There has been one conspicuous absence in the Commons in recent days. Well, two. Though no one counts Liz Truss any more. She has been airbrushed out of the Tory party’s history. Just a £40bn hole in the UK finances. Boris Johnson is a different matter. It was he who won the Conservatives an 80-seat majority in the 2019 election by promising to “Get Brexit done”. He had a deal that had eluded Theresa May. A deal that was “oven ready”. Except it wasn’t. He had just created a border in the Irish Sea. He had then come up with an even more cunning plan. A bill to allow the UK to disapply the Northern Ireland protocol that it had negotiated with the EU. To break international law. So there was some interest in what the Convict might have to say about the filigree Windsor framework Rishi Sunak had spun while falling into Ursula von der Leyen’s eyes. But there had been nothing but silence. Johnson didn’t show his face on Monday when Sunak made his statement to MPs. Almost as if he couldn’t bear to witness a rival’s success. Nor did he leave his home on Tuesday or Wednesday. By which time Rish! had grabbed the narrative. His deal had been an act of genius. The finest piece of diplomacy since the Good Friday agreement. But on the fourth day – a day late for a latter day wannabe Messiah – Johnson turned up at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre to give the keynote speech at the Brand Finance global soft power summit. Mmm, me neither. Boris was ready. If not to break bread, then at least to break his silence. For the first 20 minutes, it was hard to know why he had bothered. Unless he was getting paid by the word. He did, though, make a point of praising the “great public relations” of the United Arab Emirates and its space programme. Who knew that he really gave a toss? Though no doubt all might be revealed when we get to read next month’s register of member’s interests. We will probably find some grateful sponsor has paid the best part of £250K for Johnson to burble on. Nice work if you can get it. Johnson began with an old anecdote about how a runner had yelled “wanker” at him when he had been out for a jog in the park. How he had been cheered at living in a country where free speech could be taken for granted. The old ones are the old ones. This was Boris on auto-pilot. How the wokerati were trying to stop him reading Roald Dahl in the original. Clue: no one is doing anything of the sort. Bumble, bumble, bumble. Bits of old speeches cobbled together at the last minute. The Parthenon marbles. Definitely keep them because they belong to the Brits. The Greeks couldn’t be trusted with them. How he still couldn’t understand why he was fined for a lockdown offence. Let me help. You were done because you broke the law that you had made. From one non mea culpa to another. Labour had only been a few percentage points ahead when he had been forced out of Downing Street. The Tories should have been begging him to come back, not banking on a Goldman Sachs billionaire. He alone could rescue the Conservatives. Then a dig at the Guardian for describing one of his speeches as shocking. Allow me to suggest that the first half of this one was even worse. An exercise in laziness. Finally to the only thing anyone was interested in: Brexit. How he rejected the Chequers deal. Up to a point. At first he declared it to be brilliant. He only resigned after David Davis quit. But since then he had had no remorse about anything. Certainly not for lying to the country about his deal. Here was the thing. His really shit deal was still better than Sunak’s deal that was obviously marginally less shit. Go figure.
There was something rather pathetic about this Boris. Gone was the energy and the self-belief that used to characterise his speeches. This one just rather tailed off. So Rish! had executed a con on the country. Takes a conman to recognise another. Left to Sunak, we would still be an EU vassal state. But he was now too tired to fight. The man who had spent a lifetime fucking people over was now himself fucked. He would oppose the deal, but with no great vigour. He could see the way the wind was blowing. That even the entire audience now thought Brexit was a disaster. His acolytes – once so brave – had melted away. And he was little more than a shrunken, naked homunculus. A Wizard of Oz. The Brexit deadbeat. A rather feeble man, whose glory days are in the past. All that is left to him is to repeat his lies and keep trousering the cheques. A hollowed-out, meaningless existence. Elsewhere in Westminster, there was only one question on anyone’s minds. Who was the most loathsome? Matt Hancock or Isabel Oakeshott? Both are models of betrayal. Matt can turn over his family and the country: Isabel does the same to friends and sources. Both are seemingly free of most normal human emotions. No sense of shame. No sense of guilt. A vacuum where the soul is normally found. Matt put out a statement expressing his deep disappointment in Isabel. Er, give us a break. What did you expect? Isabel’s reputation was hiding in plain sight. Meanwhile Isabel was reinventing herself as a modern Joan of Arc. In her own mind, she’s a freedom fighter. Cleaning the streets. Bless. Perhaps they deserve each other.