Want your stomach turned? Watch Boris Johnson and Michael Gove pretending to be sorry about destroying Cameron's career

An ostentatiously heartbroken Gove’s quivery-voiced paean of love to the “great Prime Minister” he helped destroy is enough to cause genuine nausea

Vote Leave campaign leader Boris Johnson speaks at the group's headquarters in London (Reuters)

At the dawn of the EUpocalypse, how else to soothe the fractious soul than with a little light channel-hopping? As usual in the eerie quiet following a massive political earthquake before the first aftershock strikes (see Nicola Sturgeon below), the telly parlour game of choice was Spot The Same Narcissistic Dullard On All Three Networks.

While the nation awaited Boris Johnson’s inaugural address as Prime Minister Designate, it had to content itself with endless replays of him exiting his Addison Lee cab outside Leave HQ. Meanwhile, the task of filling this Johnsonian void fell to his dad, Stanley, who swiftly notched the network hat-trick.

Here he was not alone. Among others to achieve this distinction were professional Cabinet megabore Michael Fallon, creative dossier maestro Alastair Campbell, and Tim Farron, alleged leader of the Liberal Democrat rump.

In a bid to project searing wrath about the result, Farron came across as a Blackpool pier bingo caller peeved by an old biddy calling “House!” after she crossed off Legs 11 on her card in error.

So it fell to Stanley to take the laurels for a whirlwind tour of the studios in which he proved not once, not twice, missus, but thrice that a sweatshirt worn over a formal shirt - on a humid, sweaty day at that - is no great look for a septuagenarian with a Body Mass Index in the upper 30s. The fact that its legend read “REMAIN” added an extra layer of poignancy which frankly struck me as unnecessary in the Brexiting circs.

With his baby boy still refusing to come out to play, I must say this about Johnson Pere. Stanley doesn’t half do a decent Boris Johnson impression, following up a spritely “By Jove!” with a Latin phrase delivered too quickly for this Classics graduate to fathom.

As the vigil for our future premier continued, Sky’s Dermot Murnaghan doughtily insisted, “There’s so much going on” over a spectacularly pointless aerial shot of a Buckingham Palace in which David Cameron was apparently having a cup of cha and a nice relaxing natter with Her Maj.

On and on it dragged, the pesky hiatus between these various instalments of insta-history. In Downing Street, the BBC’s Sophie Raworth looked so anguished by the epicness of it all that this amateur medic immediately diagnosed an impacted haemorrhoid. Norman Lamont popped up on ITV to offer some ritual blethering, the one disappointment there being that the erstwhile Edith Piaf of the Treasury has no personal experience of dealing with riotous sterling exchange rate volatility himself.

Mark Carney, who may now have some such experience, had already appeared before the cameras for a hopeful foray into the realm of markets-steadying sonority. Cadaverous and understandably grave, he resembled an undertaker overseeing his own funeral. By the way, isn’t it awful how all these bloody foreigners come over here and nick jobs like Bank of England Governor away from us Brits?

Finally, soberly, portentously, Boris and his Leave besties took to the platform. After brief words from fellow Outer Gisela Stuart (the German-born MP who will, you assume, deport herself back to the Fatherland the moment Article 50’s done its stuff), Boris spake unto his people.

To be honest, he played the mature, unifying, untriumphalist statesman extremely well, expressing sympathy for the Bullingdon buddy he took down with something easily mistaken for sincerity. If there was any way to harness the energy he required to suppress the urge to do a madcap lap of honour, it could punch a hole in the very fabric of the time-space vortex.

Boris was so good that he reminded you how easily stand-ups generally find the transfer to straight acting. When he was done with his Lenny Henry Does Othello routine, the spotlight fell on the last member of this menage a trois.

“And now Michael Gove,” intoned ITV’s Alastair Stewart, “the third musketeer.” Which musketeer he didn’t specify, though judging by an ostentatiously heartbroken Gove’s quivery-voiced paean of love to the “great Prime Minister” he helped destroy (less is more with screen acting, Mikey boy; less is more), it must have been Pathos.

Within minutes of the three trooping away, presumably for a spot of whooping and fist-bumping in a soundproofed booth, it was crystal clear that Boris - however impressive he had been - was little more than a warm-up act for someone with no need to simulate gravitas.

Nicola Sturgeon radiates it. She was utterly magnificent as she succinctly outlined the con trick Cameron played on Scotland, promising it that the only way to secure EU membership was to stay within the UK.

In an exquisitely poised display of coiled wrath, she blew all the boys out of the water. As so often, the fantasy involved commandeering Peter Capaldi’s Tardis and changing her timeline so that Sturgeon was born in England and grew to fill the imminent vacancy of Labour leader.

In a few minutes of glacial ire, Sturgeon effectively repealed the 309 year Act of Union before our very eyes. Not for the first time in recent hours, you knew you were watching history - proper history, mind, of the sort they’ll be teaching schoolkids for centuries - being made on the telly.

For that, it was almost worth the triple shot of Stanley Johnson - and won’t he parlay First Father status into a fine panel show career? - gently perspiring beneath his pitiable Remain sweatshirt. Almost.