The 4th July is now Boris Day, where we celebrate what a fantastic job our prime minister has done

On this day forth, children will dance in a circle and cough in praise of our heroic leader who single-handedly mopped up the virus in a huge dishcloth and squeezed it over France where it belongs

We’ve won!!! One newspaper headline told us, “Cheers Boris, Back to a Brighter Britain.”

Other papers were full of articles such as “Boris Johnson’s brave battling spirit has sent the spores of filthy Covid scuttling back to Covidstan. His strategy of setting targets that are never met and then never mentioning them again, has smashed the evil pus. From now on, 4 July must be known as Boris Day, when children dance in a circle and cough and we all slide down a giant ventilator wearing blonde ruffled hair to celebrate the mighty victory of our heroic leader who single-handedly mopped up the virus in a huge dishcloth and squeezed it over France where it belongs.”

The scientists who spoke at the press conference where the restrictions were eased seemed less certain, urging everyone to please please please don’t think this is in any way over. And the expression on their faces suggested they wanted to say, “We will have to go back to lockdown if the numbers rise, there’s no prospect of a vaccine. I’m so worried I need sleeping tablets and keep having a nightmare that Britain’s full of vampires and Boris Johnson tells everyone not to worry and to go out at night in graveyards. Oh my God, where is my Valium?”

But that’s because they’re traitors. Remember, it’s your duty to buy lager. If you care about Britain you will go out on 4 July and go mental.

And by next week Boris Johnson will probably tell us, “I want you all to join a spitting club where you stand in a huddle and spit at each other. But please remember we should still be careful”.

Health secretary Matt Hancock boasted, “Our plan is working”. You can understand this, because it’s worked so comprehensively that there are only two countries in the world with a worse death rate than us.

One is Brazil, where the president’s attitude has been, “I want you to die for Brazil, if you love your country you will embrace the virus. Now find some infected rags, rub them into your chest and gasp with pride for your motherland.”

The other is America, where each day the president wanders round the stage saying something like, “I have a great cure, it’s a fantastic cure, piranhas up the a***, I’ve been doing this every morning, they nibble the virus away, it’s a fantastic cure, trust me.”

Even so, we’re told the latest situation proves we’re leading the world. You can see their point, because France, Germany and Greece haven’t announced their bars are opening on 4 July, have they?

They’ll claim it’s because they already opened them six weeks ago, but the point remains we’re the only ones opening pubs that are shut because we lead the world in pub-opening.

The one bit of the plan that has reduced the rates of infection must be the lockdown, but at the beginning that was forced on them against their will. The “plan” outlined by Boris Johnson originally was that Britain would be the one country that didn’t have a lockdown, so we could be like Superman.

Or maybe it was all part of the plan, to ignore the rest of the world’s plan. And it was also part of the plan to announce he would shake hands with people who were infected, as that wouldn’t cause him to get infected, and as a result, get infected.

And it was also part of the plan to announce a tracing app would be a “game-changer”, and it would be ready by the middle of May, then by June, then September, then never.

Boris Johnson addressed this issue on Wednesday, saying no country has a tracing app. So Keir Starmer mentioned several countries that have a tracing app, and Johnson replied: “The one in Germany doesn’t work.”

That’s the sort of leadership that means we can get pissed in a pub next week. You make our country great by making up a story that nothing works anywhere else either. If anyone asks why we never win football tournaments, he can say, “Germany never wins football tournaments”.

So now millions of people have been led to believe the crisis is almost over. Some appear to have misunderstood the rules, and interpret “stay at least one metre away” as “go to the beach and squash up as closely as you can to everyone, so the sweat of a thousand strangers drips onto your ice lolly and into a variety of your orifices”.

But the problem may be the government isn’t really trusted. It’s hard to put your finger on why that might be. But if Johnson announced there was a strict ban on country dancing, you know the next morning Dominic Cummings and two members of the cabinet would have been filmed carrying each other round a barn in a secret country dancing club, organised by crusties who arranged illegal raves in 1996.

Even when he was asked what he was personally looking forward to, after the restrictions were eased, he said, “I’m looking forward to a haircut.”

Really? An Etonian prime minister, who trades on shambolic hair, has been unable to get a haircut? For most of his life, Johnson has probably had a hairdresser responsible for each individual hair.

So when the advice is chaotic and the messengers are habitual storytellers, you might as well say, “Sod it, let’s go to the beach and see what happens. And tell ourselves we won.”