I do actually feel a little bit sorry for the Reverend Paul Flowers (although I am always disproportionately cheered by confluences of circumstance – in this case, a drug-taking minister in the Wesleyan subset of Christian denominations – that give rise to once-in-a-lifetime puns like ‘the Crystal Methodist’).

I can fairly well believe that the stresses of watching the Co-operative Bank you preside over implode beneath you while simultaneously caring for your dying mother might turn you to drink and even drugs for temporary relief.

I just wish that either he could have recognised his inadequacies as a bank chief before the thing nearly collapsed with losses of £700m, or sought the help he said he would as he apologised after the news was made public and he was suspended from the church and the Labour party. But that’s drugs, grief and stupidity for you. They make you a bit muddle-headed.

I wonder what Rob Ford’s excuse is, though? That’s the mayor of Toronto, who’s been caught doing much the same thing as Flowers (bar the rent boys and the fact that his drug of choice appears to have been crack rather than coke-plusenquiries- about-meth) and at time of going to press is still refusing to resign or display any visible sign of regret or remorse.

Or – in a different vein – there’s union leader Bob Crow, who will not leave his council house even though he earns £145,000 a year and there is a growing national shortage of public housing.

Or, of course, there’s David Cameron, cosmically unlucky enough to be friend of both and employer of one of two innocent souls currently on trial for various criminal charges relating to alleged phone hacking, making unlawful payments to public officials for stories and perverting (or conspiring to pervert) the course of justice. Meanwhile, Cameron is using the Flowers scandal to taunt and score political points off Labour’s Ed Miliband.

Or there’s Ed Balls. Would a bit of humility have gone amiss when it became clear that the economy got kinda holed beneath the waterline and kinda sank when he was kinda on deck (though the machine gunning of the survivors did have to wait until the Coalition managed to board the vessel)?

Lucy Mangan: "Do men in power feel no shame?"