I used to say that Boris Johnson was a miniature Trump. After his Afghanistan stunt, I've realised how wrong I was

Say what you like about the 45th president, but when it comes to electoral promises he has proved a man of his word

Boris made such an impression in Afghanistan that his visit wasn't even mentioned at all in the English-language Afghan newspaper (AFP)

Perhaps this aberration is due to the jetlag a chap can expect if he will insist on flying to Kabul and back in a day, but for once Boris Johnson is far too modest.

“My resignation would have achieved absolutely nothing,” the alleged Foreign Secretary wrote to his Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituents following the third Heathrow runway vote he cunningly contrived to avoid.

He shouldn’t be so self-effacing. His resignation would have spared the country, government and Foreign Office more of the unrelenting humiliation he visits on them daily. And that, by any metric, is something.

Then again, perhaps the reaction to his going Awol is too harsh. It isn’t half as severe as it would be towards anyone else who pulled a stunt like this, at an estimated cost of some £80,000 to Joanna and Johnny Taxpayer, because Boris has raised the shoulder-shrug bar higher than any minister before him.

The close observer of his antics must be at least 90 per cent inured to the nonsense, and grudgingly resigned to this fact: the only point of principle over which he would dream of quitting is the one that holds that the right thing to do is whatever is in his personal interest at the time.

For all that, it would be cheap to discount the possibility that the jaunt was too urgent to be postponed by even a day. You can gauge its importance from the local media coverage. The Afghanistan Times, the country’s leading English language paper, was so stupefied by its significance that it couldn’t bring itself to mention it at all. The most recent reference to Boris I can find on its website refers to him as “London Mayor”. So quite an impact there.

While the job title of the person he met hints that it was less vital than one would like to believe, in his defence Boris may not have realised this at the time. So intimate is his grasp of geopolitical detail that he could have mistaken deputy foreign minister Hekmat Karzai for his cousin Hamid Karzai, unaware that the latter vacated the Afghan presidency in 2014.

If so, that is the kind of trivial cousinly error any Foreign Secretary might have made. At one of the major wartime summits, Yalta from memory, Anthony Eden famously confused Franklin Roosevelt with his late cousin Theodore, asking FDR if he didn’t find life as a stone carving on Mount Rushmore awfully difficult, what with being in the wheelchair and all. So let’s hear no more about that.

On the other hand, Boris may have known exactly who he was meeting. As a world-renowned expert on suicide terrorism, Hekmat Karzai is just the guy whose brains you’d want to pick had you solemnly pledged to kill yourself for political ends by laying your body in front of bulldozers working on the third runway at Heathrow.

As tempting as these theories might seem, on balance it is marginally likelier that Boris was baring his yellow streak once again. If he is our own Baby Trump, as argued here before, fleeing to Kabul to avoid his duty to his constituents looks like his version of the “heel bone spurs” that robbed the Donald of his chance to serve in the military.

But on this form, he isn’t even Baby Trump. Say what you like about the 45th president, but when it comes to electoral promises he has proved a man of his word. He ran on the perverted poetry of the white supremacist monster, and that is how he seeks to govern in even more warped prose.

Boris ran for his west London seat with a self-penned elegy to the adamant fearlessness the voters could expect him to show in leading the third runway resistance. In the event, he chose to flip touristic convention on its head by alighting on Afghanistan as a place of sanctuary from the mortal dangers of London, SW1.

Whether this makes him a deserter or a conscientious objector is a matter of perspective. On reflection, you can probably rule out the latter on the grounds that it requires a conscience.

How proud Winston Churchill, his role model and biographical subject, would be for inspiring Boris like this. Churchill also deserted the House of Commons at the sound of gunfire. If that was to walk towards rather than away from it, the distinction between his six months in the First World War trenches and Boris’ day trip to Afghanistan is too pedantic to be worth drawing.

Churchill’s Nobel Literature Prize-winning History of the English Speaking Peoples runs to four chunky volumes, but you’d need a dozen to chronicle the history of Boris Johnson’s casually broken promises. Anyone who claims to be astonished by this one is faking it or hasn’t been paying attention.

If it was ever amusing, the joke wore off a very long time ago, and the only people smiling today will be Sajid Javid, Jeremy Hunt and other fancied runners for the Tory succession. If Boris Johnson becomes prime minister, Heathrow will be wanting a fourth runway, and possibly a fifth, for all the jets carrying passengers with one-way tickets to Kabul.