Frank Dobson, the former Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras, is dead. And yet his corpse seems to have been reanimated, purely to discredit the Labour party, at the incompetent behest of the bleary late night Tory disinformation-sluice Nadine Dorries.

The Keirgate Beergate confusion campaign, by the Conservatives and their slave journalists, attempts to associate Starmer in the public mind with lockdown breaches by simple front-page repetition of unfounded accusations. Its purpose is to distract from the government’s own well-documented and proved Partygate crimes and its broader ethical, moral, financial, social and administrative failings. It’s like trying to cover up the Great Train Robbery by pointing out that someone else somewhere else once said the word “train”. The best endgame for the fridge-dweller-in-chief is the criminally misinformed check-in woman at the hotel in Tunbridge Wells saying resignedly: “They’re all as bad as each other” when I ask her if she’ll be voting in the local elections. Job done!

Last week, Dorries circulated a photograph of Keir Starmer supposedly feasting on Indian foods during lockdown in April 2021. But the picture was cropped from a shot of Starmer dining with Dobson, who had carelessly died two years earlier in 2019, meaning it is unlikely that the picture was taken in April 2021, as if it had been it would have featured just a skellington with all curry on its face.

The so-called woke “brigade” was quick to ridicule Dorries for her mis-post, despite her dyslexia. Cruelly, a little-known dyslexia side-effect is the involuntary dissemination of photos suggesting people dined in Indian restaurants long after their own deaths and yet still the caviar communists sneer. It seems the virtue-signallers’ “sympathies” for the afflicted are discounted if they happen to be on the right of British politics.

Conservative MPs know there is no equivalence between Boris Johnson’s deliberate breaches of lockdown regulations and Starmer’s unproven breach of lockdown regulations. But they keep shtum, moral whistleblowing being a luxury even those relatively untainted backbenchers being punted as possible antidotes to the Augean filth of the Johnson years can’t afford. Instead, they cling to whatever passing falsehoods will keep them afloat, like turds floating down the especially frothy sewer of the Conservative party’s bloodstream. Sorry. Did I say “turds”? I meant “local turds”, in order to differentiate them from those other turds, you know, the bad turds, in Westminster.

The Tories and the rightwing press think we really need to discuss something Starmer probably didn’t do and shouldn’t “move on”. They also think we really don’t need to discuss a lot of things Johnson definitely did do and should “move on”. It is a textbook definition of cognitive dissonance. The entire Conservative machine is Norman Osborn arguing with a reflection of the Green Goblin in a full-length mirror, but with worse teeth and no exploding pumpkins. And isn’t it supposed to be a crime to waste police time? Meanwhile, the compliant house eunuchs of the BBC question Starmer on the Durham non-story while entirely failing to cover, on any level, the police raid on Tory peer Michelle Mone’s home, possibly in search of £203m of suspiciously awarded pandemic PPE contracts.

The Conservatives’ noble attempt, last week, to divert attention from their failings by getting everyone to talk about the actual colour of Angela Rayner’s actual pubic hair had already failed, despite its online amplification by hundreds of newly activated Soviet-style Conservative propaganda bots with plausible fake identities. Did Ada Lovelace invent the computer so made-up people could discuss Angela Rayner’s vulva, in order to drown out real people talking about a man who experienced a tractor-sex career fatality? No.

The constantly confused culture secretary Dorries recently promised that “the British internet”, whatever that is, will be the most trustworthy in the world. It could be, if she herself just stays off it. Especially after about 10pm at the weekends. And if Conservatives generally would just stop lying. Everywhere. All the time. Check out this tweet, so insane it must surely be deliberately stupid, sent out on Wednesday by Dorries: “The man who wants one day to be prime minister cannot behave like this. He has a responsibility to be open, honest and transparent with the public.” Meanwhile, the man who actually is prime minister can lie about everything for ever all the time. Parties; children; mistresses; employment figures; new hospitals; Jimmy Savile. Everything.

But maybe Dobson was eating in Durham, despite being dead for a number of years? Perhaps he did dine on dhansak and wine, while squirming Starmer chewed chana masala? Maybe the dead member for Holborn and St Pancras burned his beard on hot chicken madras, while beery Sir Keir scoffed spinach paneer? Did the deceased health secretary down meat biryani, while the Labour ex-lawyer just snacked on pakora? There are more things in Dorries’s 11pm Twitter feed, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.

On Saturday, I bisected the moors between shows in Crewe and Huddersfield, skirting Alderley Edge, where legends say King Arthur lies sleeping, awaiting Albion’s hour of need. Like the mythical king, Dobson was a convivial character thought to embody Britain at its best. Perhaps he has returned in our moment of national peril. Is Dobson with us now, once more, like Arthur, in the dying land’s time of crisis, steering thirsty Starmer’s lip towards the lassi-filled grail of a parliamentary majority?

Confronted with evidence of a starving pensioner sitting on the bus all day to keep warm, by a suddenly significant Piers-free Suzanna Reid on GMB, Johnson merely took the credit for inventing free bus travel for pensioners, but even that turned out to be a lie. Let them eat bus passes.