Boris Johnson’s smirk as he lies is the most honest thing about him

All the prime minister’s lies, and they are many, are full-throated and real – the smirk is a flash of self-awareness

Boris Johnson’s trademark smirk is the most honest thing about him. When he says, for example, that we must now prepare for an “Australian-style solution”, a term that is arguably the grandest lie of the entire Brexit lexicon, and emits a little half-smile as he does so, your casual Johnson observer likes to comment that, even as he washes his country down the plughole, he still finds the whole thing to be a jolly little game.

It is the in-joke between the man and his interlocutor. It is to say, “Look, I know I’m lying, you know I’m lying, but this is how it must be. You know it and I know it.”

Without the smirk, Johnson would look to the world like a man still expecting to be taken at his word, despite his status as the greatest liar of the age. I don’t use those words lightly, and yes I absolutely do mean them. Trump was a liar, but he was also a fantasist, an unknowing liar, much of the time, who had long stopped being able to tell the difference between the truth and his own version of it. Johnson is no such thing. All his lies, and they are many, are full-throated and real. The smirk is a flash of self-awareness.

It’s not like he doesn’t know, for example, that he spent a long election campaign, less than a year ago, assuring literally dozens of television reporters, live on air, that there would definitely be a trade deal with the EU.

Just over a year ago today, for example, he smirked and told Sky News, when asked if a trade deal by the end of 2020 might not happen, that, “The possibility you allude to simply will not happen.”

He smirked then. He smirks now. He was lying then. He is lying now. He knows the “Australian-style deal” is an absurd term, invented by him as a verbal place holder for no deal. It doesn’t matter that the former Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, on Thursday night described an “Australian-style deal” as a terrible outcome for the UK.

It doesn’t matter that the salient point regarding Australia is that it’s not in Europe, and that come 1 January, the only country in Europe liable to be trading with the EU on the same terms as the UK is Belarus.

All this can be smirked away. The people will understand, won’t they? Good old Boris. He did his best. It’s all the EU’s fault. And when it all went wrong and he lied to us, well, he had to lie, didn’t he? The truth would have got him into a terrible mess. That’s not his fault.

At this stage, that appears to be the strategy, though we may be wrong. As things stand, there are two main barriers to a deal. The first is the rights of EU fishing boats to enter areas of British coastal waters that, in 2015, yielded them a grand total of £17m worth of fish. The second is finding some kind of neutral arbitration mechanism that will quickly allow either side to take action, almost certainly in the form of tariffs, if, in the future, different regulatory regimes, in particular industries, gives one a competitive advantage over the other.

Johnson has chosen to shroud all this in the sovereignty myth. To say that the EU must now change its course or no deal it is. And as Johnson can only smirk as he says all this, we have every reason to imagine he is preparing for the shroud to fall away.

These, patently, are not insurmountable obstacles. But what seems to matter to Johnson is that they must not be surmounted too easily, or perhaps not at all. He knows that, in his own life as a Winston Churchill cosplay character, this is the darkest hour bit, confected for himself, and as much heroism as possible must be inserted as a way to paper over the patheticness of it all.

The deal is clearly there to be done, and it is very clearly in the national interest. What is not clear, even now, is what Boris Johnson has decided is in his own.