BEFORE considering Boris Johnson’s latest karaoke Churchill impression, here are two asides.

First up is Emily Maitlis on Newsnight saying: “The former home secretary Alan Johnson joins us down the line from hell.”

Often it has been the lot of Hull to suffer this unkind fate. One inappropriate vowel makes a hell of a difference. Maitlis apologised for suggesting Alan Johnson was beaming in from a demonic location, and swiftly moved on. She meant well, but the road to Hull is paved with good intentions.

I’d just switched channels as Maitlis misplaced Alan Johnson. He wore a smile and a shirt that looked like pyjamas; well, it was late.

This morning Dominic Raab was on the BBC Today programme and – oh, look, there’s no need to walk off like that. His manner does the same to me, all weird robotic arrogance and leaden persistence.

The foreign secretary was deadening the airwaves while defending the new Covid-19 measures as “balanced, targeted and proportionate” or something. It is hard to concentrate as he speaks with all the declamatory passion of a bollard.

But one phrase did catch my ear. “We’ve got the full panoply of tools,” Raab said. Was I alone in chuntering at the radio – “Yes, and they all sit in the cabinet.”

I didn’t watch Boris Johnson’s speech last night but read it instead. There is only so much Boris Johnson a person can take. Sometimes lately you wonder if there is only so much Boris Johnson that Boris Johnson can take.

The man looks permanently puzzled and frazzled, as if no one had told him this was where all that back-stabbing and conniving led.

According to a report in the Sunday Times, Johnson is struggling to live on £150,000 a year, can’t afford a nanny and hates the Downing Street flat (in fairness, it does sound dismal).

That’s the problem when you’ve had life plonked on a plate. Johnson was paid nearly twice his prime ministerial salary just to write the same column for the Daily Telegraph every week (much as I am paid nothing to repeat that outrageous fact at every opportunity).

In terms of political performance, it strikes me there are two nodding dogs contained within one shambolic man.

Nodding dog one displays outbursts of chuntering optimism in which anything and everything is promised (“It’ll be over by Christmas…”).

Nodding dog two is given to thin-skinned outbursts of Trumpian populism.

There was an example of the latter grubby tendency yesterday when Johnson was asked by Labour’s Ben Bradshaw why German and Italy had far lower rates of Covid-19 than Britain.

Johnson batted away all criticism of the flailing track-and-trace system with a wave of his fist and started banging on about our country being a freedom-loving country.

This sort of Trump-lite swerve is unworthy of a British prime minister, but typical of the one we’ve got.

The Daily Express, less a newspaper than a government press release, falls behind Johnson this morning, with the headline: “Our destiny is in our own hands.”

Yeah, right – in other words, anything bad that happens is our fault. Never mind the endless roll-out of contradictory advice: have a half-price pub dinner on us – leave the pub at 10pm or else; go back to work in the office or risk losing your job – work at home again if you can.

Will the new curbs being imposed for six months make a difference or simply squash the last vestiges of what used to be our life? Honestly, I have no idea, but wouldn’t it be better if instead of chucking mock-Churchillian rhetoric at the virus, Boris Johnson showed proper leadership and involved all sides in tackling Covid-19?

Then again, this is the man who hijacked Brexit as a means of leading his party and winning an election. Why be grown up about a crisis when telling porkies wins the prize?