It was this time last year that I raised a Point of Order with the Leader of the House about how concerned I was becoming with the government’s growing reluctance to provide straight-forward, sufficient answers to reasonable questions from members.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to get a decent answer to questions in the house and it had become nearly impossible to get a written response from ministers in anything resembling a timely fashion.

It seemed to me that the government was trying to hide its poor performance. I was concerned about what it meant for Parliamentary accountability and scrutiny.

A year on it is apparent that this was only the tip of a very large iceberg.

So many deeply troubling issues have subsequently bobbed to the surface - whether it’s the billions blown during a pandemic response riddled with cronyism and profiteering, the various ministerial scandals, the ever-lengthening string of broken promises, the screeching u-turns and the ongoing total lack of culpability.

Most recently the Prime Minister shamefully whipped his MPs to support ripping up the Parliamentary Standards procedure to save one of their own from a lobbying scandal.

And just when it seems things can’t get much worse, the Prime Minister sinks to new depths of inanity by waffling on about Muppets and Peppa Pig when he was supposed to be delivering serious and important speeches.

If the joke was ever funny to begin with, it isn’t any more.

The wheels are coming off and it is very worrying indeed.

We cannot allow this slow slide into sleaze and corruption to become the norm. This casual erosion of what it means to be an honest, competent and transparent government cannot continue.

That is not what politics should be. It shouldn’t be about helping your pals get a payday or merely a stepping stone to raking it in via lucrative consultancy gigs.

At the very least there needs to be a better system in place to look into dodgy dealings.

When you have a government as untrustworthy as this one you cannot rely on the toothless system we currently have - which essentially allows them to mark their own homework.

I fully support Labour’s call to create a truly independent anti-corruption and anti-cronyism commissioner and also an Office for Value for Money.

This would be a good start to cleaning up the mess the Conservatives have made and something a Labour government has promised it will ensure.

In the meantime, I will continue – particularly through my role on the Public Accounts Committee – to do everything I can to hold this government to account.