Sunak couldn’t say it, so one of his backbenchers did: Boris is a busted flush

At Prime Minister’s Questions, Keir Starmer wanted to embarrass Rishi Sunak by saying he was responsible for approving Boris Johnson’s honours list. Sunak was indeed embarrassed, as he squirmed and said as blandly as he could that he had just “followed convention” in allowing his predecessor’s resignation list to go through.

Starmer couldn’t quite hit the popular mood, because he was too absorbed in signalling his own virtue. We can tell he really doesn’t like the former prime minister because he called him “Johnson” instead of “the former member for Uxbridge”. The Labour leader still needs “Johnson” as a stick to beat the government with. Sunak fended off the blows as best he could, by pointing out Labour had nominated people of whom he disapproved, such as Tom Watson and Shami Chakrabarti.

The prime minister obviously wanted to say that Johnson had nothing to do with him, and that he wanted him, in the words of Tory MP Tim Loughton, to “shut up and go away”. But he couldn’t, so he had a go at Ed Miliband instead.

So far, so tediously partisan. It wasn’t until towards the end of the session that Philip Davies, the right-wing Tory backbencher, finally spoke for the nation. He asked Sunak about “the former member for Uxbridge”, saying: “I’m sure the prime minister remembers him: he’s the one who said we should be more Conservative – if only he’d had a majority of 80 and been prime minister, he might have been able to do something about it.”

It was a cathartic moment, in which someone suddenly spoke the truth that both sides of the Commons knew, but which really needed a Tory to say out loud: that they have had enough of Johnson’s narcissism and self-pity.

Starmer has to pretend that Johnson is still a force to be reckoned with in the Conservative Party, and Sunak doesn’t want to provoke what is left of the Boris fan club by being rude about him – although he did tell Johnson’s supporters on Monday that it was “tough” if they didn’t like his refusal to appease their hero.

So it was left to a surprise voice from the Brexit heart of the backbenches to spell it out: Boris Johnson is a busted flush. This is the message that the country wants to hear: that Johnson’s boosterism has turned into vapourism; that the supposed vote-winning, life-enhancing qualities of “the former member for Uxbridge” have turned into a vote-losing, lifeblood-sucking neediness.

What was striking about the response on the Tory side of the Commons to Davies’s attack on Johnson, amid the “oohs”, is that so many Tory MPs seem to think that, if only they can wipe the electorate’s memories of Johnson, they can get back to vote-winning ways again.

The biggest cheer during PMQs came from Tory MPs when Theresa Villiers, an MP for an outer London seat, attacked the mayor of London’s Ulez scheme – the “ultra-low emission zone” that imposes a charge for driving older vehicles that is extremely unpopular among the driving classes who cannot afford Teslas.

That roar from the government benches in the Commons can be roughly translated thus: they think that they have a chance of holding on to Johnson’s west London seat in the by-election – as long as they can keep Johnson out of it and make it all about Sadiq Khan’s unpopular policy.

I doubt if they are right about that. The Tories’ unpopularity goes a lot deeper than the mere association with its former prime minister. It is a Tory fantasy that if they could tell Boris to get on one of his bikes and keep pedalling, all their problems would be solved.

But it is telling that it falls to Philip Davies, GB News host and MP for Shipley, to say what Rishi Sunak really thinks.