Even if coronavirus has forced the government into a jaw-dropping move – rely on Boris Johnson to play the fool

The most certain affirmation of what Rishi Sunak had just done came in the form of the ashen terror on the face of the man standing next to him.

For Boris Johnson, it has always been a game, and the accumulated, jocular evidence of the last days are that these terrible moments of other people’s lives and deaths as the coronavirus outbreak spreads are no different.

It wasn’t that the country’s brand new chancellor, a man unknown to 99 per cent of the nation all of two weeks ago, had just made the most staggering policy announcement since the Second World War – that the government will pay people’s wages directly.

It was the way in which he had done it. That he, a smooth-talking, smooth-combed Goldman Sachs banker, had found the words and the tone and the downright leadership that have been so infinitely far beyond Johnson’s reach for every single unforgiving minute since these dismal events roared up.

Johnson had already spectacularly failed by this point, though his biggest failure, which we shall come on to shortly, was yet to come.

It was truly the measure of the man that it was here that he appeared to betray his first flash of real human emotion, the first flash of his own towering inadequacy.

It may well be that it hasn’t escaped him for some time that he is not the man for the moment, but none of that mattered until now. The problem is that, as of now, somebody else is.

There were so many well chosen words to choose from it is hard to choose just a few, but these will have to do:

“Now more than at any time in our history, we will be judged by our capacity for compassion,” Mr Sunak said, in quiet but certain voice. “When this is over, and it will be over, we want to look back on this moment and remember the many small acts of kindness, done by us and to us”.

Do the words of some politician, standing behind some lectern, in some small room ever really matter? Such things are impossible to judge. But leaders set the tone. Their words are the music beneath the pictures of our lives.

These words were needed a long time ago, when the supermarkets were being swarmed upon, the pubs and bars fell upon, by people who’d been vaguely asked not to, but never offered any great incentive, never had their better natures spoken to.

How seriously were they meant to take any of it, when the prime minister is said to be making jokes about “Operation Last Gasp”, and his 79 year old dad’s on the telly announcing with cataclysmically dim pride that “of course I’ll go to the pub”.

The jaw-dropping economics of the moment is a matter for somebody else. That every bar, pub, restaurant and theatre in the land has been shut down is stunning enough. That the public purse will now pay the wages of anybody whose company has no work for them to do, but doesn’t want to make redundant, well, it’s off the scale.

Later, Johnson would be asked whether he would be seeing his mother this Mother’s Day. All around the country, millions of people are facing up to the awful sadness of telling mum that she might have to spend this mother’s day alone, or at least away from her children and grandchildren.

Millions of people, that is, determined to do the difficult but right thing, because, well lives are at stake. What would Johnson be doing?

“’ll be working very hard. I’ll certainly be sending her my best. And I hope I’ll get to see her.”

It was a moment of mind-melting irresponsibility, and of stratospheric uselessness. It has been more than a week of the government making badly communicated, ham-fisted attempts to tell people to keep away from elderly relatives, and the simple message at the end of it, from the actual prime minister. I’ll be going to see my mum if I can, and if the prime minister can, then why shouldn’t you?

A slip of the tongue, perhaps, but a slip of the mask as well. A reminder that at this moment of extraordinary personal sacrifice, the man asking you to make the sacrifices has built a life and ruined others by never doing a scintilla less than whatever he likes.

Of course, that Johnson, via Sunak, has done the brave and the right thing is the vastly larger picture. The microscopic power games, and the choice of words at one short press conference, don’t matter much.

But they matter a bit, and they reveal one fundamental truth. It will be so much harder for us all to be in it together, on the watch of a man who’s never been in anything for anyone but himself.