The past few weeks have seen the scandal of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson come to the forefront after he was found to have deliberately misled the House of Commons around the illegal partying going on in Number 10 during lockdown.

These findings coincided with an internal Conservative Party fight about who would get lifelong peerages in the House of Lords and other honours under Mr Johnson’s resignation honours.

In addition, Liz Truss has also popped back up to say that, despite the obvious chaos she unleashed on our economy, she was got rid of because people didn’t understand what she was trying to do.

Equally, her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng who took the lead on blowing up the economy, has still refused to apologise for it.

Added to all this, both David Cameron and George Osbourne have been hauled before the Covid enquiry to be questioned about the impact of their austerity measures on public service preparedness for the pandemic.

We even saw Mr Cameron apologise for not getting our country prepared enough for what was to come.

The reason why all this matters, is because it highlights just how poorly we have been served over the past 13 years of Conservative rule in Westminster.

Whether it was austerity ripping the heart out of public services, much of which continues to this day, sleaze and scandal under Mr Johnson or economic chaos under Liz Truss, the common factor is a Conservative Party in power but out of touch.

It begs the question- what is better now than 13 years ago? And more importantly, why would any of this change when the Conservative party is out of ideas and energy to fix the problems they have created?

The Conservative government looks more like it is managing decline than renewing the future of this country.

What started as ambitious rhetoric around “Levelling Up” has become “fight for scraps”.

We see this with the latest round of public transport recovery funding.

In Greater Manchester, where we are the only place in the country taking back public control of our buses and integrating them with tram and train, we received only 40 per cent of what we needed to keep services running as they are. In contrast, London got much more than that.

The same is true for our ambitions in Greater Manchester around boosting technical education and giving it parity with the academic route.

Anonymous spokespeople for the Department for Education said this was confusing and narrowed opportunity. The reality is the exact opposite of course.

Clearly it is time for change.