Boris Johnson was interviewed on GB News by two of his own MPs – Putin must be jealous

‘Tell us about how you nearly died. And now tell us that you definitely won’t do what’s required to stop it happening to anyone else’

There was the minor detail that the interviewers, Esther McVey and Philip Davies, are both Tory MPs (Getty)

Boris Johnson’s busy schedule has prevented him from doing more than a single interview with the BBC’s Today programme since becoming prime minister two and a half years ago.

So full credit to GB News’s Saturday Selection for managing to land the big exclusive, and elusive, sit-down interview – an achievement that definitely overshadows the minor detail that its hosts, Esther McVey and Philip Davies, are both Tory MPs.

The programme began, as it does each time, with the news at the top of the hour. In recent weeks this invariably includes the latest appalling massacres in Ukraine, about which Russian state TV continues to tell the most shambolic, bald-faced lies. The current outrage, a rocket attack on a railway station in which at least 52 people were killed, has already been described on Russia’s Channel One as Ukraine blowing up its own people for the crime of attempting to flee to safety from their own Nazi government (and its Jewish president).

But even Russian state TV channels appear to have worked out that there are some things so ridiculous, you can’t even attempt them. For example, they haven’t done a sit-down exclusive interview with Putin, conducted by two MPs from his own party. One presumes that they are still clinging to the hope that their audience is taking them seriously, as required, which very much stopped being a concern in the GB News gallery about an hour and a half after its launch last year, when its now ex-presenter Simon McCoy had to issue a genuine on-air plea for people to stop texting in comments for broadcast under the name of Hugh Janus.

It was a tough session for the prime minister right from the outset, when Esther and Philip were very keen to know more about his heroic journey to St Thomas’ Hospital two years ago, when our brave leader so nearly gave the last full measure of devotion in brave service of his country.

Tell us more, they implored him – more about your not being able to get up the stairs, more about your own brave suffering and struggle – and Johnson duly obliged.

At this point there was a curious pirouette by Davies, who began to pressure Johnson into guaranteeing that there would never be another lockdown, in accordance with the ideological commitment of Davies’s wingnut wing of the Tory party. It made for rather strange viewing.

“Tell us about how you nearly died. And now tell us that you definitely won’t do what’s required to stop it happening to anyone else,” he might as well have said.

Davies, arguably to his credit, was disappointed that Johnson’s own brush with death had appeared to make him a convert to the “nanny state” cause. Why is he banning “buy one get one free” offers, telling supermarket managers where they can and can’t place certain products, Davies asked. To which Johnson responded with some terrifying statistics about how overweight the UK now is, and followed that up with a line for the ages: “I am no advertisement for willpower.” That much, there can be absolutely no doubt, is true.

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There were, after the foray into the prime minister’s personal struggles, still a few short seconds to discuss whether or not he had broken the law and then lied about it, as 99.9 per cent of the country believe him to have done because absolutely no other explanation is even remotely plausible.

“A lot of nonsense has been talked,” he said, before explaining that he wasn’t going to say anything else on the subject. And on this, no one can doubt that he’s absolutely correct. A lot of nonsense has been talked.

Somebody even once said that there hadn’t even been any parties. Then they said that there had been, but that they hadn’t attended them. And then they said that, all right, maybe they had been at one or two of them, but either they didn’t know they were parties, even while they were at them, or everybody at the party was having a party apart from them, because they were working.

So it is arguably a relief that no more nonsense was talked on that subject. But it is perhaps a disappointment, and in equal parts a mystery, that our fearless interrogators didn’t try to tease out just a little bit more on this subject, from their own boss.