You can sense the growing disbelief and anger. All his life Boris Johnson has been told that he is the Special One. A person for whom all rules are there to be broken. He is a man who has consistently managed to fail upwards. Sacked from one job for lying or incompetence, he has always effortlessly moved on to a better one. Friends, family and children have only ever been collateral damage in a ruthless pursuit of an entitled ambition. Yet now there is no hiding place. Boris has achieved his narcissistic goal of becoming prime minister and from here the only way is down. And it’s a lonely place to be because even he can’t escape the fact that he’s just not cut out for the top job. It’s not just that it’s too much like hard work and he is basically lazy: it’s that he’s not that good at it. Lame gags, bluster and Latin free association just don’t cut it. Put simply, Boris isn’t as bright as he has come to believe he is. In fact, he’s quite dim. And nowhere is this more evident than when he’s up against Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions in front of a near empty chamber. During their first few outings, much was made of how Boris crumbled in the face of the Labour leader’s forensic questioning. But now it’s clear Johnson can’t cope with any kind of questioning at all. Because even when Starmer isn’t at his absolute sharpest, Boris begins to fall apart. It’s as if he knows he’s up against a man of greater intellect and morality and his only defence is to lash out. It doesn’t help that Boris has become his own worst enemy. The charmer turned charmless. Mr Happy turned Mr Angry. It also doesn’t help that even when his friends at the Daily Telegraph try to big him up with a story about how he was going to take direct control over the government’s handling of the coronavirus, they only succeed in teeing up Starmer with his first free hit. Who had been in charge of the government during the past three months? Apart from Classic Dom of course. Because we could all take that as read. Boris immediately became defensive and snappy. He had always been in control. All that was changing was that now he would be in total control. Besides, he stood behind what the government had done so far. There hadn’t been many other countries that had managed to kill so many of its citizens through negligence and indifference, so that was something of which we should all be proud. Besides why was the Labour leader standing up and asking him all these difficult questions when he could easily have been more supportive? This left Starmer rather perplexed as he had a copy of a letter he had written to the prime minister a fortnight ago offering to help find a solution on reopening schools to which he had not yet received a reply. “Um … er,” said the floundering Boris. He had rung him back. Except he hadn’t. He had merely spoken to all the opposition leaders on a joint conference call.
There was something almost pathetic about Boris pleading for people to trust him at the very moment he was lying. Starmer merely pointed out that trust had to be earned, and returned to the charge sheet. Why had Johnson eased lockdown restrictions when the woman in charge of track and trace on which the new guidance was predicated had said the programme wouldn’t be fully functional till the end of the month? Why had the guidelines been altered when the threat was still stuck at level 4? By now it was clear that Starmer had got under Boris’s skin, and Johnson began to visibly fall apart as he tugged at his hair, tried to prevent his chin from wobbling and angrily jabbed his finger. A prime minister unable to differentiate between being picked on and being subjected to the bare minimum of democratic scrutiny. For Boris even the most modest of criticism is interpreted as a personal betrayal. He might not be very good but he was doing his very best and it was about time the Labour leader and the rest of the country expressed their gratitude for that. As so often, the leaders’ exchanges ended with Boris doing a U-turn on government policy. If you had to guess from PMQs who was running the country then you’d have to say it was Starmer. Only the previous day, Johnson had insisted on a three-line whip in support of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s plans to institutionalise discrimination into the workings of the Commons. Now it sounded very much as if he had had a change of mind. Which had meant that much of Tuesday’s proceedings had been as big a waste of time as MPs queueing up for 90 minutes to deprive absent MPs of a vote. Not that queueing was necessarily a bad thing, Boris ad-libbed. The public had queued for Ikea so it was right for MPs to get their knees dirty and queue to vote as well. Even though there was a fully functional alternative up and running already. It’s getting harder and harder to know where satire ends and reality starts. Boris breathed a sigh of relief when Starmer’s six questions came to an end, but there was no let up. The SNP’s Ian Blackford twice asked Boris to condemn President Trump’s handling of the riots in the US – teargassing peaceful protesters to get a photo op in front of a church had been a particular low point – and twice the prime minister declined. Even Theresa May got in on the act by asking a Brexit question he couldn’t answer. How the Tory benches could do with her at PMQs right now. The truth is that Boris is a beaten man even before he stands up to speak at the dispatch box. He knows that. Keir knows that. Worst of all, the country knows that. The shouting is all just empty, white noise. A distraction from his own limitations. And at a time of national crisis you can’t get away with putting that on the side of a bus.