Boris Johnson has 'savaged' nothing beyond his own basic dignity, yet again

“Pip pip pip pip pip peep…” went the Today programme headlines at 6, 7 and 8 o’clock this morning. “Boris Johnson has savaged the Prime Minister’s Brexit strategy, describing it as a ‘fix’ and claiming that the UK will get ‘two thirds of diddly squat from the negotiations’.”

Without wanting to sound too much like Donald Trump, there is no surer sign of the descent of public affairs to fully dystopian hellscape when the people reading out the news are compelled by convention not to tell the truth.

Yes, it’s true that Johnson wrote a column for the The Daily Telegraph, which is a light rewording of his laughable “resignation statement” of two months ago, in which he is heavily critical of Theresa May’s Brexit proposals. But you only have to have spent about 10 seconds paying any attention to current affairs over the last two years to know that the real story, the one the BBC understandably cannot read out as the transparently obvious truth it clearly is, is that Johnson has still not given up on being prime minister, and has savaged nothing, other than his own basic dignity, yet again.

His column offers no solutions to the complexities of Brexit, because he does not have any. It offers only verbose analogies for the problems he made precisely zero contribution towards solving during his two-year public audition for the job of prime minister which he failed to pyrotechnically spectacular effect.

What might have changed a little however, is the steadfastness of May’s refusal to dance to the Johnson beat. Perhaps she is feeling a little emboldened by the unlikely triumph of her African dance manoeuvres, for which I, by the way, offer nothing but admiration. Let he who has also been compelled into entirely sober mid-afternoon dancing under the full double glare of the African sun and the international public spotlight throw the first shape.

The prime minister’s official spokesperson briefs Westminster journalists twice a day, in sessions that are traditionally an exercise in avoiding the questions that have been asked. On Monday morning, that could not have been more different. What is the prime minister’s response to Johnson’s comments? “Boris Johnson has left the government,” came the reply. “There are no new ideas in this article to respond to.”

And indeed there are not. As parliament returns for autumn, we enter Brexit’s decisive moments. The record has not changed, but the volume is louder, and when the music stops, as it soon will, nobody has a clue what happens next.

Johnson and his hard Brexit acolytes are mobilising to compel parliament to say no the Chequers agreement, but the EU has all but already said no to it. Michel Barnier said in an interview with a German newspaper on Sunday night that it risked compromising the integrity of the single market. Where Schengen and the Euro have been befit with problems, the single market doubles is the EU’s single unqualified success story. Monsieur Barnier, who hopes to succeed Jean-Claude Juncker as EU Commission president, will not put it at risk.

And as both Damian Green and Sajid Javid made clear on Monday morning, if parliament says no to Chequers, which it is unlikely to get the chance to in any event, Johnson and friends are yet to offer any kind of plan for an alternative.

These are the kinds of debate that should have been resolved at least two years ago. This eleventh hour chaos is squandering whatever vestigial bits of credibility the UK might still have left. How can the EU meaningfully negotiate with the UK when in plain sight on the UK side are those intent on bringing down whatever might be negotiated? When the negotiations themselves look like they could collapse the government, and what might await, in the form of Jeremy Corbyn, is such a wildly different prospect altogether?

It is a chaos Johnson is entirely content to orchestrate. It is now abundantly clear there is no possible victory in this battle that he would consider to be too pyrrhic. The Conservative party can be broken, Brexit can be broken, even the country, just so long as he is left standing at the end of it. May, clearly, has had enough. It is long past time for the rest of the Conservative party, in its entirety, to say so too.