For a man who keeps insisting he doesn’t want an election, Boris Johnson seems awfully like someone who wants an election.
He’s on your side, you see? He knows you don’t want to sit through another divisive campaign.
And he thinks you’re more likely to vote for him if you think he doesn’t want one either.
So taking the stage for his first PMQs - which might end up being his last at this rate - Johnson bellowed his poor-me performance to the back row.
He accused MPs of making him “surrender” to the EU, moaning their refusal to let him have his way without question was forcing his hand.
But as soon as that scruffy nuisance Jeremy Corbyn turned up and went off-script - refusing to vote for an election on his terms - Johnson’s star turn changed from political drama to am-dram farce.
“He’s frit,” Boris boomed, jabbing his finger at the Labour leader. “He’s frightened!”
Perhaps stricken with stage fright by an unusually confident Corbyn, Johnson made it plain that in reality he would relish an election.
If Johnson learned anything from his first PMQs, it’s that average undergraduate debating club wit and a sense of profound entitlement isn’t enough to bluff his way through being Prime Minister.
He’d been stopped in his tracks a day earlier by one of his MPs defecting to the Lib Dems mid-speech.
And he was knocked off-balance again by Sikh MP Tan Dhesi’s furious demands for an apology over his ‘divisive and racist’ comments likening women wearing face veils to ‘bank robbers’.
Johnson tragically misjudged his response, insisting his comments were only offensive if you ignore their context - a newspaper column halfheartedly opposing a ban on face coverings.
But Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson tore a strip off the PM, saying: “His words carry weight and he has to be more careful with what he says.”
And he does. If he keeps breaking character, the audience just won’t believe in him.
