The Boris suspension bridge

An excerpt from John Crace's article in yesterday's Guardian.

Then came Boris. The prime minister has been instructed to be on his best behaviour and not to gloat but he just can’t do it. After a brief attempt at “unite the nation” rhetoric – the “trust me” line has never gone down well in any of Boris’s relationships – Johnson quickly lapsed into charmless insincerity. It was so charming the way Corbyn believed the silly things he did, he exclaimed. Pity can be crueller than mockery.

Johnson then just went into full-on lying mode. Forty hospitals. Tick. Fifty-thousand nurses. Tick. Get Brexit Done. Tick. The bigger the lie, the more the Tories loved him. He wanted to restore public trust in politics. Said the man who has built his whole career and campaign style on destroying it. “If you can’t trust the Daily Telegraph, who can you trust?” he asked. How about a paper the prime minister hasn’t lied in.

Eventually Boris got so carried away that he went for the biggest lie he could think of. He would build the bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland that every civil engineer had said was technically impossible. The Tory benches went moist in a collective orgasm.

This is the new present. It’s also the future. Boris Uncontained. Until it all inevitably goes hideously wrong. And then he’ll just walk away. Untouched. Untouchable. As the SNP’s Ian Blackford got up to reply, Boris merely pulled out his phone and started playing online CandyCrush with Classic Dom. This One Nation stuff was never meant to include the Scots.