Boris Johnson's Week of Weeks has been a thing of wonder. We will not see its like again

Here is a late-middle-aged man who can see with terrifying clarity that for 50 years he’s had the wrong dreams, but they’ve come true anyway and it’s far too late to do anything about it

To look back now at all those old photographs of Boris Johnson is to become a quantum observer. Under our gaze, the pictures alter.

That black and white, gurning one of him aged 10 – the one that feels like it is actually moving under a rostrum camera – for use in the intro-montage of a Bravo TV documentary on What Turns Men Into Serial Killers.

That psychopathic one, in his Eton Wall game kit, where he looks like he’s just done a line of his own ego.

The Bullingdon Club one, the zipwire one, the one where he’s rugby-tackling a tiny child at the age of 47: behind all those long decades of eyes, the same thought is whirring. The same scheme is being hatched. They are all snapshot moments in the same colossal journey of self-propulsion.

To look at them now is to know what whirred was this. This. The Shitshow Valhalla. The slow-motion star crash. The grand unified theory of f**king up everything.

After his death, it emerged that the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky liked to have sex with prostitutes in the back of his Mercedes Maybach while driving up the M40 at 150mph.

Are we allowed to wonder: could the Boris Johnson premiership just be the vicious fetish of a pervert god?

If so – and it absolutely cannot be ruled out – there has never been gratification like it. Not in this, the Week of Weeks. A week that, had it happened a thousand years ago, monks would have painted its story in intricate detail on the walls of churches.

At 6pm on Monday, I was pretty sure that the maddest thing I would see this week would be the prime minister summoning all of his MPs to the Downing Street garden, only for him to then walk out the front door and threaten them, live on television.

But threaten them with what? Still nobody knows. The only words of any substance said were, “I don’t want an election. You don’t want an election.” Yet the front pages of the next day’s newspapers all seemed to agree he had called one. His advisers had had to go around telling journalists that what he’d meant when he said “I don’t want an election” was “I do want an election”.

But does he want an election? He still keeps saying no. He still keeps saying the public don’t want one either. And he’s absolutely right.

But on Friday afternoon, he had his staff spend the day slicing up Tesco Value baked chicken breasts and put them into plastic cartons of “Jeremy Fried Chicken” to leave all round the parliamentary estate.

This was to make the point that Jeremy Corbyn is chickening out of the election that I don’t want and you don’t want but someone must want but don’t ask me because I’m only the prime minister and what do I know? Absolutely sod all.

Perhaps, with more hindsight, it will become easier to map the blast pattern of these five explosive days. Historians will debate the relative significance of all the many causes that eventually led to the prime minister, standing in front of a wall of police officers and entering into a fugue-like state, delivering what seemed to be a soliloquy from The Bill, wondering aloud about whether or not, at this point, the right thing to do would be to just arrest himself, if only he could remember how.

There are just so many possible causes to get through. Was it chucking Ken Clarke out of the Tory Party that had sent him mad? Had it been Sir Nicholas Soames’s voice cracking in the House of Commons under the sheer weight of events that he, Boris Johnson, had brought down to bear upon him?

He had chucked Winston Churchill’s grandson out of the Tory Party, after all, and Winston Churchill’s grandson, two rows back and four seats down from where the ghost of his granddad probably still likes to sit, was struggling not to weep over it.

Or perhaps what made Boris crack was when he had been quite rightly called racist at his first Prime Minister’s Questions; when hundreds of MPs had applauded the real, furious and correct anger of Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi MP, who spoke in one angry voice for all of Britain’s millions of ethnic minority citizens, all of whom were slurred equally by Boris Johnson when he wrote of niqab-wearing Muslim women “looking like letterboxes and bank robbers”.

Perhaps it had been watching his parliamentary majority vanish in front of his eyes while standing at the despatch box of the House of Commons, when Philip Lee wandered in unannounced and defected to the Liberal Democrats in WWE style. In fact, that probably wasn’t it, because he was by that point hours away from destroying his majority anyway, when he kicked out 21 of his own MPs.

It could have been the traumatic shock of appointing one of the world’s finest strategic minds, Dominic Cummings, to run Downing Street for him, only to then find himself having been entirely outmanoeuvred by Jeremy Corbyn.

It could have been, in other words, losing absolutely all of his parliamentary votes. Not being given the election he says he doesn’t want, and not being given the no-deal Brexit he also says he doesn’t want but is actively planning for.

Jeremy Corbyn won't grant him his phoney no-deal Brexit election, and Jeremy Corbyn won't give him a no-deal Brexit either.

Perhaps, indeed, it was realising that he’d had his best people on this, and their next move in the three-dimensional chess game they never thought they could lose had been a trip to the pre-cooked meats aisle at Tesco. Perhaps he’s buggered.

Some people will suggest it was his own brother’s resignation from the cabinet that did it; for me, that’s an outsider. When your little brother has to come out and say that your being prime minister is against the national interest, that would damage most people.

But Boris Johnson is not most people. When, a few hours later, the prime minister thanked Jo Johnson for his service, on live television, he couldn’t even remember what job his own brother had resigned from – the one he himself had given him, in his own government, all of five weeks ago. No, this one is no biggie. Jo is just another one of the little people, brother or not.

It could even be the low-level stuff, the soft strings beneath the roaring symphony of despair. The stuff that barely gets a look-in, like the actual West Yorkshire police chief, having to put out a statement disowning the prime minister’s visit, in which his trainee officers had been kept standing around waiting for so long that one of them collapsed on live TV.

Or the country’s chief medical officer lodging a formal complaint against the man you’ve just made Leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has already used parliamentary privilege to slander a doctor.

Or it could be none of these. It could just be the simple, crushing reality, bearing down upon a late-middle-aged man who can see with terrifying clarity that for 50 years he’s had the wrong dreams, but they’ve come true anyway and it’s far too late to do anything about it.

That he will forever be the worst prime minister the country has ever had. At least until the next one.

That we will never see such times again. Not until next week, anyway.