That drink Boris Johnson was given at a nearby Wetherspoons at the weekend could just have been the best freebie Tim Martin has ever handed out. First up he got a 15% reduction in VAT, only some of which would probably get passed on to the punters. But he then got the promise of £10 meal vouchers for his slackest trading days of Monday to Wednesday. This was the kind of meal deal Big Tim could relate to. And who knows? It might even come in handy for his customers, provided they order twice as much as usual and take home the leftovers in a doggy bag that they can eat for the rest of the week. It’s a sign of the times that the chancellor’s summer coronavirus bailout package was greeted with little more than mild curiosity by politicians from both sides of the chamber. Only a year ago, a £30bn package would have been unthinkable economics for a Tory government, but now it’s just another drop in the ocean on top of the nearly £180bn already promised. What’s more, everyone knows this is merely the start. Come the autumn, billions more will be needed to even try to stave off a major recession and mass unemployment. Throughout his 25-minute statement, Rishi Sunak had looked profoundly unbothered about the sums he was spending. Then, to be fair, he has had rather more than his fair share of practice; over the past few months – ever since he unexpectedly landed the Treasury job after Sajid Javid stomped out when Classic Dom sacked his special advisers – he’s given the equivalent of eight budgets already. Come the end of the year, he’ll be well into double figures. And the coronavirus has made him demob-happy. Sums that might once have given him sleepless nights now barely raise his pulse. Then, apart from the Groupon-style voucher scheme, there was nothing in the chancellor’s statement that hadn’t already come pre-briefed. So Rishi rattled through his list of spending commitments as if he was reading out his shopping list. Though most MPs might, on reflection, have preferred some more money for a track-and-trace system that actually worked, as that really might have saved more lives. But you get what you get. So there was £9bn for firms that didn’t sack their furloughed staff until January. A kickstarter scheme for the young unemployed, which looked set to encourage people not to rehire their older, more expensive employees. A cut in stamp duty for houses under £500K. And £2bn in grants for homeowners to make their buildings more energy-efficient. Great for renters, that move. By the end, even the chancellor was having trouble sounding that interested in what he was saying. In reply, Labour’s shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, was caught between insisting that the bailout package had been totally inadequate to meet the scale of the pandemic crisis, observing that the Kickstarter Fund looked suspiciously like Labour’s Future Jobs Fund, which the Tories axed in 2010, and wondering how on earth the government was going to pay for it all. Rishi merely shrugged, amazed that anyone could question how the bill was going to be met. That sort of talk is so last year. These days it’s Tory policy to max out the credit cards. For most of the time Sunak had been on his feet, Boris Johnson had looked on like a proud dad, beaming extravagantly with every new spending promise. Rishi is the chancellor in his pocket. A man who can be trusted to do as he is told and who doesn’t have his eye on the top job. A Matt Hancock character, though with more brains. These days, Mattbeth’s ambition is limited to merely being allowed to remain as health secretary: something far from guaranteed given the ongoing disaster. Maybe he can one day look forward to being nominated as the next director for the World Trade Organization. After all, if Liam Fox can make that grade, then there’s hope for all of us. But towards the end of Sunak’s statement, Boris’s knee began to jiggle up and down uncontrollably, as if the excitement of the summer holiday spending plans had been replaced by a flashback to yet another disastrous encounter with Keir Starmer at PMQs. What’s more, it has been a totally self-inflicted wound, as all the Labour leader had to do was ask Boris six times to apologise for having blamed care workers for the high levels of care home deaths. Saying sorry isn’t Boris’s style, though. He’s yet to apologise or take responsibility for any of his actions – in his political or his private life – and he wasn’t about to start now. So he did what he always does when under pressure: he lied. He had never said the things that everyone had quite clearly heard him say. At times like this, you have to wonder just how emotionally damaged Johnson must be to behave in this way. It’s just our luck that at a time of crisis we have a car wreck of a prime minister in charge of the country. The more Starmer pressed him to apologise, the angrier Boris became. “You’ve become Captain Hindsight,” he snapped. In which case, this must make the prime minister General Oversight. Because his repeated assertions that no one had warned of the dangers of asymptomatic transmission are blatantly untrue. Scientists were flagging up this possibility in January, and for the government to have discharged untested patients into care homes was at best reckless. In the absence of proper data, any normal government would have erred on the side of caution. But Boris has never done caution. He is a compulsive risk-taker, the dealer who is watching for the card that is so high and wild, he’ll never need to deal another. Pushed into a corner by Starmer – a man he despises for his quiet, greater intelligence – Johnson could only yet again lash out wildly. Boris is so lost in his own bubble, he has no idea just how bad an impression he is making on the country. Yet there will be a reckoning. It may not be this summer. It may not even be this year. But Boris’s days are numbered. And his ending will be of his own making. His mistakes will not be forgotten; without humility, only humiliation awaits.