Boris Johnson’s first year in No 10 has been worse than the wildest of nightmares

It was always going to be bad, but no one dared imagine any of this. Even a gentle trawl through the records since he took office as prime minister yields an embarrassment of riches

It is a year since Boris Johnson stood outside the door of 10 Downing Street as prime minister and shouted a curling word salad into the skies.

A year since he spoke of his plan for social care that was “ready to go”. Traditionally, at this point, the columnist points out that the plan did not, in fact, exist.

That it was a blatant and hopeless lie. But what does an entirely fictitious plan matter, when what care homes got instead was a tiny badge and a tsunami of entirely preventable deaths, for which Boris Johnson has had the almost unimaginable lack of class to blame them for instead of himself?

It is exactly a year since he harrumphed about how we are “going to get going now on our own satellite positioning technology!”

It was pointed out at the time that the UK had contributed hundreds of millions of pounds and vast amounts of intellectual capital towards Galileo, the EU’s new satellite positioning technology to which we no longer have access thanks to Brexit.

We now learn, as of yesterday, that a further £400m has been invested in a satellite operator called OneWeb, despite warnings the entire sum is likely to be lost.

The standard way to summarise a year of life under a political leader is to seek to find the microcosmic moment that most defines it. But even a gentle trawl through the records yields an embarrassment of riches. What sums the man up most is just how easy he is to sum up.

The first thing he did after that historic day, when it also became known, by the way, that a chap called Dominic Cummings was coming into 10 Downing Street with him, was to take a long summer vacation.

His first week in the job came in September. Does it best sum up the man that a shameless stunt at a police training academy ended with one of the junior officers fainting, because she had been kept waiting in the bright sunshine for so long that she could take no more, and that the next day the head of the West Yorkshire Police Force disowned the entire occasion?

Perhaps not, because that was also the week he lost his parliamentary majority, kicked Ken Clarke out of the Tory party, was prevented by the great political strategist, Jeremy Corbyn, from calling a general election he’d said on the Monday he didn’t want to call, and had had his team handing round lukewarm Tesco value chicken breasts around Westminster in protest.

In a few weeks’ time, he would attempt to prorogue parliament, at the same time as telling bald-faced lies about why he wanted to do it, and was then ritualistically humiliated by the Supreme Court, shortly before signing up to a Brexit deal that had been previously rejected by Theresa May on the basis that “no British prime minister could ever sign it”. (A few weeks later, he would be campaigning for an election, and lying to Northern Irish business people about what that deal meant).

Of course, there have been successes. It is futile pointing out that he hid in a meat fridge just to get away from questions about a little boy with pneumonia having to bed down under coats on a hospital floor. That was in the middle of a general election campaign that he won by miles. It helped, of course, that he had his victory handed to him principally through normal, working class Labour voters being so repulsed by Jeremy Corbyn that they voted instead for a man who spent his youth wearing a £1,200 morning suit to smash up the back rooms of pubs then have daddy send in a cheque for the damages.

In February, he had to tell his staff not to contact him, while he retired to Chequers for a week-long summit to attempt to sort out the rolling dumpster fire of his private life. To divorce one wife, announce the engagement to another, and the imminence of what can only accurately be described as an nth child by an nth mother.

That was true enough to the caricature even at the time. With hindsight, we would learn that a deadly new virus was spreading through the population. That while Johnson was holed up, seeking to manage his own unmanageable private affairs, themselves the direct consequence of his sociopathic selfishness, and skipping vital Cobra meetings to do so, the now fabled R number is likely to have been above three.

Not so long after that, he would be on television, bragging about going into a hospital and shaking hands with coronavirus patients. Later, his staff would have to clarify in private, background whisperings with journalists that, don’t worry, that hadn’t actually happened. When your own team have been instructed to get the message out that you’re not actually that stupid, you’re just telling lies again? Well, perhaps that is the purest essence of the man, right there.

Or maybe it’s right now. On Thursday, he spent the anniversary of his being elected leader of the Conservative Party in Scotland, seeking to save the union from himself, which he cannot do, seeing as the problem is the intense revulsion felt for him by so much of Scotland.

On Thursday morning, the leading story on the BBC website was that Johnson was going to Scotland to say that the “coronavirus response shows the might of the union”. The second story was a report into the latest “astonishing failures” in the government’s handling of coronavirus.

He does not make Nicola Sturgeon’s life hard.

It has been pointed out many times that Scotland and England’s coronavirus outcomes are hardly any different, yet Nicola Sturgeon’s popularity has soared while Johnson’s has plummeted. At times of crisis, people are not reassured to see that the man in charge can only do puerile jokes, that there is nothing there. Nicola Sturgeon did not talk of the need to “squash the sombrero”, or of “whack-a-mole” strategies to “suppress”, rather than eliminate the virus.

She also, of course, accepted the resignation of her chief medical officer when she was found to have broken the rules over lockdown. The matter was over in hours. She did not force her entire parliamentary party to humiliate themselves defending the indefensible, as he did to keep hold of Dominic Cummings, the man who, naturally, has made the “highly unusual” and highly risky, and certainly entirely needless but for Brexit, £400m investment in the satellite company.

There have been some notable achievements. It is not an exaggeration to say that the financial rescue packages may have prevented the country from descending almost into lawlessness during lockdown. The state was directly paying the wages of almost 10 million people. What might have been the consequences, had it not done so?

He is dogged by four dismal failures on coronavirus. The lack of testing, the lack of PPE, the slowness to lock down, and the catastrophic care homes mismanagement. But there has been vast improvement on all those fronts, in impressively quick time.

The problem is that coronavirus phase one was a health disaster and a relative economic success. The next phase is likely to be the other way around, and that stands oven-ready to be the most disastrous phase of all.