Boris is the emperor with no clothes and it’s not a pretty sight

A more fruitful strategy for Boris Johnson at prime minister’s questions might be damage limitation. To accept that Keir Starmer is far brighter, better prepared and more obviously sincere and try to dead-bat his way through the half-hour with short, anodyne responses. It might not be the rallying cry for the Tory troops that he would like to give, but it would sure as hell be better than being comprehensively owned by the Labour leader week after week.

But Boris is temperamentally incapable of such an act of self-preservation. His natural instinct is for destruction, both of himself and everything around him. So while Starmer is The Daddy, Johnson is visibly regressing in front of our eyes. When he first became PM, he would act the adolescent: Kevin the teenager. Then he slipped back to the grumpy 10-year-old. Now he is like a toddler barely out of nappies. At the current rate of progress, his baby son will soon be reading him bedtime stories.

What’s more, it appears Boris either is unaware of his decline or believes it to be of little consequence. Or possibly both. He may even be right for the time being. After all, most people aren’t paying much attention to his weekly half-hour of humiliation, he has an 80-seat majority, and an election is four years off. Yet his lies and tantrums still have the power to corrode. And few prime ministers have done more to undermine democracy than he has.

For the last PMQs before the summer recess, Starmer focused on the intelligence and security committee’s report on Russian interference in UK politics. How come Johnson had managed to sit on something that had highlighted Russia as an urgent and immediate threat for 10 months?

The honest answer would have been that Johnson had actually intended to sit on the report for much longer than 10 months but had been caught on the hop when Chris Grayling, his nominated stooge for the committee chair, managed to lose a vote that had been rigged in his favour. He should have paid more attention to those who had warned him there was no bad situation that Failing Grayling could not make worse. There should be statues to Grayling in every city, symbols of hope for losers everywhere.

Instead Boris did what he always does. He ignored the question and went on the attack. No one cared more about national security than him, and the reason successive Tory governments had failed to even wonder whether the Russians might have influenced the Brexit referendum was because Vladimir Putin had assured them that such an idea was totally unthinkable. The Russian president had been far too busy in 2016 with acts of espionage elsewhere in the world, so there was clearly no need for the UK to go looking for evidence of interference that everyone knew didn’t exist. There couldn’t be a smoking gun if no gun existed in the first place.

To make the point more forcefully, Boris concluded by saying that Starmer had failed to condemn the Salisbury novichok poisonings. Now it was Keir’s turn to look confused, as Johnson had clearly failed to notice that Jeremy Corbyn had been replaced as leader of the Labour party back in March. Starmer pointed out that he had strongly supported government actions against the Russians on that occasion. What’s more, as director of public prosecutions he had also introduced proceedings against Russia on behalf of Alexander Litvinenko’s widow.

Yeah but no but yeah but no but you’re still basically pro-Russian, said Boris, by now stuck on autopilot. And in any case, all this stuff about the ISC report was just sour grapes from “Islingtonian remoaners” who still hadn’t got over the result of the 2016 referendum.

This was Boris’s great Freudian slip. Because Labour under Starmer has never once tried to refight the Brexit vote. The only reason Johnson could have had for bringing the subject up was that it had been his fear that Russia might have tried to influence the referendum that had led him to suppress the report. After all, if he had really believed in Russia’s innocence he would have published it before the last election.

Visibly rattled, Boris now just lapsed into meaningless, disconnected phrases and a lame gag about “more flip-flops than a Bournemouth beach”. He really does need to get himself a new scriptwriter. Starmer merely sighed that this was a bit rich coming from a man who as a journalist had two contradictory columns for every occasion.

“We are delivering as the people’s government,” Johnson insisted. Only I don’t remember him promising us the highest death rate in a global pandemic, a disastrous no deal with the EU and the likelihood of the biggest recession in decades.

The only person unable to see quite how damaged Boris is, is Boris himself. He is the emperor with no clothes and it’s not a pretty sight. Even when he’s losing badly, he imagines himself to be a winner. The Tory MP Nusrat Ghani suggested he might care to spend his staycation recess reading Winnie the Pooh. Boris’s eyes lit up. There were too many Eeyores on the Labour benches. What the country needed was a Tigger like him. Except it doesn’t. What the UK really needs is a grown-up in charge. And what we’ve got is an infantile narcissist.