ALLEGRA Stratton, Boris Johnson’s extravagantly paid press secretary, sure has to walk the irony plank. Perched there the other day, she came up with a good one about her boss.

“In the months and years ahead, as he perhaps rearranges his top team, he will be mindful of making sure that that cabinet looks like the British public,” she said.

On those grounds he’d be turfing himself out of his own cabinet. One thing you can say for certain about Boris Johnson is that he has zero resemblance to the great British public.

On the same occasion, Stratton also floated the charming idea that Johnson is a ‘feminist’ – a claim that allowed columnists to pull out a few of his greatest hits, including: “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts.”

Perhaps he’d been quoting Germaine Greer or something.

Have you seen the new briefing room in which Stratton will strut her irony stuff? It is said to have cost £2.6m, a remarkable sum for a room that from the early photographs looks like the most expensive village hall in the land after an ill-advised, faintly fascistic makeover. I’d heard that Changing Rooms was coming back to TV but hadn’t realised the series had already started.

Who knew that so many union flags could be squeezed into one place? Like a fool I always thought that flag belonged to the country, but the Conservative Party appears to have bought the franchise when no one was paying attention.

How Johnson enjoys spending other people’s money on vanity projects. Two point six mill is an astonishing sum to splurge on one room so that Stratton can spin-wash the stains. Truly she is the biological washing powder of politics, guaranteed to remove all the mendacity skid-marks.

If you’re wondering how one room cost so much, that’s just how it is with Boris Johnson and money. Someone is always there to pick up the tab. His partner, Carrie Symonds, is reported to have blown £200,000 on decorating a flat in Downing Street – a pound or two over the usual £30,000 budget for prime ministers. A secret whip round among Tory donors is reported to have quietly sorted out that one.

Then there is the new Boris Bunker, a situation room for national emergencies that will come to a reported £9m. Clearly a bargain, as the only added cost will be a Winston Churchill fancy dress outfit in which Johnson can wander around pointing at things.

And while you are digging down the back of the national sofa, could Johnson please have £20m to investigate building a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland. Or how about the failed garden bridge project across the Thames, dating from his days as London Mayor? That span to nowhere cost you and me £43m, according a BBC report of February 19, 2019.

And did someone just mention £37bn on a test and trace system that seems to have been of little real benefit? Perhaps the blowing of such an incomprehensible sum explains why there is nothing much in the kitty to give nurses a decent pay rise.

Here, to close, is a trailer for another money-spraying venture. This is the No 10 documentary being heavily trailed on social media with the movie-like tagline: “Extraordinary. Unexpected. Fantastic.” A Beacon of Hope: The UK Vaccine Story.”

Does that sound like a white-washing exercise to remove all memory of all the earlier pandemic mistakes and one of the highest death tolls in the world, while washing away all talk of a public inquiry?

Over to you, Allegra.