Wednesday is Boris Johnson’s take your inner child to work day. The day when he falls out of bed, puts on a suit, uses a brush to turn his hair into a total state and rides out of his Downing Street flat to first face prime minister’s questions in the Commons before doing his weekly coronavirus press briefing at 5pm. Quite what he does in the intervening six days, almost no one has a clue as he is rarely spotted in the wild and there is no visible evidence of any action. Though many of us – including a large number of Tory MPs who are beginning to think they might have backed the wrong man as his approval and competency ratings plummet – would dearly love to know. Perhaps he has been taking time out to catch up with the third series of Ozark. Fair to say that until now Boris has taken a hammering from Keir Starmer at PMQs. Exposed for the petulant narcissist he so clearly is. Yet on Wednesday he escaped with his pride more or less intact. Not because he was any better at responding to the questions – Boris has yet to answer any question directly or truthfully – but more because the Labour leader seemed vaguely distracted and not at the top of his game. Perhaps it had all got too easy for Starmer and he had come to believe that all he needed to do was turn up, do his surgical QC schtick and wipe the floor with the prime minister. After an unsatisfactory opening skirmish on racism in the UK – surely now would have been the time for Starmer to ask if Boris regretted his own use of the terms “picaninnies” “watermelon smiles” and “letterboxes” and whether that might have normalised racist attitudes to people from BAME communities – in which Boris was allowed to suggest he had already implemented the Lammy and Windrush reports in full, the Labour leader did land a telling blow on the coronavirus death rate. Which bit of the excess 63,000 deaths was the PM proud of? Boris’s reply that it was too early to make international comparisons fell hopelessly flat. How many people does he need to die – 100,000? 200,000? – before he admits the UK response to the pandemic has been far worse than almost every other country in the world? If we had the mortality rates of South Korea or Germany, Boris would be the first person to sing his own praises. World-beating only cuts one way for Johnson. You could tell that Boris sensed he was getting away with it as Starmer moved on to the government’s failure to plan for children returning to school. The familiar entitled confidence and swagger began to shine through. Out came the long words (“tergiversation” was reminiscent of a wannabe Will Self, only without the smack) as first he accused Starmer of being a rent-a-gob lawyer – a bit rich coming from someone who has been sacked from several jobs for lying – and then brazenly insisting it was basically Labour’s fault that most children would not go back to school before September at the earliest. By now Starmer had run out of questions, so he had to just suck it up as Johnson began to ad lib like some bloated Mr Toad. The two-metre rule was under review – as in would be dispensed with ASAP regardless of what the scientific advice happened to be – and the world would be returning to some kind of order. What was the point of reopening zoos and theme parks if kids were stuck in schools unable to enjoy them? The Labour leader shook his head. He had missed a trick, but wouldn’t be making the mistake of underestimating his opponent again. In the end it was the SNP’s Kirsty Blackman who landed the most telling blow by asking the prime minister to condemn Donald Trump’s response to the death of George Floyd. Boris couldn’t even bring himself to equivocate, instead calling the US “a bastion of peace and freedom”. A response that confirmed what many people think he really believes: that when push comes to shove, Black Lives Don’t Really Matter. After a couple of hours’ shut-eye, Johnson was back on view – he’d make a good exhibit in the sloth enclosure for next Monday’s zoo reopenings – for the Downing Street press briefing. Here, once he had waffled his way through his big announcement that single people were now free to resume their affairs – who could he have had in mind? – things got noticeably more tricky for Boris than they had been at PMQs. Why had he been so disorganised in getting children back to school? “Um ...” said Boris. He’d have liked to get children back sooner but that would have meant a level of planning and preparation of which his government was completely incapable. Besides, it had been impossible to predict you could only get 15 kids in a classroom even though everyone had been saying just that for months. In any case, the UK wasn’t doing noticeably worse on schools than any other countries. Here was one international comparison he was happy to make. Boris initially dodged the more telling question raised by Prof Neil Ferguson earlier in the afternoon that the UK could have halved its death rate by introducing lockdown a week earlier, instead letting Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty take the flak. Both advisers are now showing worrying signs of having gone over to the dark side. Vallance merely played for time by talking of a range of different scenarios while Whitty initially answered a completely different question to the one asked, before his integrity kicked in. Eventually, though, after repeated questioning on the same subject, Boris was backed into a corner by Sky’s Beth Rigby, who asked if there was something he regretted. Anything he might have done differently. The prime minister merely hummed and hawed. “But you take the decisions,” Rigby insisted. This seemed to come as news to Boris. He hadn’t realised that was part of the job description and scuttled out of the room as soon as was indecently possible. Not to be seen again for another week.