Six, seven, eight... 21? The number of children Boris Johnson has fathered in and out of wedlock might not really matter if the cynical liar wasn’t forever playing fast and loose with the truth.
His 40 new hospitals are really six, while his 50,000 more nurses are only 31,000.
The £350million- a-week extra for the NHS myth clinched Brexit but was a fiction that came from a dishonest over-fertile imagination.
Third wife-to-be Carrie Symonds is a useful human shield, as No10 announced her pregnancy and looming nuptials to deflect from the floods, coronavirus and the Priti Patel bullying crises.
The discarded first two Mrs Johnsons know what she is marrying but it is the lazily incompetent Prime Minister’s public performance which causes the gravest concern.
Jeremy Corbyn’s “part-time Prime Minister” jibe has proved right, as Johnson could not be bothered to chair a Cobra session on the coronavirus until today.
Downing Street’s frantic insistence that the boss likes to delegate is a transparent excuse rather than a reasonable explanation.
When there’s credit, Johnson grabs it. Where there’s a problem, he vanishes. The Johnson joke is on the voters who the charlatan now takes for granted, including those in the blue brick Tory seats in Labour’s red wall.
But playing the fool isn’t funny when people’s lives and livelihoods are at stake. Imprisoned Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe might have spent last night at home with her husband and her daughter had Johnson thought before opening his mouth as Foreign Secretary.
David Cameron’s former aide Kate Fall recalls Johnson arriving in No10 with a nine-point plan to win a second term as London mayor but remembering only three of his points. Disorganised as he was, Johnson won the capital’s poll.
The PM’s damaging slothfulness in a truly demanding position must give Labour encouragement.
Lies will catch up with politicians eventually – including the biggest baby of them all.
