It must have been a very confusing morning for Boris Johnson.
He returned to the Commons chamber for his first Prime Minister’s Questions for more than a month and found a lot had changed.
Since he was last here, the PM had caught and barely recovered from a life-threatening illness.
He’d also welcomed a new son into the world, promptly naming him ‘Willy Johnson’, two euphemisms which it doesn't require a classical education to understand.
At PMQs, he had no braying cheerleaders ‘waff-waffing’ behind him - in fact most of the green benches were empty.
The toady, planted questions from lickspittle junior MPs desperate for a government job disinfecting someone’s briefcase came via video link.
The guy opposite him was suddenly looking a bit more spritely and didn’t appear to be as easy to bluster.
On top of which, the PM had woken up to countless headlines about a man who thought the rules didn’t apply to him getting caught enjoying extramarital relations with a much younger, blonde-haired woman.
And the headlines weren’t even about him.
At the despatch box, Johnson’s answers were every bit as confusing as his morning must have been.
Apparently it just wouldn’t be right to judge the UK’s unbearably grim death figures with a comparison to other countries, because, you know, reasons.
We’ll do that later, when there are fewer reasons.
But the new guy, Keir Starmer, waved a sheet of A4 in the PM’s face, and pointed out Downing Street had been comparing the UK to other countries live on TV at a press conference watched by millions every day for several months.
Perhaps the freeview signal at Chequers is on the fritz.
Then, caught on the hop on the thorny subject of his team having missed the 100,000 tests target for three days on the trot, he magicked a new goal out of thin air.
Forget that 100,000 thing we didn’t quite manage - now we’re going for 200,000 a day by the end of the month.
Which is a bit like failing to pay back the tenner you borrowed, and asking if you could have another hundred grand until a week Thursday.
At this rate by August we’ll be arguing over whether having a bazillion tests done by lunchtime each day was a target or merely an aspiration.
The PM rounded off his series of increasingly farfetched claims by pledging the ‘A’ word - austerity - won’t be how he tries to patch up the economy after the pandemic, literally hours after it emerged the treasury was already planning to slash furlough payments.
Because, you know, we can’t have people feeding their children and paying rent.
Traditionally, the public have taken what Boris Johnson had to say with a pinch of salt.
But as the coronavirus crisis goes on, and Starmer keeps calmly asking him why it took him so long to do really obvious things that could have saved thousands of lives, the seasoning may not be enough to mask the bad taste.
By the end of the year, Johnson may look towards Professor Lockdown with a sense of envy.
At least he got some ‘daily exercise’ out of it.
