Boris Johnson can’t even be trusted to insult Jeremy Corbyn properly

Of course, it is not the greatest breach of trust out there. But is it perhaps fair to wonder, if you can’t be trusted to call Jeremy Corbyn a w*****, what can you be trusted to do?

“Boris Johnson cannot even be trusted to...” feels like it should be some sort of Christmas parlour game or a round on Mock the Week. Trouble is, no one could possibly come up with anything more absurd than the truth.

Boris Johnson cannot even be trusted to call Jeremy Corbyn a w*****. That’s now a fact. He can’t.

He said he was going to call Jeremy Corbyn a w*****. He said he was going to call him a w***** in a car factory in Coventry.

That he would call Jeremy Corbyn a wanker was formally announced by the Conservative Party on Tuesday night. The nation’s media were instructed this would happen. Many newspapers, websites and TV channels led their morning coverage with news that, this afternoon, Boris Johnson would call Jeremy Corbyn a w*****.

A vote for Jeremy Corbyn, he said he would say, would be “a vote for political self-obsession and onanism”.

And then, he didn’t say it.

Why had this telling phrase gone missing? Could it perhaps be that in the 18-hour window between saying he would say it and then not saying it, it was pointed out many hundreds of times that Onan, of Bible fame, is best known for coming up with a canny ruse to avoid impregnating a woman? And he, Boris Johnson, is in some ways still best known for comprehensively failing to do the same on a number of occasions that even now remain unspecified?

It could be this. Or it could be that he has long since slipped free of the weight of any kind of expectation. He knows and we know and everyone knows that actually doing what you’ve said you’ll do is barely even an aspiration anymore. He is so far gone that to actually keep his word would almost feel dishonest.

Of course, not calling Jeremy Corbyn a w***** is not the greatest breach of trust out there. But is it perhaps fair to wonder, if you can’t be trusted to call Jeremy Corbyn a w*****, what can you be trusted to do?

Can you, for example, be trusted to “unleash Britain’s potential”, as he again promised to do, whilst standing behind a lectern with those three words on it?

Or should we, the voters, at least pause for a moment and ask, who is doing the leashing, exactly? It’s just that the Tories have been in government for the last nine years straight, and for 45 of the last 70, and if the nation somehow finds itself with this strange leash around its neck, could it, at least theoretically, be the Tories who have put it there?

Should we at least consider the blatantly obvious reality that Britain’s potential is about as likely to be unleashed on this guy’s watch as Michael Heseltine’s dog?

He spoke again of “tidal waves of investment, waiting to pour into Britain”, held off by the uncertainty of Brexit, which is not merely palpably untrue, but if it were true, it casts him in the bizarre role of an actually successful King Canute. The mighty king who, through the force of his lies alone, actually managed to hold back the tides of investment from the land for three full years, to vanquish the oceans of prosperity, which he now genuinely imagines he will now unleash and genuinely take the credit for.

Trouble is, tidal waves of investment are powerful things. They don’t tend to sit about and wait for the great leasher-in-chief, Boris Johnson, to unleash them for his own benefit.

Indeed, it is a touch on the unfortunate side that the very day he should choose to come and stand in front of the production line of a small company that makes electric taxis (shutting it down for the purpose, obviously), should also be the day that Elon Musk would announce that his brand new Tesla factory will be built in Berlin, not Britain as he had previously suggested. Why? “Brexit makes it too risky.” That’s verbatim.

Risk indeed. There’s a lot of it about. Risk is what is born when trust dies. There are no risk-free options at this election, but do bear in mind that the current frontrunner cannot even be trusted to call Jeremy Corbyn... you get the picture by now.