Rishi Sunak is the star of the latest coronavirus show – but the Johnson family can’t help but add some drama

This was the second emergency press conference in as many days in which the prime minister made a fool of himself, but he was only the support act this time

Dividing £330bn by 70 million equals £4,714.28. That is the average cost, to every British man, woman and child, of the first coronavirus emergency loan measures announced at the latest Downing Street press conference, and it certainly won’t be the last.

Not that you’d know it, to listen Britain’s brand new chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, who is the second biggest thing you’d vaguely heard of a few months ago but didn’t think would amount to much, and is now suddenly absolutely everywhere.

It’s distinctly possible that you’re old enough to remember being “all in this together”, as George Osborne used to like to say, while stripping public services right back to their bare bones, then essentially breaking them.

But now we really are all in it together, Sunak appears to have decided that in fact it’s all about him.

If you think the bog roll aisle in your local supermarket is looking bare, check out the first-person pronoun section. Sunak has panic bought the lot.

“I can announce today an unprecedented package ... I am making available a £330bn package of guarantees ... If the demand is greater, I will go further ... I will provide whatever assistance I decide is necessary.”

Never before, in the field of human generosity, has so much been owed by so many, to so few. Well, to one exactly. It might look and feel like you’ve just had to lend yourself five grand you don’t have but whatever you do, don’t forget to thank Sunak for it.

It’s not his fault, not really. The annual Budget speech is itself an annoying and really rather pointless tradition of British politics, and one of its more annoying conventions is its first-person nature.

And this was the chancellor, giving an emergency budget less than a week after his first one, an emergency response to the absolutely inevitable and eminently foreseeable emergency of a week ago. (Not my opinion. I’m not qualified to give one. But many leading medics and scientists have, not least the editor of The Lancet, Dr Richard Horton, who has been warning of this utterly inevitable moment since, well since long before it became inevitable, back in January.)

At the time of last week’s Budget, of course, around 600 MPs crammed onto the hot sweaty benches of the House of Commons, a few hours after one of their number had tested positive for coronavirus. The Commons is still sitting, by the way, as is the House of Lords.

Is it any wonder that, 24 hours later, still nobody understands what they are and aren’t meant to be doing? What does and doesn’t constitute non-essential travel?

Twenty-four hours ago, everybody, and especially the over-70s, were told to avoid such travel, and so why shouldn’t the prime minister’s 79-year-old dad, Stanley Johnson, turn up on ITV’s This Morning to tell Phillip Schofield and Vanessa Feltz: “Course I’ll go to the pub if I have to go to the pub.”

When does a man “have” to go to the pub, you might ask? But then, you are not Stanley Johnson, a man for whom a call to a 24-hour news studio or breakfast TV sofa is indistinguishable from the village church bells that once called men to the trenches.

Currently, the world’s scientists are engaged in a battle to find a coronavirus vaccine, which they expect to take more than a year. While they are at it, they might like to see if any occasion can be found that is minor enough for Stanley Johnson to consider non-essential.

Many years ago, when I was as a celebrity journalist working the London party circuit, I saw more of Stanley Johnson than my own flatmates. There is no party in the observable or unobservable universe that is too small for the guy to attend (there are many that are too big, for obvious reasons).

A nanoscientist in a lab could organise a party for invisible robots on the head of a pin and they would still gaze down the microscope to find Stanley Johnson there, hand curled round a complimentary glass of fizz, nanoscopic vol-au-vent crumbs tumbling from his chin. Though no formal research has been conducted on the subject, it has been speculated that the man has lived off canapes alone for more than 20 years.

The last time I can recall seeing him would have been in 2012, at a travel journalism awards ceremony hosted by the mayor of Las Vegas who had brought her own showgirls for the occasion, the G-stringed backsides of whom were logged in Stanley Johnson’s iPhone while most of the rest of the room was seated.

It’s possible, in these horrifying rarefied moments, that I have digressed. But if the prime minister can’t take any of it seriously, why should the rest of us?

The question of whether he really did refer, on a conference call with business leaders on Monday, to the urgent drive to produce ventilators as “Operation Last Gasp” was just one of many he didn’t answer.

With his final, and self-evidently pre-planned words at this second emergency press conference, he advised the terrified public that “the more sedulously we follow the scientific advice we have been given, the quicker our economy will bounce back”.

Yes, that’s right – sedulously. Because if this isn’t the time and the place to drop in a little word that you know and that the other 99.9 per cent of a frightened nation will have to go and look up in the dictionary, then when is?

It’s not merely that there’s no surer sign of a lightness of intellect than the heaviness with which it is worn.

It is simply that the man is a prat, to the core and to the last. And for the very worst hour in the life of our country in more than 70 years, we are stuck with him, for the very long time being at least.