washington, politicians are all living in their own movie — thanks to social media and the 24-hour news cycle.

ALONG with the Westminster Press corps, they think they’re the reincarnation of Watergate’s Woodward and Bernstein in All The President’s Men. Why else is every minor political scuffle labelled ‘Something-Gate’?

The real tragedy here is that while they’re fiddling away, both in Westminster and Washington, Babylon is burning.

Inflation is out of control, there’s a global energy crisis, World War III may be about to erupt — and yet no one’s in charge either in the White House or Downing Street. Western democracy is going to hell in a handcart while the so-called tribunes of the people are staging absurd Stalinesque show trials and are about to retire and consider their verdicts of ‘Guilty’.

As Peter Cook once observed in another context, this is not the kind of way to run an effing ballroom.