Boris Johnson is bringing the country together, to tell him to go away

Wherever he goes, the people suddenly realise there is more that unites them than divides them, and what unites them is not wanting Boris Johnson anywhere near them

Another day on the election campaign trail for the election that isn’t happening and Boris Johnson is doing his bit to bring this divided nation together.

Wherever he goes, the people suddenly realise there is more that unites them than divides them, and what unites them is wanting Boris Johnson to go away.

In fact, the only thing that is dividing voters is to where, exactly, they want Boris Johnson to go.

On Friday morning, he was out on the streets of Doncaster, this great new charismatic Tory leader, the people person, the vote winner, bothering members of the public into what he hoped might be a kind of placid, semi-tolerant submission. It wasn’t to be.

“What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in Europe, getting us a deal?” one entirely unimpressed shopper asked him.

“I am, err, I am, err, I am going to get us a deal,” Boris Johnson told him. To judge from the man’s expression, he seemed about as convinced a deal would be forthcoming as Michel Barnier, who was, at this moment, over in Brussels, publicly stating for around the about 10,000th time that Boris Johnson has still not submitted any proposals for a new deal, at all.

Oh well. An hour later, Boris Johnson found himself five minutes into a speech in a convention centre in Rotherham, when a member of the public stood up and began heckling.

“Why are you here? Why aren’t you in parliament, sorting out the mess that you have created? Why don’t you get back there and sort it out?” said heckler wanted to know, in the 20-second window before he was thrown out.

Still, back in the Downing Street bunker, there was much valuable data to be harvested from all this by Dominic Cummings. The voters might not agree on where exactly they want Boris Johnson to go, but as long as he gets away from them that should be enough.

It may very well be, that come the election campaign proper, Cummings will decide to attach the prime minister to the back of the campaign bus on one of those elasticated ropes often found at corporate fairs.

They could cover the whole country in a matter of days. Pull off the motorway, park up in the town centre, Johnson sprints 15 paces towards the general public and by the time they’ve told him to go away he is already retracting on his springy leash.

There are other upsides to this strategy too. At one point, in Doncaster, the prime minister made the strategic error of engaging a member of the public in actual conversation.

There he was, barely a breath into his now standardised flim-flam on his one, big, new policy. You know the one, the one about 20,000 new police officers. The one he launched in a police training centre in West Yorkshire last week, at an event the head of West Yorkshire Police formally disowned in an official statement the following day.

“You’re putting the same amount of police on the streets as what you took off,” she told him, with rather exquisite bluntness.

“Yes, that’s absolutely true,” the prime minister said, accidentally torpedoing the entire electoral purpose of his one flagship policy in just four words.

It is conceivably possible this is not how his thousands of backers in the Tory party dreamt it. All of six weeks ago, the idea was that, after the miserable May years, he was what they needed; the likeable, charismatic one. Get him out among the general public, this serial lying, child abandoning, all-round good egg and we’ll clean up.

They probably hadn’t foreseen him getting so comprehensively humiliated every time he walked into the House of Commons, but they’d solved that problem by shutting it down.

Proroguing the general public, however, the prime minister is discovering, is not so straightforward.

This sort of thing can’t be allowed to happen again. Just give what the voters want, prime minister. Which is for you to turn up, then go away again. Or, better still, don’t turn up at all.