Johnson breaks promises all the time – his pledge to reject an electoral pact with Farage might be the next

An agreement would force the prime minister to share the limelight. That’s not something he seems overly fond of doing. But we’d be naive to accept this without looking at his history of deceit

Nigel Farage has been sucking the blood out of the Conservative Party for years, but despite donning his bat wings and impaling the country on his own fangs, Boris Johnson has so far refused to let Far-cula into the house to deliver the coup-de-grace.

There will, we are told, be no electoral pact between the Tories and the Brexit Party’s undead hordes of zombie pensioners.

Steve Baker, the European Research Group’s creature from the black lagoon, who’s been advocating such an arrangement from the back benches to “unite the right” can just bloomin’ well stay in his swamp. No need to have any nightmares.

Here’s the problem with that claim: hasn't Johnson been proven to be about as reliable as… well, think of a metaphor?

I was initially going to go with a used car salesman with just two halves of a Ford Fiesta inexpertly welded together to sell to hit his bonus target. But that salesman arguably looks like a positive paragon of virtue compared to the man whom we have somehow ended up with in No 10.

The prime minister’s career has been defined by accusations of deceit, duplicity and deception and his broken promises have piled up like plastic beer glasses at a pop festival.

This is the man who promised to lie in front of a bulldozer to stop the third runway at Heathrow, only to trouser £10,000 from JCB three days before a speech in front of one of their bulldozers at their headquarters a few years later. You could fill a book with examples like that.

Harry Frankfurt, a professor of philosophy emeritus at Princeton University in the US, argues that when someone lies they have to be aware of the truth, because a lie is defined in opposition to it. Bull****, by contrast, is just a stinking flow of fakery a la Donald Trump.

In my view, Johnson indulges in both. The claim that suspending parliament for five weeks is because the government needs the time for its “exciting domestic agenda” (pass me the sick bag) is, to me, clearly concocted in opposition to the truth that the decision was nakedly political and intended to frustrate scrutiny of the government’s disastrous Brexit plans. As the Scottish courts have found, although the Supreme Court will have the final say with an English court having ruled differently.

The rambling, incoherent speeches? The “people’s” questions sessions? They’re just full of bull****.

Which is the “no pact with the Brexit party” vampire promise? A lie or just the latest serving of verbal diarrhoea?

It scarcely matters.

You might very well wonder why Johnson, having turned himself from the liberal “Heineken” Tory into a pasty-faced imitation of Far-cula, doesn’t just finish off the job?

Perhaps it’s because there’s still a sprig of garlic above the front door of No 10, put there by Dominic Cummings.

The party’s 20-some-odd corps of whipless wonders have repeatedly raised questions over whether Cummings is actually a Conservative. He certainly doesn’t seem to like the party very much.

But he doesn’t have much time for Far-cula either and kept him at arm’s length from Vote Leave during the EU referendum campaign for fear that he’d have middle-class voters reaching for their crucifixes and running to Remain in search of holy water.

Teaming up with Far-cula risks many of those people seeking solace in the arms of the Liberal Democrats.

A pact would also force the narcissistic Johnson to share the limelight. That’s not something he seems overly fond of doing.

These may all serve to stop it from happening. But based on previous form, Johnson’s statements on the matter are as good as meaningless.