If Boris Johnson's anti-Heathrow constituents feel let down, they only have themselves to blame

To vote for Boris Johnson and genuinely expect him to keep his word is like voting for the Vegan Christmas Party, and not mind that the man wearing the rosette is Bernard Matthews

British politics has been fully auto-parodic for a while now, but it is still worth a brief pause to applaud the multiple clustershambles that is the Heathrow third runway.

Last week Greg Hands, an international trade minister, a man who you may have worked out has a job that involves boosting trade with foreign countries, resigned over the possible expansion of the country’s busiest airport.

And then, on Monday, so desperate was Boris Johnson to be out of the country and avoid the crucial vote on the matter, having once promised to “lie down in front of the bulldozers” to prevent it going ahead, took a return flight to Afghanistan for a highly spurious meeting.

The precise cost of Mr Johnson’s Afghan jaunt has not been made public, but the market rate for these things is upwards of £80,000.

The third runway, on the tiny off-chance it is built by 2025, will cost a minimum of £14bn. The real number will be much larger. And you can add to that the foreign secretary’s air travel, and the cost of the Richmond Park by-election of 2016, which Zac Goldsmith triggered via his Heathrow protest resignation, a course of action he freely admitted regretting before he’d even done it, and regretted even more in hindsight, when he lost it.

The Heathrow farce shines a light on all the most significant problems haunting British politics and British public life.

For the first part, a government minister is having to resign for no greater reason than that Heathrow is right in the middle of the richest part of the country, and so is predictably surrounded by a large number of safe Conservative seats, where residents do not want any more aircraft noise and airport related traffic.

Indeed, in the debate on Monday evening, Greg Hands, MP for Chelsea and Fulham, of course, even pointed out that the people whose sleep was being disturbed by night flights into Heathrow are “some of the most economically productive people in the country”.

Don’t be in any doubt. If, in the 1940s, the British government had had the foresight not to put the country’s main airport where rich people live, it would certainly have three runways by now, if not five or six.

The former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill, who became Lord O’Neill when he took on the job as the government’s infrastructure Tsar, regularly made the case for the expansion of Gatwick instead, and even Birmingham. Among his former colleagues at Goldman Sachs, it is regularly joked that he only took the job to stop the third runway at Heathrow, and the extra flights that would pass over his house in Barnes. When Heathrow won the bidding process in 2016, he resigned shortly after.

And then we move on to the foreign secretary. Having claimed to be prepared to “lie down in front of the bulldozers” to prevent the third runway being built, he is now not prepared to resign in order to vote against it.

Now he claims he can “achieve more” by not resigning, and by working against the third runway from within government. If he thought that was even remotely true, or even merely plausible, he’d have written it on his campaign leaflets. “I will work from the inside to stop the third runway at Heathrow. Even if the ‘inside’ is in Afghanistan.”

Does anyone seriously consider Boris Johnson to have gone back on his word? To have let anyone down. That Boris Johnson does what is in Boris Johnson’s immediate self-interest at any given moment is a reality so well established that the real betrayal of voters would only come if he ever actually took a principled stand on anything.

If anyone voted for Boris Johnson expecting him to do what he said he was going to do, even if it might appear to be not in his interests, well that’s their own fault.

It would be like voting for the Vegan Christmas Party, and pretending not to notice the guy wearing the rosette is Bernard Matthews.

Still, the prospect of the government losing the vote had already been reduced to almost zero, with the SNP abstaining and Labour MPs being given a free vote. So it’s over to Mr Johnson now, to stop it from the “inside.” And whoever knows where that might take him.