If Boris Johnson’s new year’s resolution was to appear to have a basic grasp of reality, he somehow managed to fail in just five days.
His answers at the first PMQs of 2022 swung between wildly inaccurate and manifestly untrue.
So extended and flappy were his ramblings that at one point Labour super-sub Angela Rayner paused to enquire about his well-being.
And the Speaker had to stop him walking out of the chamber because he’d apparently forgotten he was due to give a statement to MPs about Covid straight afterwards.
Rayner, meanwhile, stood tall across the despatch box in place of Keir Starmer, who has been benched by another unfortunate Covid test.
In contrast to Johnson’s bottom half of a duck impression, Rayner appeared as cool and calm as Fonzie getting a foot-rub in a fridge.
She, and a string of MPs from all sides of the house, urged him to do literally anything to prevent rising energy prices, inflation and his tax hikes combining into a cost of living nightmare within months.
Johnson denied saying fears over inflation were “unfounded” - which he definitely did. He claimed his government had built new nuclear power plants, which they haven’t (yet).
He claimed Labour wanted both a Christmas lockdown and for Britain to rejoin EU, neither of which are true.
And he got his own ‘warm homes discount’ wrong by a factor of 52.
But 2022 so far has’t been a complete disaster for Johnson.
He’s somehow convinced his backbenchers not to immediately make him redundant.
For the first time I can remember, he managed to get all of his MPs - even the most maskophobic members - to cover their mouths for half an hour.
And, you know, he got a haircut.
But all it took was one question from Rayner, deployed at the end of one of his particularly lengthy and baffling rants, to send him reeling.
“Are you OK?”
Somewhere on a pinboard in 10 Downing Street there's surely a hand-scrawled and regularly updated list of questions the Prime Minister should never be asked.
Questions like "how much is a pint of milk?", "which one's Ant and which one's Dec?" and "how many children do you have?."
And with polls suggesting the public has lost faith in Johnson - Rayner’s three-word suckerpunch must be pretty high on that list.
