If Boris Johnson doesn’t save Geronimo the alpaca then the man is finally losing his touch

What, frankly, is the point of a cynical, opportunist, conviction-less prime minister if not to spare the life of a condemned alpaca?

Today (Friday) is understood to be the last day of Geronimo’s life, at the Alpaca Power stud farm in Gloucestershire, barring a last minute intervention that could yet prevent him from being executed to prevent him spreading a disease he probably doesn’t have.

Geronimo’s owner, Helen Macdonald can be found on the front page of Today’s Sun, claiming that she will “take a bullet” for Geronimo, though it does not appear that Defra are considering that as an option.

Geronimo first tested positive for bovine tuberculosis four years ago. He has since tested positive again, though undermining the validity of those results is the unarguable fact that – at least at time of writing – Geronimo is not dead.

Macdonald has been to the high court to explain that alpacas with TB “die very quickly.” Government lawyers, meanwhile, have argued that TB in alpacas “can take years to manifest in physical symptoms” – a spokesperson has also said there are no plans to test him a final time.

In scenes somewhat more auto-ironic than Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, or the floating and sinking of medieval witches, it currently appears that the only way to establish whether Geronimo does or doesn’t have TB will be via postmortem, at which point it would, arguably, be too late.

To which we can only ask: what on earth is the prime minister up to? His spokesman This, don’t forget, is a man who looks like he really will spend £250m on a “royal yacht” that the royal family doesn’t actually want, just so that the Daily Telegraph might stop writing about it.

Despite having absolutely no interest in football whatsoever (which absolutely isn’t a crime and more politicians should have the courage to try it), he correctly saw which way the hurricane was blowing over the European Super League and played, at least in publicity terms, a vaguely decisive role in putting the kybosh on it.

We must also, at this point, consider what The Sun is up to. It is a well known rule of tabloid journalism that you don’t start a campaign without knowing you’re going to win it. You don’t start a fight to save an alpaca’s life if you know, or even suspect, you may later have to solemnly report news of its death – and by association, your failure.

Geronimo stands ready to join a hallowed roster of spared farm animals, but not yet. Can it really be eleven years since The Sun dashed out to a Russian Black Sea resort to save a parasailing donkey? Anapka, you may recall, was purchased for £1,500 and led away to a life of luxury at “an elite Kremlin stables” where she would live out the rest of her days eating carrots and receiving massages.

(It would, sadly, emerge shortly after, that the wrong donkey had been secured. Anapka’s owner, a Russian flying donkey entrepeneur called Vasily Gorobets, later claimed the real parasailer had been a different donkey called Manya. "I can’t believe they didn’t notice the trick," he told a Russian newspaper. "Manya’s with me and I’m guarding her closely. I wouldn’t give her away for anything".)

There was also the legendary tale of Blackie the Alhambra Donkey, also the victim of apparent mistreatment near where British tourists were on holiday in the summer of 1987. There was a race to repatriate her, which was won by The Sun, who tracked her down and paid the local farmer in question £250. But The Star arrived later and secretly outbid them. One version of this tale involved Blackie being stolen by a rival reporter from outside a Fleet Street pub, where he had been ceremoniously tethered. But this, like so many things, is understood never actually to have happened.

(The Sun’s editor at the time, Kelvin Mackenzie, was not best pleased, not least as he was in desperate need of boosting his animal loving credentials, given he was simultaneously in the midst of making a vast libel payment to Elton John, whom he had wrongly accused of having his guard dogs’ voice boxes surgically removed.)

That Boris Johnson would not leap at the opportunity to join the cast of such venerated incestuous journalistic story-telling seems remarkably far-fetched.

Not least as he finds himself with some emergency cleaning up to do. His latest hilarious joke, about how the UK’s clean energy revolution was begun by Margaret Thatcher, who had the foresight and wisdom to “close so many coal mines” has already been described as his worst ever gaffe.

Even  by his own standards, it is somewhat incredible. He is fully aware that he governs only with the temporary support of Labour’s former industrial heartlands. It is one thing to liken the EU to Nazis, or make grim jokes about dead bodies on Libyan beaches. It is quite another to openly laugh at the misery and suffering of very large numbers of British people on whose support you depend. Of course, it shows a man hopelessly out of touch, with no concept of real work, real hardship and actions having real consequences. But we know all that already.

And we also know, in such circumstances, and with his polling collapsing too, an alpaca can very easily be spared. If it isn’t then maybe, just maybe, the luckiest politician to ever live is finally running out of the stuff.