Boris should know that likeable, affable Boris is dead. After all, he killed him

Monday morning was meant to mark the rebirth of nicer, kinder, more liberal Boris Johnson. But the prime minister is in self-isolation after a meeting with a coronavirus-infected Tory MP who thinks unruly council tenants should be forced to take cold showers, work as vegetable pickers and live in tents.

(It is, of course, the same MP, Lee Anderson, honourable member for Ashfield, who also accidentally conspired to have a mate of his tell Michael Crick’s camera crew that said problem residents should also be made to wear a pink tutu and be whipped with a cat o’ nine tails, but that’s another quite incredible story.)

One could arguably see this as an omen – your big nice guy reboot derailed by a colleague that wants to bring back the chain gang. But the cause is futile anyway.

The weekend reports of a mad week in Downing Street paint a picture of a prime minister as unflattering as it is possible to be. Quite what happened, and who is to blame, will probably never be known even by those involved. But what is clear is that Boris Johnson wanted to make Lee Cain his chief of staff, and two days later, after discussions with other people in No 10, Lee Cain was not his chief of staff, but was instead effectively forced to resign.

It is a quite baffling state of affairs. Most, nay all, people who ascend to great offices of power do so because they are seduced by the power to be found therein. It is highly unconventional, if not unprecedented, that one such person should be found wandering the corridors of power seemingly unaware that the power to be found there emanates from them, and acting as little more than a sort of beleaguered, affable, put-upon man, trying and failing to keep everyone happy.

That Boris Johnson really would appear to see the role of prime minister as that of agreeing with whoever he last spoke to and then doing what he can to please them is extremely illuminating as to how we have ended up where we are.

And it’s just as illuminating, and as depressing, as to where we are inevitably off to next. In the end, it would seem, Boris Johnson came to see the case being put to him by his new spokesperson, Allegra Stratton, that he used to be the most popular politician in the country, and now he is divisive and, to a large extent, hated, and it was time to turn that around.

Already the return to “normality” is under way. Matt Hancock was on Good Morning Britain, being ritualistically humiliated as only Matt Hancock (and, in fairness Alok Sharma) can be, after a near-seven-month boycott of the programme.

But it is likely Boris Johnson will quickly learn that the route back to sort of general likeability is not merely treacherous but entirely blocked off.

It is not merely that Brexit did for him, it is what came after.

Stratton is certainly right to say that Boris was once immensely popular. It feels quite bizarre now to recall that, on a sunny September afternoon in 2012, I stood outside Buckingham Palace and watched both the public and actual, gold medal-winning Olympians chanting, “We love you Boris we do, we love you Boris we do.” That really happened.

Of course, four years later, there would be another crowd, on the morning of 24 June 2016, outside his front door this time, pounding on his car bonnet and chanting, “Scum! Scum! Scum!”

But even in that dawn, avenues were available that are now closed off. There were opportunities for consensus building that have not been squandered, exactly, as purposefully and strategically shut down. Theresa May chose to make rude speeches about the “bureaucrats in Brussels” and demonise the “citizens of nowhere”.

Back then, there were still a few hopes to cling on to. Johnson, for example, had said, in a clip widely shared, that he was “in favour of the single market”. Tory MPs who now speak of anything less than the hardest of all Brexits as a betrayal were, back then, making noises about EFTA and EEA and the Norway model and so on.

Those boats have all sailed.

As Brexit has descended further and further into Beckettian farce, so political punditland has, for some time now, become a prisoner of its own muscle memory. The number of “final deadlines” for “a deal” are now so many as to be almost uncountable. It means that, for far too long, it has always been possible for traumatised remainers to issue warnings, to say what must be done, and what the horrifying consequences might be if they are not.

It has gone on so long it is hard now to see that it is too late. That Brexit hasn’t always, in fact, been one of Zeno’s paradoxes, that it really is happening, in earnest, in just a few weeks.

Actual reality really is coming. There will be a time, very soon indeed, when Boris Johnson can no longer just say things like the UK will “prosper mightily” if it leaves the EU with no deal. Because it will be demonstrably shown to not be the case. The data they are currently too scared to publish, or even to read, will not be a forecast: it will be real.

Nicer, cuddlier Boris is long gone, filed in the bin with that second column. Boris the liar, Boris the phoney and Boris the unimaginably incapable is alive and well, and he will soon have to atone for his actions.