Some pictures are worth a thousand words, but his one was worth just three: amateur, chump, fraud

In Boris Johnson’s defence, he does have some splendid answers to the questions he can answer – including his solution to Brexit, as drawn from the ‘Noel Edmonds Teach Yourself Guide To Cosmic Ordering’

In a marginally different context, you could weep for Boris Johnson. That one tiny difference would be that he wasn’t Boris Johnson. If he were someone else, almost anyone else, you could drench a triple-ply Kleenex at the sight of him drowning in the unfathomable depths of his own shallowness.

He has prepared for this for decades, reputedly since the nursery, and is terminally unprepared. He has sold himself for years as the plain-speaking antidote to the generic mealy-mouthed politico, and has nothing plain to say when asked the simplest questions. He has styled himself as the second coming of Winston Churchill, and his idea of a fightback is mutely waggling the white flag of peevish surrender.

He might still win this contest – though the doubts about that multiply almost by the hour as he ostentatiously unravels. But, even if he does, he has incinerated the artificial persona beyond identification by dental records. He has burned it so absolutely that the celebratory vote of no confidence threatened by a dozen Tory MPs would be less an act of assassination than one of euthanasia.