If Boris Johnson is really this desperate for May’s job, maybe we should just give it to him to shut him up

The most worrying thing is not that he’ll say or do anything to become prime minister, it’s that there is nothing that can ever happen that will cause him even for a second to question his suitability for the job

In Boris Johnson’s defence, he did once claim he would “lie in front of a bulldozer”, and now he has. For 40 straight minutes, with a giant JCB behind him, he lied without stopping. And not just your straightforward, honest lies, either. Every kind of mistruth was here, their timbres and textures timed to augment the next, like an intricate firework display. The whoppers went up like rockets. But then there were the softer, subtle lies.

The evasions, the equivocations, the promises that could never be kept.

The ideas for how to sort out Brexit that have, for the past two years, been shown in glorious super-slow-motion technicolour to be singularly impossible; which restated now would be no more than lies.

And then there was the fact that the whole thing was encased in a porky. That it wasn’t a Tory leadership pitch, no, not at all. It was a “chance to show a way forward” (or, rather, backward) to the tried and failed, to the absolutely, unequivocally, definitely cannot-be-done.

Alright, it wasn’t, technically, a bulldozer. It was a digger – a backhoe loader, to be exact – and the staff who had been compelled to gather at the paused production line at JCB’s global headquarters were left, I would imagine, in absolutely no doubt about what unsavoury substance was being dug up and thrown at them in industrial quantities.

JCB might be the world-leading manufacturer of this kind of thing, but even it is yet to come up with the kind of highly specialised equipment that might allow you to dig all the way down into Boris Johnson’s soul and find the bit where the shame is meant to be.

At one point, Channel 4 News’s Michael Crick asked him about the scaremongering the Vote Leave campaign had engaged over immigration from Turkey. “I never said anything about Turkey throughout the entire campaign,” was Johnson’s reply. In the week before the referendum, he and Michael Gove sent an open letter to David Cameron, asking him to promise he would veto any attempt for Turkey to join the EU. It was arguably, the most cynical moment of the entire referendum. Gove knew Cameron would always use this veto if he had to but he also knew, as a member of the privy council, that Cameron could not say so publicly, due to intelligence-sharing relationships with Turkey and the threat of Islamist terror.

In any event, here was Boris Johnson, denying the whole thing had ever happened.

But the most worrying thing with Johnson is not that he’ll say anything or do anything to become prime minister, it’s that there is nothing that can ever happen that will cause him even for a second to question his suitability for the job.

Not two years as the worst foreign secretary in modern times, with his departure from the department still referred to as “Liberation Day” by everyone who works there. Not the undisguised loathing of at least 50 per cent of the population.

Here he was, telling Theresa May to “go back to Brussels, ditch the backstop, and leave by March 29.”

He is not so stupid as to think this is not totally impossible. May’s deal was defeated by 230 votes on Tuesday. Before Christmas 117 of her own MPs voted to chuck her out. They did so because of the backstop. If all that was required to save her from this neverending ritualised public humiliation was to go to Brussels and have the backstop removed, she would, very obviously do it.

Normal people tend not to be allowed to reach these kinds of levels of self-delusion. Normally, this would be the point where the family steps in but unfortunately for Boris Johnson, the family has already stepped out. And not just out of the family home, out of the government as well. And this really is the problem. In other families, Boris Johnson would just be the one you don’t talk about. Not so easy when talking about Boris Johnson is what half of you do for a living.

But there is one way forward. Would it not be easier, and very much in the national interest, to just let him have the job, and then after a single day, remove him? He would get the picture of him walking into 10 Downing Street, which is all he wants anyway. And the nation would not have to carry on being brought down to Boris Johnson’s level.