Boris Johnson has cocooned himself in his own inadequacy. No one can touch him

To have so many career-ending scandals running concurrently is surely part of the plan

Years ago, Boris Johnson described his strategy in interviews as to become “a blond wall of noise” through which his interviewer cannot penetrate.

It has self-evidently served him well, but arguably his new ruse is faring even better. He is no longer a wall of noise but a wall of s**t. He is cocooned in his own inadequacy.

This, clearly, was the plan all along: to be so relentlessly terrible, to have so many career-ending scandals running concurrently that it is impossible for any interviewer to know where to start or stop.

Even in a full 40 minutes with the BBC’s Andrew Marr, on the eve of the first-ever Tory party conference to be accidentally banjaxed by the prime minister, there were whole entire s**tshows with not enough time to mention.

Let’s take just one example. According to a story in the morning papers, Johnson was accused of having lunch with two female journalists and was alleged to have touched not one but both of them under the table.

Two years ago, this exact behaviour led to the resignation of two of Theresa May’s most senior ministers. But with Johnson, there simply isn’t time to mention it when the interviewer has only got so long – to pick just a few: the Supreme Court making him apologise to the Queen; MPs accusing him of complicity in threats of violence against them; and delivering a Brexit that won’t ruin millions of people’s lives and livelihoods. There’s also that rather awkward story about the woman who’s received more than £100,000 worth of public money in “tech” grants, and whose flat he used to go and visit in the middle of the afternoon for what she has called “technology lessons”.

Oh, and there’s also appropriating the murder of a Remain campaigning MP for the cause of Brexit, as Johnson did at the despatch box of the House of Commons on Wednesday, hours after the Supreme Court forced him to reopen it.

Each, any and absolutely all of these are very much the sort of thing prime ministers traditionally resign for. But so huge is the stockpile of humiliation, it almost becomes smaller.

Just as people with overwhelming amounts of work to do tend to find themselves paralysed and unable to do anything, so Johnson is so useless and so shameless he is almost in the clear.

For his part, it’s hard to imagine Johnson himself was not entirely delighted to spent a full 20 minutes of live prime-time political television on whether or not it’s OK to call what has come to be known as the Benn Act, the “Surrender Act”.

Quite possibly the only interesting thing David Cameron said in the recent public conversation devoted to the publication of his memoirs was on the central and seemingly unsolvable problem of what he calls the “post-truth” age. With regard to the still-not-quite-finished row about the Vote Leave £350m bus, Cameron told The Times this: “I’m afraid it is a real problem in politics – and there is no real answer to this. If you’re having a row about your issue, you’re winning, even if the numbers are wrong.”

All Johnson wants to do is make the term “Surrender Act” stick in the public consciousness, and all Labour wants to do is tell him he’s not allowed to. And so all Andrew Marr wanted to do was argue about whether or not the term “Surrender Act” is morally acceptable. It meant that the term, the one Labour wants effectively banned from public debate, was mentioned, by my count, 19 separate times in just under 15 minutes. And here I am, mentioning it too.

There is precious little time to note that, at the precise moment the prime minister was speaking about the “40 new hospitals” he is building, the number was reduced to six. The BBC News website, which had reported the number as being 40, genuinely put out a statement in which it essentially apologised for having taken at face value the prime minister’s own promise.

It has now corrected its story. When Marr told Johnson, “It’s not 40 new hospitals is it, it’s six”, Johnson at least had the good grace not to try to correct him.

Without wishing to get too deep in the technicalities of the Jennifer Arcuri story, it is a fact that when money was awarded to Arcuri while Johnson was mayor, Johnson should have declared an interest at the time that the two were, as Marr put it, “friends”.

Did you declare an interest? He was asked three times. Eventually he said the words: “There was no interest to declare.”

That is, straightforwardly, not true. And it will become a fact in the days ahead.

It is the sort of thing ministers resign for. But one suspects this one will get away with it.

Voters tend to be quite forgiving of all manner of transgressions. The only thing you can’t get away with is hypocrisy. And this is the reality of the new politics, here, in America and all around the world.

Johnson has set the bar of expectation so low he cannot fail to stumble over it. It’s a stunning game plan. Nobody expects anything of him, beyond a non-stop cavalcade of lies and uselessness.

We all expect to be disappointed. Perhaps we even demand it. And goodness knows, he is not going to disappoint us.