Johnson’s sputtering tour of Britain makes Theresa May look like an expert campaigner – the Tories are in trouble

The prime minister’s performance over the past few days should put to rest any questions about why he’s kept away from the public

Theresa May must be loving this. If you recall, she made an impressive start to her election campaign, when she announced her vote-winning policy that if you had dementia, she’d take your house away. This wasn’t as popular as she’d hoped, which is a shame, as she was probably hoping to add “and we’ll raise much-needed funds by charging them twice, as they’ll have forgotten they’ve paid already”.

But Boris Johnson’s campaign is even classier. So Kwasi Kwarteng revealed exactly how much Labour’s plans would cost, with statements such as: “They are planning to spend £31,675,908,430.69 amounting to £45.68 per person every 12 minutes, 14 pence for every ant in the world, or £4,587.39 for every cornflake”.

Then he was asked how much his own party’s plans would cost, and said “I’m not here to give specific figures”.

It was a fair answer, as he was claiming Labour would spend £1.2 trillion, which he worked out by adding all the money anyone who’d voted Labour had ever spent, including in dreams, and all the money a Labour government would spend if it was in power for 8,000 years, assuming they’d appointed Kanye West as chancellor. So there was no time left to work out their own spending plans.

In their manifesto, under “the economy”, they’ll probably put “life’s too short to worry about money. Something will turn up, it usually does”.

But Johnson is the master of attention to detail. He was filmed in Northern Ireland explaining his Brexit deal with these exact words: “When you come out of the um, er, customs union, which is what we’ve done, you have to have some way of checking goods that might attract a tariff coming from the United Kingdom into, er... er, Ireland pay that tariff, if there is to be a tariff.”

If only Labour were able to explain their Brexit policy this clearly and simply.

It could provide a solution to the Irish border after Brexit, if Johnson sits at customs explaining those rules to everyone coming in or out of the country. Within a week the entire population would be in the middle of Ireland, facing in opposite directions, unable to move as everyone borrowed change from each other to pay a tariff that might attract a tariff, er...er, if there is to be a tariff, and a wonderful sense of community would emerge.

This sort of speech may be the reason he’s kept away from everywhere. He’s hardly been seen in public, and won’t take part in a debate about climate change, which is understandable, as the continued existence of the planet is too small an issue to bring into the election.

None of them dare go to the flooded areas (if they do, it’s usually much too late), which makes sense, because if Jacob Rees-Mogg went, he’d tell some poor sod in Doncaster who’s canoed out of their upstairs bedroom window: “shame about the lower floors but at least it’s only your servants drowning down there”.

Even in an interview filmed by the Conservative Party, where the bits chosen to go out must be the most coherent, Johnson mumbles that his favourite band is The Clash, whose drummer called himself Tory Crimes, who howled with rage about how people like Johnson are “working for the clampdown”. I suppose it was between them and Rage Against the Machine.

This week, the prime minister even announced he would call Corbyn an “onanist”, of actually masturbating with the economy. This is why Johnson is kept out of sight, because most things he says are posh gibberish with sprinkles of Latin so we assume it makes sense.

In the TV debate, he’ll answer a question about interest rates by saying “ah, what we HAVE is a CORNUCOPIA of ad hominem, a CHOICE, er... er... er... er.. between VIGOUR, a CAVALCADE inter alia prima facie etcetera, in vino veritas or Jeremy Corbyn MASTURBATING all over Her Majesty the Queen, if there is a tariff”.

Last time Theresa May sent Amber Rudd to do the TV debate, but all the Amber Rudd-types have gone, so their best move might be to send a pet such as Mark Francois’ Doberman, or one of Rees-Mogg’s coy carp.

One issue the Tories might be ahead on is racism, because their Muslim ex-party chair Sayeeda Warsi says the party is institutionally racist and “failed to tackle racism at any level”.

At the same time, many people say Labour is still complacent over antisemitism in the party, because they’re holding an investigation into the issue. So the Conservatives have learned from that, and decided that as holding an investigation is inadequate, they’ll be much more thorough and not bother looking into it at all.

So they have candidates such as Anthony Browne, who wrote that immigration costs lives by “letting in too many germs”. It’s an interesting theory, that all germs are foreign. You’d have thought scientists may have spotted this before, that everyone in Pakistan is constantly sneezing, but thankfully Browne has worked it out, though he’s now excused because he said he was being “deliberately provocative”.

And this is a reasonable excuse, that he wasn’t like the awful people who are foul out of ignorance, he did it on purpose knowing exactly how foul he was being. But at least the press is even-handed about incidents like this between all the parties.

Similarly, when Johnson put his wreath upside-down by mistake on Remembrance Sunday, there was barely a mention in the media. And it would have been exactly the same if Corbyn had done the same, except every front page headline would have said: “Corbyn DELIBERATELY does an elongated runny poo on Winston Churchill’s head, attracting flies that eat the Cenotaph costing the taxpayer £1.2 trillion.”