The crucial part of any lie is that it must be believable. Not necessarily by everyone but by enough to create a margin of doubt, however small. It also helps if the lie feeds into the audience’s weakness by telling them what they want to hear. One of the ways someone who is serially unfaithful can get away with it for so long is that their partner would rather cling to something demonstrably untrue than face the reality of being betrayed. Again. The creaks in the excuses cover up those in the bedsprings. Much the same applies to politics. Voters frequently back snake-oil salesmen simply because they need to believe in a promised land. One that’s often located somewhere in an imagined, nostalgic past. No one knows this better than Boris Johnson. If he has a talent, it’s a talent for lying. And while it may have cost him countless relationships and friendships, it has taken him all the way to Downing Street. Put simply, he has become prime minister by lying better than all the other contenders for the job. But now he has run out of road and the lies have caught up with him. He’s the cartoon villain hopelessly spinning his legs before plunging into the abyss. Brexit has failed to deliver any of its promised rewards and inflation, at more than 5%, is far higher than wage growth. No matter how Boris tries to spin it, people are feeling more broke by the week. Nor is the clown act working any more. Every comedian has their day and people no longer find him funny. He is the Man Without Qualities. The lies are no longer believable and the jokes are far too tired to paper over the cracks. Johnson’s japes about the parties not being parties and the rules being obeyed at all time (wink) lie face down, dead in the water. He has lost all trust, all credibility. His lies and cover-ups are an insult to all those who bothered to follow the regulations. Worst of all, he doesn’t even realise he’s the author of his own downfall. Inspector Clueless. There were a few cheers as Johnson took his place in the chamber for the last prime minister’s questions of the year. Though they had a hollow echo given that 99 Tories had given Boris the finger the night before. Most of the noise was merely a Pavlovian response. Those making it feel no sense of loyalty and will happily back a new leader when the time is right, for their own advancement as well as the Tory party’s. An absence of loyalty is a two-way street. Indeed an outsider might well have believed it was Keir Starmer who was the prime minister and Boris who was the leader of the opposition from the exchanges that followed. It was Starmer who had all the best lines. The confidence born of carrying the moral authority of the house. Johnson merely burbled and rambled, free associating past remembered punchlines that had never really landed the first time months ago when some still took him seriously as prime minister. Neither do his backbenchers trust him. They’d always known he was a liar, but he had been their liar. Now he’s not even that. He’s just a shambles. Both mentally and physically. He looks broken. The body of an 80-year-old blob who has let himself go, topped off with a toddler’s haircut. A wreck of a human being turned wrecking ball to the country. Someone who knows he is failing and takes out his anger on all those around him. That includes you. The Labour leader raced through his questions, scoring easy wins along the way. It had been Labour votes that had ensured the new Covid measures became law and it was Labour the country could trust to protect the national health. The Tory backbenchers were right to have no confidence in someone who consistently overpromised and couldn’t tell the truth about the parties in Downing Street – there’s almost been enough to fill an Advent calendar – but totally out of touch when it came to understanding the criticality of the Omicron pandemic. MPs who had no qualms about depriving people of their citizenship and limiting rights to protest now found wearing a mask a step too far. Johnson did what he always does when under pressure: invented a fantasy narrative to suit himself that only he believed. Not so much socially distanced from the truth as anti-socially distanced. At times he was completely delusional, insisting that Labour would never have implemented a vaccine programme and that he alone would be prepared to put in place a “plan C”. All this when plan B had never been likely to stop Omicron but was the best he could hope to swing past enough of his “die and let die” backbenchers. We reached peak Madness of King Boris with his insistence he hadn’t relied on Labour votes on Tuesday night. When you don’t understand primary school addition and subtraction, it’s really time to go. Even Priti Patel can almost manage that. Stupidity seems to be spreading faster than Omicron through the cabinet. Many backbenchers slid away after the exchanges between the two leaders, but there was still time for more nonsense. First Boris tried to claim he had the NHS right behind him. He doesn’t. Most doctors fucking hate him – their words – for leaving them so exposed and under-resourced during the pandemic. And now they’ve been given the impossible target of delivering more than 1m jabs a day over the holiday period. Then, after a quick chat to Liz “Britannia” Truss, who momentarily broke off looking at her coronation Christmas cards on Instagram, he lied to Tom Tugendhat about cuts to the Foreign Office. Both Liz and I can’t wait for her to become the next Tory leader. Later that afternoon, Johnson was giving a Downing Street press conference in which he re-announced the booster campaign he had first announced on Sunday. Call it the Bertie Booster timelag. Though he still couldn’t quite explain why he hadn’t started the boosters weeks earlier or why the EU had been quicker to approve vaccines for 5- to 12-year-olds. Inevitably, he was asked whether this wasn’t all too little too late. “Not at all,” said Boris. “Hang on,” said Chris Whitty, looking more and more like a haunted, overworked undertaker. His best advice was to sit tight, not go anywhere and do the exact opposite of anything the prime minister advised. “Pifflepafflewifflewaffle,” jabbered the out-of-control bullshit generator. “The best thing is to carry on inviting as many people as possible to parties. Just don’t bother to turn up to them yourself.” By now the presser had collapsed under its internal contradictions. Something Johnson did nothing to address by insisting once more that his own parties had been serious work affairs to which Covid hadn’t been invited. And in any case the public didn’t really care what he did and was just thrilled that he did anything at all. I think we’ll be the judge of that. • A Farewell to Calm by John Crace is published by Guardian Faber, price £9.99. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.