Boris Johnson is scapegoating the EU to cover up his own failings

In accord with the law of probability, the most glib and remorseless liars known even to politics will speak the truth once in a while.

Jonathan Aitken uttered the word “guilty” from an Old Bailey dock, and Donald Trump told a MAGA rally “I love the poorly educated”.

Until this morning, it seemed possible that Boris Johnson might be the exception to prove the rule. After the uninterrupted brazen mendacity stretching back years, the reflex on hearing him say it is a gloriously sunny afternoon is to slake out a hand for the nearest umbrella.

And then, in his letter to Donald Tusk, he inexplicably erred. Actually, there may be an explanation. Even the most reliably metronomic performers in any discipline are vulnerable to intense pressure. Think of Steve Davis missing that easy pot to gift Dennis Taylor the “black ball” in the world snooker final of 1985.

Johnson’s miscue took the form of one brief sentence. “Time is very short,” he wrote to the European Council president – and for the first time in memory his honesty was beyond doubt.

It isn’t so very short that he will recall the Commons early to ponder this charming little crisis of ours. But it’s pretty bloody short all the same.

The end of any long undefeated run brings mixed emotions. As when Mike Tyson was knocked out in Tokyo by Buster Douglas, if we must double down on lazy sports analogising, exhilaration comes with poignancy at seeing a champion you thought unbeatable rendered mortal.

For what little reassurance it gives all you Johnson superfans out there, the rest of the letter found him on cracking form with the deceits and distortions.

Its target audience patently wasn’t Tusk. Nor was it Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, whom in an aviation fuel-wasting exercise (Sir Elton will presumably be planting trees to offset the carbon footprint) he will meet in their homelands over the next couple of days.

It was written with no one in mind other than the editors of The Telegraph, Sun and Express. Its purpose was to lay the ground for their scapegoating of the EU if and when we suffer the horrors outlined by Yellowhammer, or worse, after Halloween.

Space being short, a couple of untruths about the Irish border must suffice.

The first is the old favourite he revived like the controller of Dave (the TV channel, not the last Bullingdon Boy occupant of No 10) giving Are You Being Served? yet another run out.

His demand that the backstop be scrapped in favour of “alternative arrangements” implicitly refers to using technology that doesn’t exist, and has no prospect of existing, to avoid a hard border.

Exactly when that gag had its debut I don’t remember. But the request feels as archaic as Mrs Slocombe asking Captain Peacock if she can leave early to attend to her pussy, and has the identical chance (none) of being granted.

If Johnson and Dominic Cummings smiled slyly when they composed that, they must have gone the full Marti Pellow over their claim that the backstop would jeopardise the Good Friday Agreement.

What will threaten the peace, and quite possibly propel Northern Ireland out of the existing union and into a revived one with the Republic, is the hard border which Yellowhammer foresees as inevitable after no deal.

The latter also promises to burst the fantasy bubble of an instant trade deal with the US. According to its speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House of Representatives, the consent of which is required, will opt for a no deal of its own if the peace has been endangered.

If Johnson imagines he can win his game of chicken with the EU, he may have barely more chance – whatever President Donald J Gump says to the contrary – of winning any game of chlorinated chicken with America.

But of course Johnson imagines no such thing. He knows there is an approximately 0.00 per cent chance of the EU demolishing as essential a building block to free trade as the single market by scrapping the backstop.

This letter is blatantly an enticement to European leaders to join in a chorus of “Sod off, you mad bastards, and leave us to soak up the pain” – a less soul-lifting anthem than Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy”, perhaps, but rousing enough in its own earthy way. And so let the scapegoating commence.

As for the double whopper with extra cheese, this comes either side of a hyphen when Johnson refers to the backstop as “anti-democratic”.

In another context, you might relish the mischievousness of someone elected by 0.01 of the population to lead a minority government – someone willing to impose no deal on a country where it’s supported by barely a quarter of the public, by circumventing the will of a parliament more strongly opposed to it than the public... well, you could admire the chutzpah of such a man projecting the adjective “anti-democratic” all the way across the Channel and North Sea.

In this context, having such a man as prime minister at such a moment makes weeping with collective shame less a temptation than a moral imperative.

If Merkel and Macron adhered rigidly to the teachings of Margaret Thatcher, they’d cancel their meetings on the grounds that they do not negotiate with terrorists. And if not for that reason, because they are too busy to waste ten minutes on enabling him to swing his handbag (a cheap Hong Kong copy from the Tinky Winky autumn collection, rather than the real Thatcher deal) to throw meat, chlorinated or otherwise, to the piranhas of the reactionary press.

Time is indeed very short. Whether it’s short enough for him to pull off his coup against democracy, or long enough for the forces of sanity to coalesce effectively against him, who the hell dares to predict? In a world where Boris Johnson manages to sustain the truth for as long as five syllables, absolutely nothing – other than the EU scrapping the backstop – can safely be ruled out.