The day Boris Johnson was left badly dented by a shopping trolley

Trolley.” Everyone called him “Trolley.” His most senior adviser, Dominic Cummings. The cabinet secretary, Simon Case. The head of communications at No 10, Lee Cain. Virtually the entire staff and occupants of Downing Street and the Cabinet Office – with the possible exception of Carrie Johnson – reduced the prime minister of the United Kingdom to a directionless, lightweight, rickety shopping trolley.

In digital communications, he was reduced to an emoji of a shopping trolley. In the now famous WhatsApp messages, the trolley emoji appeared as a sentence in its own right, a self-explanatory reason for the “dumpster fire”, as Cummings described the official response to Covid.

Cain put it more elegantly, in a phrase that deserves to find its place in the dictionaries of quotations: “It was the wrong crisis for this prime minister’s skill set, which is different I think from not potentially being up for the job of prime minister.” “Potentially,” you’ll note.

It is striking that all those giving evidence to the Hallett inquiry hold such a unanimous opinion about Johnson’s many personality flaws – these were his colleagues, and some counted themselves as close to him, if not as his friends.

What does it say about Johnson that those who worked most closely with him should talk of him so dismissively? Indeed, virtually everyone who has had even the most passing of dealings with him has come away with the distinct impression that the only thing he’s actually good at is being a charlatan.

On that measure, Britain was gifted a world-class player when Johnson manoeuvred himself into the premiership five years ago – but not in any other sense. According to the evidence supplied to the Covid inquiry, Johnson’s cabinet secretary, Case, a man hand-picked to do his bidding, despaired that Britain’s response to coronavirus in 2020 was a “terrible, tragic joke” because Johnson “cannot lead and we cannot support him under these circumstances. The team captain cannot change the call on the big plays every day... IT HAS TO STOP.”

Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser who was able to observe Johnson from the perspective of a rational, disinterested player, noted in his Covid diaries that the prime minister was “being weak and indecisive”, and in one entry claimed that Johnson’s “ridiculous flip-flopping” was getting worse. If a trolley can be said to flip-flop, or “oscillate”, as Cain describes it, then the picture is complete.

The current condition of Johnson’s reputation reminds one of nothing so much as one of those neglected statues of forgotten statespeople covered in guano. It has been a remarkable decline.

For most of the second half of the 2010s, Johnson dominated British politics. He won the EU referendum, and, in due course, delivered a famous victory to the Tories in the 2019 general election – their best result since the Thatcher era. Both of those wins were achieved on a false prospectus, as we know now, and to our great cost. But at the time, Johnson genuinely seemed a colossus, an election-winning machine so formidable that his well-known personal drawbacks could be forgiven. No longer.

Now Brexit is discredited and his performance during the Covid crisis is exposed as baleful. We knew about Partygate; we did not, until now, fully appreciate the extent of his wider incompetence. His botched Brexit deal cost the economy dear; his failures over Covid probably cost lives. Plus, he virtually broke the constitution when he wrongly advised the Queen to prorogue parliament.

As the old saying goes, there is nothing quite so “ex” as an ex-prime minister, and we are now witnessing the destruction of the former prime minister. It’s not shocking, exactly – most premiers endure a period of obloquy before a timely rehabilitation – but the scale and speed of the collapse in Johnson’s standing is surely unprecedented.

The blame is entirely his own, and his fall from grace is not yet complete. The trolley himself is due to appear before Baroness Hallett and her team of KCs, and, if his performance at the Commons privileges committee is anything to go by, he’ll probably do himself no favours.

Indeed, there is every chance that he’ll go full Trump and accuse the Covid inquiry of being another kangaroo court; the tool of a luxury elite plot to undermine Brexit. Or something like that. It will be a severe test of the noble and learned lady’s patience.

Shocked? Of course. The country deserved far better. Surprised? Surely not. We have known for many years about Johnson, though he had a knack for charming his way out of trouble. But the effects of his charm have been replaced by the realisation that he conned his party, and the whole nation.

He’s been found out, big time, and – just as a long line of past teachers, editors, bosses, wives, girlfriends, political colleagues, advisers and civil servants have discovered – we can now see what a nasty, mendacious, deceitful piece of work he is. He dreams of a comeback, but only more guano awaits him.