Have we lost all perspective?

Judgments on our political figures seem to have lost all sense of moral relativity. Andrew Mitchell lost his rag with a couple of police officers when they forced him to get off his bike and go through the pedestrian turnstile in Downing Street rather than letting him through the main gate. He clearly got really annoyed and said things he shouldn't have. But really - sack him? Force him to resign? Come on.

Have you ever known a police officer to be patronising and arrogant in tone? I'm afraid their power gives them automatic tendencies in this direction, which they are trained to curb - and, to be fair, usually do so effectively (particularly in Surrey, where I rate them highly). Mitchell was angry and probably a bit arrogant in his actions. But who went running to The Sun? The police, of course. And what caused them so much angst? Answer - the gall of Andrew Mitchell to behave in a superior manner that threatened their own sense of unassailed superiority. There they are guarding Downing Street and enjoying their sense of importance with all the tourists, when a senior cabinet minister attending his umpteenth meeting of the day dares to ask them to open the gates. Who does he think he is?!

And of course, we all know that the police are the unsullied guardians of public virtue, don't we? After all, they have played no part whatsoever in the various national scandals in our minds at the moment -  Savile, phone-hacking, Hillsborough, have they?

The arrogance of the West Midlands police in deigning to demand Mitchell's resignation is simply outrageous .

And if Mitchell is supposed to have single-handedly torn apart the painfully-rebuilt reputation of the Conservative party, has he erred in ways equally-heinous to how other senior politicians have behaved in recent times?

Everyone is raving about the blue-eyed saviour of the Tories at the moment, but they forget that Boris Johnson betrayed the one individual to whom he took a public oath to be loyal. He refused to come clean about an affair and was sacked as shadow higher education minister. Do we really believe we can trust him to run the country?

According to Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair needed to strip down to his underpants in order to do his serious thinking, when with his speech-writing team. Wasn't that abusing his relationship with his subordinates? Should he have been sacked???

Gordon Brown threw things at people and shouted at them.  Thatcher spoke to colleagues as if they were six-year olds.  Churchill was apparently so intoxicated that he came out of the gents in Westminster Palace with rather too much of his anatomy exposed. Our greatest Englishman? Huh, he should have been locked up.

And the list goes on.

Let's get a sense of proportion, people.