Boris Johnson's got a way with words (dewlap for instance) but what a terrible Prime Minister – Aidan Smith

They’re in this column, obviously, but before that they were in the first column of the rest of Johnson’s life. Well, it probably won’t extend to that, given his reputation as a bolter – from his wives and lovers, from the truth and from the office of Prime Minister – but for the foreseeable, the weekly dispatch shall be where we’ll most likely find him, the most regular and accessible spot.

He began with boggle, dewlap and spider senses and I’m sorry, but they made me smile. Just about the entire piece did, for lines like: “If an otherwise healthy middle-aged man displays sudden weight loss, I reasoned, there are only two possible explanations. Either he has fallen hopelessly in love, or else he is about to mount a Tory leadership bid.”

I know, I know, it’s far too soon to be rehabilitating him and I’m not doing that or claiming it should ever happen. His premiership was awful, and the new footage of those illegal Conservative HQ frolics – the Christmas jumper, the David Brent dance moves, the whole lockdown’s-for-serfs attitude – rams that home. All I’m really saying is, the man can write. Why didn’t he stick to that?

Johnson is not about to mount a leadership bid. The most informed and optimistic speculation suggests that if he’s really determined to be happily reunited with his gold wallpaper – provided Rishi Sunak doesn’t replace it, which given the cost was £840 a roll would, as they say, send the wrong message – his best opportunity looks like being to hang around until sometime in 2026. By then, a stand-in leader might have made such a dismal attempt at opposition, prompting the Tory Bat-Signal to be flashed across the skies over Westminster…

What’s he going to do until then? Railing against that 90-day Commons ban now no longer required, Johnson crony James Duddridge sarcastically asked, “why not go the full way?” and slam him in the stocks, hand round rotten food, and tour the land with this ritual humiliation. Well, it could pack the beaches all summer long just like the Radio 1 Roadshow, back when we trusted DJs.

Traditionally, a Tory MP required to resign because of some scandal or other is next glimpsed at home in the country, sturdy brogue on the bottom rung of a five-bar gate, sturdy wife by his side, obedient dog staying loyal too. And all he will say is that he’s looking forward to “spending more time with my family”.

At least Johnson has swerved that cliche. He’s going to be saying a whole lot more, as you’d expect. A memoir is due next year (expect better gags than David Cameron’s and better classical references than Tony Blair’s, though these are extremely low bars). He might get around to finishing the biography of Shakespeare for which, eight years ago now, he signed a £500,000 deal. Public speaking earns him £250,000 a pop. And now there’s the Daily Mail column.

Surely everyone must have been expecting the first blast of the Boris blunderbuss to be heavily political. Surely Sunak, on an immigration raid photo-op just prior to publication, must have asked the police if he could take the loaned stab-vest home with him, fearing the worst. But no, Johnson chose to open with his struggles with his weight, how he’s experimented with an appetite-nixing wonder drug, but this had failed to stop the late-night raids on the fridge for cheese and chorizo.

What a bounder, what a card. Johnson’s enemies, after finding no references to themselves in the text, probably began scrabbling around the sub-text. Was he taunting them? Mention of a fridge – maybe this was a jokey reference to the time he dived into one on live TV to escape a tenacious reporter. And perhaps the stuff about “40 years of moral failure, 40 years of weakness in the face of temptation” was him teasing his critics with the promise of far bigger fess-ups than vulnerability to Camembert and that fiercely orange sausage of Iberian origin.

Mention of sausages, incidentally, is a reminder how, as a journalist with an EU-bashing brief, Johnson used to blart about how Britain’s bangers were under threat from over-regulation along with our prawn cocktail-flavoured crisps, while continent-wide conformity would affect everything from coffins to condoms. A terrible Prime Minister but a humorous writer. It is just about possible, I think, although not forgetting the trouble he caused, to acknowledge both these things.

For the column, he’s being paid another six-figure sum. Nice work if you can get it. Word is the bulletins will stay light for the time being, so kind of “Boris at Large”. But it cannot be “Boris at Larger” every week or “Boris at Larder”. He’s not been hired to blether about fat-busting and will have to get into the meat of politics eventually.

As PM, he made life easy for parliamentary sketch-writers but tough for columnists frantically searching for a topic other than the crazy circus of his life. As with Harry and Meghan and recently Holly and Phil, there were simply too many news days when it was Boris, Boris, Boris on pages 1 to 14. So if the biggest of the big dogs runs out of themes, hell mend him.