Boris Johnson is a man with nothing to offer and no idea what to do. And so his words outside No 10 were entirely meaningless

Brexit still hasn't happened yet, and Boris Johnson has already stopped pretending anything good will come of it. It is something to be got out of the way. Fat chance

If it was what he was going for then, in fairness to the prime minister, it was the best impression of David Brent that’s ever been attempted outside the front of the door of 10 Downing Street.

Specifically, the most unhinged bit in the Brent narrative arc, when he imagines himself to be Lenny Henry, flashing his teeth and raising a middle finger to Dawn French, who won’t stop going on at him about putting the bins out while he’s “got to save some Africans!”

Johnson, you see, has a mission: 20,000 new police officers, some improvement works to some hospitals and an administrative tweak to the schools funding model.

But whatever he does, wherever he goes, just doing his best to his nation’s very white saviour, there is his nagging wife – the nation itself – who just won’t stop bleating on about Brexit.

He just wants to get Brexit done, guys. Out of the way, and then get on with the real work, the thing that drives him every day, that inspires him – more police officers, some hospital improvement works and an administrative tweak to the schools funding model.

These are the things that have propelled him onward, every day, for thirty years, to get to this very point. And now here he is, standing ready to bring in some more police officers, do some slight improvements to some hospitals, and tweak the schools funding model, but this bloody Brexit thing just will not go away.

On Tuesday, large numbers of his own MPs are getting ready to side with opposition parties and, as he said, “chop the legs out from under his negotiating strategy”, by trying to stop him dragging the country out of the EU without any kind of deal, and deliver a chaotic, life-chance destroying Brexit of the kind that he always said could never possibly happen.

Why won’t these people just let him get Brexit over and done with? Why are they persisting with this?

Why can’t they see that nobody will care about rising food prices, food shortages, fuel shortages, medicine shortages, the collapse of the Good Friday Agreement and the breakup of the United Kingdom once he’s finally, finally, been able to bring in some more police officers, do some hospital improvements and make some administrative tweaks to the schools funding model? That is his vision and Britain is crying out for it.

And so he had a warning for his MPs. He gave them this warning by summoning them all to Downing Street, ushering them into the garden, then going out of the front to issue this warning in the street, where none of them could see or hear him. He did this for reasons that may never become clear. Such are the stresses on a man so close to seeing his vision made real but still so agonisingly far.

Indeed who of us can hope to know the intricacies, the subtleties of the man? This Johnson premiership is already arcing out of the reach of mere mortals. Who of us can understand him, this higher life form, this great man, this modern-day Churchill, whose eminent Churchillianism cannot even be held back by his lacking absolutely every single one of Churchill’s qualities?

How can we even come near? Boris, as Churchill may very well have once said, is bollocks, wrapped in bollocks inside bollocks. But there may be a key. That key, is bollocks.

If you understand that the ultimate point of Johnson’s words are to be meaningless – as he has absolutely nothing to say, at all, no cause or purpose he wishes to serve beyond his own narcissism – you can start to balance the bollocks out on both sides of the ledger.

If MPs vote to block no-deal Brexit on Tuesday, it would, as he said, chop out the legs of the negotiating strategy from under the government. Within two sentences, he added that, if they do compel him to seek to an extension to Article 50, he would just ignore it. So the thing that he expects you to believe will derail his negotiation, he will also just ignore.

The EU need to believe we are serious about coming out without a deal. He said this for approximately, the ten thousandth time, otherwise the negotiations “cannot move forward”.

The negotiations that “cannot move forward” have already finished. The new “proposals” that have apparently moved them forward were, we are told, shown to MPs in Downing Street, by Boris Johnson. One such MP has claimed that they are the same as the old proposals, but with the bits about the backstop crossed out.

“I don’t want an election, the people don’t want an election,” he said, by way of threatening to hold one within six weeks if he doesn’t get his way. In the Westminster village, a long day’s election speculation ended without the production of a single poll that intimates a general election will improve his fortunes in the slightest.

Is it, at this point, perhaps possible to wonder if all this could be a little disappointing, if not unsettling, for the 17 million or so people that voted for Brexit? The country has waited patiently for all Brexit’s many promised glories to become real, but before it has even happened, the man who promised it to them now talks of it as little more than an inconvenience.

Because Boris Johnson has been prime minister for five weeks now, and he campaigned to become prime minister for even longer than that. And during that entire time, not once has he uttered a single positive syllable about what Brexit might actually have to offer.

It must simply be got over and done with. It must be “pacified”. The bawling baby must be put to bed.

The leading Brexiteer is now prime minister, and all he appears to want to do, in this post-Brexit nirvana, he will soon have built, is bring in some more police officers and, well, you know the rest.

Is it possible, just dimly possible, that it might be starting to look like something of a con?

And when that con becomes glaringly real, it might just be that 20,000 new police officers won’t be enough.