What a wonderful personal lawyer Michael Cohen appeared to be; he loved his client Donald Trump so much that he paid $130,000 out of his own pocket to secure the silence of Stephanie Clifford - who was threatening to go public about her alleged sexual encounter with the President of the USA. The story seemed to turn lawyer jokes on their head. It was not his money Donald Trump stated and he knew nothing about the settlement securing the silence of Ms Daniels.

When ex New York Mayor, Rudi Giuliani, took over as part of the Trump legal team, he must have realised immediately that Trump’s lie would come back to haunt him when incontrovertible evidence would prove that Trump did pay $130,000 to Michael Cohen after all. The admission of the reimbursement to Mr Cohen would be less damaging that the puzzling legal argument about whether such a payment was made as part of Trump’s campaign and therefore an illegal payment. That battle is live, more complex and will run and run. Did Trump pay because he was worried about Melania finding out rather than the US public? There are now grey areas rather than a simple truth about the money changing hands when Trump said it had not.

It is ironic that Trump, whose honesty has been called into question on a number of occasions, is still trusted implicitly by his own loyal supporters. After all, he was sent to Washington to ‘drain the swamp’ and every battle enjoined with the ‘establishment’ is further proof that this is precisely what he is doing. Such is the mistrust of the honesty of established politicians, that any outsider, however mendacious, is trusted more than them. After all he is a “Real Guy” not one of those slippery Washington insiders.

It appears that in the US at least the public’s perception of honesty is being turned on its head and this leaves our democratic system in a precarious state. If we cannot trust anyone working as part of our political processes, then we can say goodbye to a functioning system. Elections and referenda become a game where anything goes, no- one is trusted and no- one accountable. Effectively that is what happened in the 2016 US election; and the Brexit referendum was hardly a shining example of honest claims on either side of the argument which leaves us in a right mess.

And yet all this is against a culture, in the UK at least, of honesty in public life enshrined in the Nolan Principles and the Ministerial Code. As Amber Rudd found out to her cost, even an honest misleading of Parliament inevitably led to her position as Home Secretary being untenable. Perhaps it is time that election promises and claims should be subject to the same principles. I am not sure how we would put claims to the test, but we should hold our politicians as accountable to the electorate as advertisers are in the claims they make to the public about their products and services. £350 million a week available to the NHS is just one of many ludicrous claims made by people who we are then expected to trust in the way they govern us.

Then there is also our legal system which depends on the integrity of the lawyers and judges who are involved. Despite newspaper headlines like ‘Enemies of the people’ to attack judges when they made decisions journalists happen to disagree with, the integrity of our legal system is still intact. In 2008, when President of the Law Society, I was invited to meet President Assad of Syria in his palace high above Damascus; he asked me what we did with our dishonest judges. I was able to say with the utmost of integrity that we do not have any. Yes, the honesty of the legal profession and those involved in public life, is vital for the health of our society. I for one am glad to be part of a profession that espouses those values.