Boris Johnson just made this the most embarrassing prime minister’s questions I have ever witnessed

The prime minister has run out of answers – and he’s low on bluster too

It is possible that my evidence is merely anecdotal, given that it has been gathered entirely from ancient stag-do WhatsApp groups and hurried chats with socially distanced delivery drivers, but there is a sense out there that the nation has had enough of the news.

It’s always the same. It’s too depressing. What’s the point?

What’s the point in finding out how many more hundreds of people have died today? I don’t need Huw Edwards to tell me I can’t go and see my parents. I already know.

I don’t need to switch on the television to know that, at this unprecedented hour of national crisis, the country is being led by a shaved orangutan who appears to be biologically incapable of telling the truth.

It may even be a sensible psychological coping strategy to choose not to know how bad things are or, more specifically, how bad he is.

Indeed, I would personally advise that, come noon every Wednesday, the only safe thing to do is bury either yourself or all of your telecommunications devices in some sort of concrete bunker, for fear that you might catch even a glimpse of prime minister’s questions.

It would be tempting to describe it as a national embarrassment, but that would be unfair on other, more serious national embarrassments, like having the highest coronavirus death toll in Europe. That became a matter of fact reality in the last few days, which, as Keir Starmer pointed out, just so happens to have coincided with the Powerpoint slide that tracks UK deaths alongside other countries now suddenly not being there. Before that, it had been displayed at every Downing Street press conference for 49 consecutive days.

“He seeks to make comparisons that are premature,” the prime minister told Starmer. Seven weeks after Boris Johnson began comparing the UK to other countries, it has now become too early to do so.

That really happened. Johnson jabbed his finger over the dispatch box, pointing at one of his own government’s slides, that he has displayed, publicly, every day for seven weeks, and described it as “premature”.

The intimation was that this was somehow beneath him, that it was cheap. That what the nation didn’t need to be told, right now, quite frankly, was that its prime minister is completely, unfathomably, irredeemably useless. Starmer, frankly, should know better.

The prime minister stopped short of quoting a professor called David Spiegelhalter, who has said that comparisons between countries are unhelpful. Because when he did that last week, Spiegelhalter had to publicly rebuke him for misrepresenting his work.

Starmer would again repeat the point that he made on Monday, that the prime minister is telling people to go back to work who don’t have adequate childcare to do so because schools and nurseries are shut.

He read out a letter from a constituent, the kind of which every single MP in the country, including, one must assume, the prime minister, has received hundreds if not thousands of since the prime minister’s mad, indecipherable statement on Sunday night.

The gist was that both the constituent and her partner had been told to go back to work. They’ve got no childcare and “my boss is having none of it”.

In response, the prime minister simply repeated his words from Monday: “Employers MUST be understanding.”

Johnson has done precisely one week’s work in what anyone would call a normal job, which was when he quit the LEK Consulting graduate trainee scheme, on the grounds that it was “too boring”, so it may be that he is personally unaware that there are some people out there who work for unreasonable bosses.

But it does make one wonder quite what happened when this was discussed at cabinet. Indeed, perhaps he would never have come out with this stuff if this had been a normal prime minister’s questions. If, for example, he’d have had his home secretary there to remind him that her most senior civil servant recently quit, accusing her of bullying. (That she has since been cleared has led not so much to the clearing of her name, but for ever-growing calls for reform of the process by which she was investigated).

Where was his foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, to point out that some people end up signing NDAs with work colleagues over allegations of bullying, and that those people sometimes end up as foreign secretary?

And though he wouldn’t have been in the Commons itself, it is also unfortunate that Dominic Cummings wasn’t around to remind the prime minister that before he based his entire de-lockdown policy on the hope that employers are reasonable people, there was, a few months ago, an ad for a job in 10 Downing Street that featured these words:

“You will not have weekday date nights, you will sacrifice many weekends – frankly it will be hard having a boy/girlfriend at all.

“I’ll bin you within weeks if you don’t fit – don’t complain later because I made it clear now.”

Still, none of that happened, ’course it didn’t. It wouldn’t have fitted in with the general theme of the hour, which is to say just one hyper-extended rolling s**tshow of utterly avoidable death.

All the prime minister could do, by the end, was thump the dispatch box and growl about the “common sense of the British people!”.

The British people are apparently bigger than all this cheap point-scoring. They can see right through you, holding up a seven-week-old graph that turned premature overnight.

“They know they still have to obey the social distancing laws!” he said.

And he’s right, they do. So when hundreds and thousands of them are filmed, as they were on Wednesday morning, streaming off packed trains and buses, breaking social distancing laws to get back to work at the demands of their entirely reasonable bosses, the common sense of the British people is very much on display.

It’s the common sense of the British people that tells them that they know it’s an absolute joke but they’ve got no choice in the matter.

Dare one suggest it was the very same common sense that led them, last December, to vote in their millions for Johnson over Jeremy Corbyn?

What choice, really, did they have in the matter?

On this evidence, should Johnson get round to asking the British people to drop their common sense in the ballot boxes once again, he may well find it not on his side.