Boris Johnson is back to his worst – and he has found a way to drag Keir Starmer down to his level

‘Is it safe for schools to reopen?’ he demanded of the Labour leader at PMQs, regardless of whatever he had been asked

Give him long enough and Boris Johnson, like an HMRC phishing email or the clap, will find a way to get the better of you.

And after four long weeks of strenuous efforts at prime minister’s questions by Keir Starmer, we must report that the prime minister is back to his worst. The dreaded second wave is here. The B-rate is back up (B being for either Boris or what male cattle produce after a large meal, whichever you prefer).

Yes, the prime minister has returned to his old ways like a dog to its vomit. It is a wonder, really, what took him so long. He has known, all his life and career, that the way to master any difficult situation is to reduce it to his level. And he has finally found a way to apply his methods to what had, until now, been a rather challenging forum.

Dedicated watchers of Johnson will know the technique well. It is to act as if you have brought a gun to a knife fight then pull out a large purple dildo and claim your opponent’s sheer bafflement as your victory.

To give but one example: last summer, several million years ago, when the now prime minister was launching his leadership bid in a hot sweaty room full of Tory MPs, fully cognisant of the terrible harm they were about to visit on the country but doing it anyway, Johnson was asked a question by Sky News’s Beth Rigby about “his character”.

“My parrot?” he interrupted, deliberately mishearing and then belittling her, lowering the occasion and raising a few execrable titters from the gathered bore-geoisie. They did their bit a few weeks later and here we all are.

Here we are, specifically, at prime minister’s questions, where we would learn, apparently, that the schools not having reopened was not the government’s fault, not his, but Starmer’s.

Whatever the question, be it on, say, his failure to deliver on recent promises about not charging migrant NHS workers to actually use the life-saving services they provide. Or the fact he has only managed to provide food for impoverished schoolchildren via an assist laid on by Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford (or Daniel, as the health secretary likes to call him). All would return to the same place.

“Is it safe for schools to reopen?” he demanded of Keir Starmer, at least three times, regardless of whatever he had been asked.

Johnson imagines Starmer to be in a difficult position on this issue, because some people in some of the teaching unions have some concerns about safety, and it would be difficult for Starmer to have to contradict them.

For a prime minister to stand at the despatch box, having promised to reopen schools by 1 June and completely failed to do so, and then pin that embarrassment on somebody else is, well, Classic Boris.

It hardly needs to be repeated that the reason schools have not reopened is not because of the teaching unions, but because of the crushing failure of his education secretary, Gavin Williamson, to do what is needed to make them safe to reopen.

Now, naturally, ministers’ own failure has been pinned on the people who don’t want to have their lives endangered by people in Westminster. There is no real precedent for this. There would be if, say, back in 2010, the Chilean president had gone to the Atacama desert and bellowed “It’s your own fault” down the collapsed mineshaft. But being vaguely human, he didn’t.

Where schools have reopened, such as in South Korea, they have done so with plastic screens around each desk, matched by an actual world-beating test and trace system, one that, you know, actually exists, and hasn’t been conjured to life by nothing more than the vaporous air of a wafer-thin class of joke politicians.

Williamson, of course, is the high prince of them all. Though it is frightening to conceive of such a thing, he is Johnson lite. Beyond a truly unjustifiable narcissism and a love for the drama and the gossip, there is absolutely nothing there. If a clever way can be found to prevent the gentle crushing of the life chances of a generation of children from holding Williamson – and his political ambitions – back in any way, it will be like the problem never existed.

Will it hold him back? Who of us can say at this stage? The little clique of Remainers in Johnson’s cabinet are an intriguing, if grotesque spectacle. Liz Truss and Matt Hancock know without any shadow of a doubt that they are guiding, indeed have already guided, their country down a ruinous path, but on they go anyway. Williamson, in his defence, is too stupid to understand or care.

Not so long ago, the words “no deal is better than a bad deal” used to be heard fairly often. They were ridiculous, but they were also true. It absolutely is true that if you can’t walk away from a negotiation you have no position. Your interlocutor will simply laugh at you.

This little clique has gone around saying that no deal is better than a bad deal, while simultaneously deciding that a bad career is better than no career. They have nowhere to walk away to, nothing else to do with their lives. They’ll take what they’re given, they’ll say what they’re told to say. Better to be humiliated than ignored.

So will it hold him back? Probably not. It doesn’t especially matter how demonstrably useless you are, if you’ve got a boss who’ll stand up and pin your failings on the other guy, and people will actually believe it.