No Boris, ‘will you be changing any nappies?’ is not a difficult question

When you have the reputation he has, perhaps that question doesn't come with an easy answer

Another day, another new and exciting way in which Boris Johnson has shown himself to be a terrible human being.

We are, of course, long past the point where we can expect our actual prime minister to tell us how many children he’s got.

On Thursday, This Morning’s Holly Willoughby and Philip Schofield became the latest lucky people to hear the prime minister’s stone-cold reasoning behind this.

The reason he won’t tell you how many children he’s got is because he loves them too much.

Whenever you see another politician's children on the television it's because their parents don't love them. Malia and Sasha Obama – that you even know those names is evidence of their father's dereliction of care.

“There are people I love that I just don’t want brought in to this,” Johnson told Holly and Philip, as he has told everyone else before.

The daughter whose existence he connived in a court case to suppress the existence of, for example, that was an act of love. Which father hasn’t loved their child enough to do that? And if you haven’t then, well, can you honestly say you love your children at all?

What is particularly unfortunate for the prime minister, whose number of offspring can only be expressed as n, is that he has publicly announced that n is about to become n+1, and thus, for every previous occupant of Downing Street as well as the very large, non-personally degenerate portion of the human race, what should be happy news must instead be shrouded in awkwardness and evasion.

Schofield, for what it’s worth did try the old tester. “How many?” he asked, issuing a kind of pre-squirm as he did so. Answer came there none.

Still, there is to be a new mini Johnson arriving in the summer, meaning there will now be at least enough confirmed names on the Johnson teamsheet to fill a volleyball team, though the real number may be more in the cricket, Rugby Union or Royal Shrovetide Football leagues.

And so in came Holly Willoughby with this fairly innocuous offering: “Will you be changing any nappies?”

We won’t dwell too long on the length of the pause before the answer, “Erm, erm, I expect so” arrived, other than to say that various civilisations rose and fell, and the Labour Party may even have got another third of the way through its leadership contest.

Later, the prime minister would inform that this question, “will you be changing any nappies?”, was “a tricky one, coming in on middle stump.”

Of course, it is tedious to have to point out that, for all un-woeful people out there, the stroke you really don’t have to search very hard for on Holly Willoughby’s not altogether fiendish “will you be changing any nappies” delivery, is the straight drive, known as “yes” which carries the ball directly over long on for six runs, and quite possibly through an unlucky suburbanite’s prize greenhouse.

Of course, none of us can fully know the thoughts that whirred inside the pathologically dishonest mind of Johnson, as he tried to come up with an answer to the question of whether he’ll be changing any nappies, but we can all know that if the answer is anything other than “yes” then the real answer is no.

Perhaps Willoughby is a more tricksy bowler than I am giving her credit for. In those long agonised moments, there can be no doubting the batsman’s mind was well and truly scrambled.

When you are principally known for being two things a) a terrible dad and b) an even worse liar, there is much to think about as the nappies slower ball makes its deathly flight toward you. “Yes” or “no” just confirms one or the other, and before you know it, you’re mumbling “erm, erm erm I expect so” and Schofield’s got his finger in the air, Willoughby’s wheeling away in delight and you’re on your way back to the pavilion after yet another hopeless innings.

Still, what does it matter? Johnson is doing the rounds to try and suppress fears about the spread of the coronavirus, but when you’re still kind of best known for once deliberately putting too many weights in your harness so you’d get stuck on a zipwire for lols, it’s far far too late to try and be taken seriously, and he knows it.

There’s the chief medical officer for that, professor Chris Whitty, who is doing his best to reassure the nation while looking never more like a sort of sober, sensible-looking version of Adrian Chiles’s and Tim Farron’s lovechild.

While Johnson spoke, Whitty was in Westminster addressing the Health Select Committee. If you want to avoid spreading the virus, don’t shake hands with someone who’s just coughed into their hand, he explained, and then coughed into his hand.

They wanted to know whether parliament should be shut down. It has been speculated that the Palace of Westminster poses a unique risk to the health of the nation, which anyone who’s been paying attention since 2016 knows to be a certain fact. It is suggested that the weekly diaspora and return of MPs to every corner of the country risks creating what Jeremy Hunt called “650 superspreaders”, a new, surprisingly accurate moniker, adapted from the agricultural process of throwing horsesh*t about on an industrialised scale, which we can only hope sticks around long after the coronavirus has been and gone.

Whitty had some bad news for them alas. There is no reason, he said, that working in parliament should be any more risky than anywhere else. A pity. There’d been talk of having March to September off, which would have given Johnson at good six months to prevaricate before inevitably failing to live up to all of his most basic responsibilities.