In his first PMQs, Boris Johnson's racist words had consequences – but this time they were finally for him

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi was quite right to challenge the prime minister on his description of women wearing the hijab or burqa. He had no answer and his MPs fell silent

It was the cockney twang that did it. The wide vowels and the half-dropped Hs. The reminder, not that one was needed, that beneath his turban and behind his greying beard, Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, born in Slough and now the town’s MP, is as British as they come. “Mr Speaker,” he began. “If I decide to wear a turban ... or he decides to wear a kippah or a skull cap, or she decides to wear a hijab or a burqa, does that mean it is open season for right honourable members of this house to make derogatory and divisive remarks about our appearance?”

Eyes were widening. Silence swept across the benches behind the prime minister like the blast radius from a nuclear explosion.

Sitting by the prime minister’s side was the chancellor, Sajid Javid, the son of a bus driver. He, and everyone else, knew where they were about to be taken – and it wasn’t going to be a pleasant journey. And indeed it wasn’t.

“For those of us who, from a young age, have had to endure being called names such as towel head, or Taliban, or coming from bongo bongo land, we can appreciate full well the hurt and pain felt by Muslim women when they are described as looking like bank robbers and letterboxes,” Dhesi went on.

“So rather than hide behind sham and whitewash investigations when will the prime minister finally apologise for his derogatory and racist remarks, racist remarks which have led to a spike in hate crime?”

The opposition benches applauded. The pufferfish prime minister had taken a fatal puncturing. But he wasn’t done there.

“When will the prime minister finally order an inquiry into Islamophobia in his party, something which both he, and his chancellor, promised on national television?” Dhesi asked.

Ordinarily, the political sketch writer pauses here to state that the Conservative benches winced. But there are no Conservative benches. Two rows behind the prime minister, there was Kenneth Clarke in his usual space. A few yards to his right were Dominic Grieve, David Gauke and all the rest who Boris Johnson, two parliamentary days into his job, has already kicked out.

It is not hard to look behind the eyes of a Tory MP. All that lurks there is an appetite for power. Could it, perhaps, be that some of them might have been wondering whether they have made a terrible mistake?

Words have consequences. Power comes through winning elections. Winning elections comes through building electoral coalitions. Already Boris Johnson has broken off one wing of his party; the part that, in theory at least, remains has, in fact, abandoned them for Nigel Farage in their millions and very well might not come back.

And so here was a chap from Slough, not lolloping on the benches or speaking in a voice that makes ordinary people shudder, building in a few short brilliant sentences, a righteous and angry coalition of ethnic minorities against Boris Johnson. (The Jewish community might, of course, be less enthusiastic participants.)

It was the last part, really, that did it. When was the review into Islamophobia coming? He was entirely right to say that both the chancellor and prime minister had promised one on live television during the leadership campaign. It was, predictably, the only part of the question the prime minister did not acknowledge.

“If he actually took the trouble to read the article,” Johnson began. It was perfectly clear Dhesi had read the article, but Johnson simply cannot do unpatronising, not to the likes of the member for Slough anyway. What followed was the usual descent into the world of Labour and the “scourge of antisemitism”.

It remains a constant source of fascination to me, as a regular observer of political debates, which is to say arguments, how few people seem to understand the fundamental fact that two wrongs do not make a right. But there is more to it than that. In this particular instance, the prime minister did write racist and derogatory words in a newspaper, he did attack Muslim women, and he is too cowardly to apologise for it.

Two rows behind Boris Johnson, and next to Ken Clarke, was Theresa May. You do not need a too-long memory to recall her first attempt at Prime Minister’s Questions. It was brutal. An evisceration of Jeremy Corbyn so severe that not even Tim Farron survived.

Boris Johnson’s was the other way around. He made Jeremy Corbyn look like a statesman. Corbyn asked the same short, simple questions that Kenneth Clarke, David Gauke, Philip Hammond and the rest had asked yesterday. What new proposals on the backstop had been sent to Brussels?

The answer, again, was a wall of waffle that embarrassed everyone and fooled no one. Johnson genuinely expects us to believe two things. One, that threatening no deal is advancing the negotiations, and removing it would undermine them, even though Johnson will not provide any details on the negotiations, and the EU continually says they are not happening.

And two, that the consequences of no deal are serious enough to persuad​e the EU to change their ways, but are nothing for British people, who will feel their effect more than anyone, to worry about.

But people are not that stupid, and Jeremy Corbyn is not that stupid. “How can I be accused of undermining the negotiations when no negotiations are taking place?” he said. It seemed unscripted and it was, frankly, definitive. There is nothing there.

Johnson could only waffle at Corbyn for refusing to give him the election he says he does not want. But he will get that election in the end, at some point, and all that can be known with any certainty about elections (in recent times, at least) is that they do not pan out as expected.

But with this evidence, Johnson should be significantly more worried than he let on. If his phoney position can be entirely blown apart with such ease, in one remark, by Jeremy Corbyn – a man who is frankly no great shakes at this stuff – then the public will not find it difficult to see through him too.