Things fall apart. So what would you do? The Office for National Statistics has just announced a rise in unemployment of 600,000, with many more expected to be out of work in the coming months. The economy has tanked by 20%. The UK has turned into a world leader in coronavirus deaths per head of population. The Manchester United forward Marcus Rashford has just skipped past the defence of Grant Shapps and Thérèse Coffey to set up the prime minister with a tap-in own goal on free school meals. You’re also worried that Harry Kane will now enter the Brexit talks and nutmeg you with an extension to the transition period. Ordinarily you would expect Boris Johnson to do nothing. Partly because he’s naturally lazy and the idea of leaving Downing Street to sort out the chaos brings him out in a cold sweat. But partly also because Boris is at his best when he says nothing at all. He’s yet to find a situation that he can’t make worse by opening his mouth. On this occasion, the prime minister chose to deal with the ongoing shitshow by going to the Commons to make an entirely unnecessary statement on his proposals to merge the Department for International Development with the Foreign Office. Just imagine. You’re in the middle of the worst global health pandemic for 100 years, the economy is falling apart all around you, children are going hungry and the most important item on your agenda is an entirely pointless departmental merger that no one except a few Tory ultras was calling for. Boris did his best to talk up the futility of the exercise by calling it Global Britain, but the longer he spoke the more it became clear the Britain he had in mind was Little Britain. Only without the jokes but keeping the casual racism. It was something of a surprise he didn’t reprise “picaninnies with watermelon smiles”. He was fed up with the poorest countries treating us like “a giant cashpoint in the sky” or taking the money and then chopping people’s heads off. That kind of largesse was very late-1990s. Now was the time for the lazy scroungers to give us back something in return. If they wanted the dosh then they had better start doing as they were told. Opposition MPs were predictably outraged, denouncing the merger both as a diversionary tactic and a chance not just to cut the foreign aid budget but also to redirect it to richer countries of more strategic influence. Tory MPs were rather more indulgent. For some this was a welcome end to a department they had never seen the point of, while others sought reassurances that this wasn’t just an opportunity to be less generous to the poorest countries. “Absolutely not,” Boris replied. Just trust me. The rearrangement of the deckchairs was purely an administrative convenience. The faces of Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Dominic Raab seated further along the frontbench rather gave the lie to this. The DfID secretary looked inconsolable while the foreign secretary appeared ecstatic at his land grab. But trust him the Tory MPs did. Though why was another matter, given that his word is now officially meaningless. Only the day before he’d insisted there would be no U-turn on free school meals and he’d happily allowed cabinet ministers to die on that hill defending it in public. Not that he gave a toss about people like Shapps or Coffey. They were merely expendable extras orbiting Planet Boris: they had it coming. It wasn’t just ambition that had made anyone accept a cabinet job. It was also their total absence of self-worth. Boris had spent his whole life lying to his family, his friends and latterly the country so why should he suddenly start telling the truth now? If he had a therapist, he’d probably lie to her too. Not just for the hell of it, but because he might genuinely fall apart if he told the truth. The shame would be just too much. Sensing that he might be fighting something of a losing battle on the distractions – when even David Cameron thinks you’ve screwed up then you really are having a bad day – Boris popped up again at the Downing Street press conference as a further diversionary tactic. He hasn’t yet learned the value of quitting when you’re no further behind. But if he was hoping that, by standing next to the scientist who had completed the first successful trial – one part-funded by DfID, the very department he had just axed: some things you just can’t make up – of a steroid that reduced coronavirus mortality rates for those in hospital, some of the glory would rub off on him, then he was in for a disappointment. The first few questions were all on his embarrassment at being shamed into the free school meal U-turn by a 22-year-old footballer who’d shown more integrity over the course of a couple of days than Boris had managed in a lifetime. Johnson’s pretence that he had only heard about Rashford sometime that morning fooled no one. As for the departmental merger, Boris was adamant that he was doing it at a time when he could maximise Britain’s influence abroad. As in at the very time when the prime minister was giving an object lesson in how not to govern a country. But maybe it was all just a cunning plan. Rather than handing out cash to countries, such as Tanzania, soon they would be feeling sorry for us and giving us overseas aid instead. It was the dialectics of international development. To Make Britain Great Again you first had to ensure the country was a global laughing stock. • This article was amended on 17 June 2020 to remove quote marks from the phrase “taking the money and then chopping people’s heads off”, attributed to Boris Johnson, which was a paraphrase and not a direct quotation.