Frankly my dear Nadine, Boris never gave a damn

One reason Johnson has been rendered so ridiculous is that only the already ridiculous and witless were willing to defend his endless lies, writes Tom Peck

Not waving, but drowning (Getty)

There could be no more perfect finale to the most tedious boxset drama of all time than a week-long row about a peerage for Nadine Dorries.

Of course, Johnson’s most recent and surely now final downfall doesn’t actually have anything at all to do with Nadine Dorries. It’s to do with him lying to the House of Commons. The row about Nadine Dorries is an entirely separate row, which is not about him lying to the Commons but lying to Nadine Dorries, which she is sadly if not tragically incapable of working out.

Eventually, everybody works out that Boris Johnson never gave a toss about them, but Dorries looks likely to be the exception that proves the rule. For her, it seems the penny will never begin its descent.

No, Dorries would sooner write columns for the Daily Mail about the “sinister forces” that kept her, a working-class girl from Liverpool, from joining the House of Lords, than see that if someone isn’t telling the truth, there really is an overwhelmingly likely candidate.

In some ways, it’s a shame that she’s so very wrong. If only there were sinister forces preventing working-class women from being elevated to the peerage, then you and I wouldn’t yet again be paying the government’s legal costs as it tries to get back some of the £122m it gave to Baroness Michelle Mone, originally of Glasgow but now of Mayfair, for a load of PPE that she never actually had.

But it’s still pleasing to see some of the best characters finally weaved into the central plot line. For quite a while, the likes of Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg were crucial to the dramatic spectacle but not the narrative.

One of the most crucial causes of Johnson having been rendered so unfathomably ridiculous is that only the already ridiculous were willing to defend him.

When a prime minister first denies that any illegal parties took place, then has to admit they did happen but he didn’t know about them, then has to admit that he didn’t know about them but he was in fact at them, any even vaguely sane Tory MP just puts their phone on silent, and ignores the calls from the TV news channels.

It has been possible, for a very long time now, to precisely measure the depth of the excrement in which Johnson has buried himself by exactly who has sprinted to the TV studios to defend him, armed only with a shovel, with which to make the hole ever deeper.

When merely entirely bang to rights, you might hear from someone like James Cleverly. When an outrage has occurred, enter Dorries, or Rees-Mogg. An atrocity – that’s when you can be sure you’ll be hearing from Michael Fabricant or, very occasionally, Christopher Chope.

As his star not so much waned as exploded, in the privileges committee investigation, and finally its report, which will be published just as soon as its members get their hands on a new printer cartridge, his always entirely ridiculous defenders were left only with the most ridiculous of defences.

And so here he is, left with the likes of Jake Berry, Nadine Dorries, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Andrea Jenkyns, blaming the downfall of the latest Etonian prime minister first on “the establishment” and more recently on “the blob”. The only thing left to blame it on is a made-up word, and the only people left to do the blaming are the very, very stupidest of them all.

The fact that at least some of them were promised peerages for their efforts, and the even more recent fact that those peerages will not be forthcoming, because Johnson very obviously lied to them about the process involved and they trusted him enough not to bother checking until it was too late, is a frankly ingenious way to weave it all together in time for the credits to roll. To bring absolutely everything back to the fundamental truth.

That the demise of Boris Johnson is, once again, about absolutely nothing but his own towering deficiencies. That no one else is to blame.

But also – and this really is the masterstroke – it is an ending that contains within it more than the faint possibility of another series. If Nadine Dorries is stupid enough to believe him, and the Daily Mail thinks its readers are stupid enough to believe her, then the flame of eternal bull**** has not been extinguished.

Don’t be naive enough to think we couldn’t all get burned again.