Who cares if Boris is incompetent – at least he’s ‘plain-speaking’, right?

Maybe this is a joyful way to hold the competition to be prime minister – by copying The X Factor and for the first few weeks showing all the hopeless idiots. Where the producers have slipped up, though, is in that the most hilariously embarrassing knobheads are being put through to the next round.

One contestant, who’s always been adamant there should be no forgiveness for anyone who ever took drugs, had to confess he spent a chunk of his youth enjoying drugs. He dismissed this as it was a while ago, which is fair enough as long as it was so long ago it came outside the time of “ever”.

To his credit, this behaviour represents an almost artistic level of hypocrisy, as if it turned out David Attenborough builds a house every day out of plastic and then pushes it into the sea.

So they all copied him, Andrea Leadsom with her dope and Rory Stewart with his opium, and by the weekend Jeremy Hunt will admit to running a Mexican drugs cartel, “where I learned how to run a successful business”, and Dominic Raab will own up to dealing in Afghan hash, “though I didn’t realise Afghanistan was abroad”.

But as ever Boris Johnson wins this round. In an interview with GQ he said: “I tried [cocaine] ... and I remember it vividly,” but in an interview in 2008 he said: “To say that I have taken cocaine is simply untrue.” This is why he’s right to boast that people like his “plain speaking”.

One thing he speaks might be completely the opposite of the next thing he speaks, meaning at least one is a total lie, but at least it’s plain. Defendants should try this in court, saying: “Yes I did do the robbery, but no I didn’t do the robbery,” and any fair-minded judge would let them off because at least they’d made their point plainly.

This must be why he’s in the lead, because instead of the normal politicians’ gibberish he gives plain answers. For example, he answered one question at his launch this week saying: “That would appear a minestrone of observation,” the sort of straight answer we’ve all been demanding.

So we’re used to his speeches that go “indeed as it were, in as much as one’s valedictory uh uh uh carpe diem so to speak, to wit, sine qua non, thrust, if one gets one’s drift, um um veni vidi vici”, because he connects with the common person by speaking in plain Latin.

One of his finest pieces of plain speaking was when he was arranging with a friend to have a journalist beaten up, going along with phrases such as “cracked rib”. Other politicians might have dodged the question, or fudged it by saying, “I propose an initial fracture”, but Boris was plainer than that because he’s a man of the people.

I heard one of his supporters say that if we worried too much about flaws when we choose a leader we’d never have had Churchill or Lloyd George.

Maybe what we need is to go back to the days when we had leaders who were talented but a bit power-mad. But this brave thinking goes even further, as with Boris Johnson we’d have to say: “He may be a psychopath, but on the other hand he’s a talentless idiot as well.”

Amber Rudd said he was “not the man you want driving you home at the end of the evening”, which must be why she tried to arrange a pact with him, because if someone can’t be trusted to take you home, it’s best to leave them in charge of something simple and unimportant, such as Britain during Brexit.

This seems to be the justification for many MPs who are supporting him, that while they don’t agree with him on very much, at least he’s a proven liar, thug and racist, so that’s three things he definitely stands for.

One cabinet member said whatever job he’s had, he’s proved incompetent and an embarrassment, and that everyone who’s worked with him says the same. But another senior Tory MP said “fear of Corbyn is leading Tories to back Johnson”. And that’s reasonable, because while it might not be ideal to put a lying, racist, incompetent embarrassment in charge of the country, at least he won’t nationalise the railways, so that’s the main thing.

And at least he’ll be a plain-speaking embarrassment. It’s the same with builders: you don’t want some competent bastard bamboozling you with terms like “making good” and “dovetail joint” – it’s much better to have a plain-speaking one that uses language we can all understand such as: “I’ve accidentally smashed your wall down.”

So he tells us he’ll take Britain out of the EU without a deal, just as it’s revealed we won’t even have enough medicine, and it does him no damage. Lie after lie can be found that would have finished anyone before now, but it makes no odds. Because as with Trump, the rules have changed. Now you can be filmed setting fire to puppies and it’s laughed off as “at least it’s plain-speaking animal cruelty”.

It’s as if a footballer suddenly rode onto the pitch in a steamroller and gunned down the goalkeeper with a Kalashnikov, but while the rest of us went “he can’t get away with that”, referees decided this would be allowed for a trial period.

But you can’t blame him. It’s like if the people who ran a playgroup were having problems controlling the kids, so they put a leopard in charge of them. It would be no good later complaining that all the kids had been eaten. Possibly it was the original decision that was a little on the reckless side.