Boris Johnson on Facebook Live gave us three lots of utter drivel in just two short minutes

The prime minister has taken the trouble to announce he wants Britain to be ‘the greatest place in the world to live!’ Yes, that really is all he’s got

Not so long ago, Facebook was aggressively promoting its new “Facebook Live” feature. Facebook executives flew round the world, selling it to media companies as the Next Big Thing. If anybody you knew went “live”, you’d get an instant notification and it would race straight to the top of your news feed.

Then people started committing live murders on it and the wise old owls at Facebook placed it somewhat on the backburner.

So where better then, for prime minister Johnson to pop up out of nowhere at 5.15pm, stare down the barrel of someone or other’s smartphone camera for a full two minutes and announce a fully meaningless new policy then disappear again?

It was all structured rather like the chorus to O Come All Ye Faithful, in that there were two bits of gentle, almost whispered utter bollocks by way of gradual build up to the main utter bollocks event.

First there was the “more money we’ve been putting into policing”. The £1.1bn, to be exact, for “20,000 new officers”. This is the same promise that was first announced on 3 July, since which time the now prime minister has declined at least 30 opportunities to explain where the money will come from. And there is certainly no evidence that any of the “more money we’ve been putting into policing” has actually left the exchequer at this stage.

Then there was: “Another £1.8bn, which we’ve been investing in our wonderful NHS.” This would be same £1.8bn that the actual health minister, Chris Skidmore was forced to admit on live television two days ago, was not new money, at all.

And then came the big one. The prime minister had been to see some nuclear fusion reactors that morning and so had decided, “right here on Facebook Live” to announce that he would be “changing the rules on immigration to make them even more welcoming to scientists”.

This, frankly, is a change that can’t come soon enough. Because if you take the trouble to speak to an actual scientist in the UK, about what Boris Johnson and his Brexit brain egg Dominic Cummings have done so far for scientists living in the UK, you might not be too shocked to learn they are less than complimentary.

If you speak to anyone who, say runs a scientific research group at any major university, there are a number of facts that instantly emerge. First of all there’s the fact that, as the UK already has a very large number of the EU’s leading universities, it has consistently received between £500m and £1bn more, every year, from the EU’s scientific budget than it puts in. They’ll tell you straight away that, since 23 June 2016, virtually all of the funding awards that they were used to winning from the EU dried up overnight, despite the UK still being a fee paying member of that organisation.

And if you speak to anyone who is a international scientist at a UK university, there is a 50 per cent chance that person will be an EU national. And if you then tell them that Boris Johnson is going to relax the visa rules to make it easier for them to be a scientist in the UK, when they have finished cracking up laughing, they’ll gently point out that they’ve spent the last three years needlessly filling in forms, or being used as a political bargaining chip for the right to remain in the country where they do their job.

Next, they’ll come on to the unfortunate fact that, should they ever wish to return to their EU home, the money they’ve been earning for the last three years is worth fifteen per cent less than it would have been.

All of which means that, if the person you speak to is British, they’ll tell you about the fact that European scientists just don’t bother applying anymore, another seismic change that happened overnight, in the moment of Boris and Dom’s great triumph.

The only fact worth clinging on to is that Johnson and Cummings are the architects of the single most damaging attack on British science that there has ever been and will in all likelihood ever be.

Another huge win, for Cummings and his universe-dwarfing intellect. Cummings who likes to imagine himself somehow superior to his Bullingdon enabler, merely because he smashes things up through the force of his towering ideas. He, in his imagination and absolutely nowhere else, is Prospero reaping the tempest, dancing on the branches of history. He, you have to believe, is not just another dismal clown, throwing a jug of claret at a wall, trashing some little person’s life in the service of his own ego.

Johnson wasn’t done there, of course. “I want this country to be the greatest place in the world for science! The greatest place to bring up your kids! The greatest place to send them to school! The greatest place to live!”

Each one of these crushingly banal truisms was punctuated with a pseudo punch of the right fist toward the lens, like a cartoon bear trying to convince you it wasn’t an idiot. This, of course, was accompanied by the prime minister’s now traditional failure to conceal his own half smirk, which each time it emerges serves only to remind you that – come on – even he isn’t stupid enough to believe this rubbish.

“The greatest place in the world to live!” To which one must ask, with the exception of actual murderous tyrants, is there anyone alive, in any country, at any point in history, that hasn’t wanted that? The greatest place in the world to live, which, according to every major economist in every major bank, I, Boris Johnson, have made £600m a week poorer every week for the last three years.

“The greatest place to bring up your kids!” To which one must ask, is this really all that Johnson has got?

The answer, as we shall come to see in the short, miserable months ahead, is yes. The eternal fraud. The 42-carat phoney. The joke to which we are all the punchline.