“It was one of his family’s birthdays that day and blah blah fishcakes.” We were listening, of course, to a Boris Johnson interview. He was talking, I think, about Dominic Cummings and the Barnard Castle Eye Test. Though he could also have been talking about Emmanuel Macron and the hydrogen-powered Concorde, or Joe Biden and the unwanted bottle of wine. After a while, the stories all merge. 

The former prime minister is currently unavoidable as he promotes his book. “A lot of people have said it’s shatteringly revelatory,” he explained, in a comment that wasn’t even in the day’s top ten unlikeliest claims. Tuesday would give us the chance to see two different approaches to the challenge of interviewing the Blond Blustermachine.

Technique One was the approach of LBC’s Nick Ferrari, who treated the interview like a chat between chums. After asking Johnson whether he would like to slag off Sue Gray, he followed up by asking him if he’d like to slag off Keir Starmer. Astonishingly, the answer to both these questions was yes. 

Technique Two was offered by the BBC’s Matt Chorley, who had done his prep and set about trying to nail the former prime minister down on some of the book’s claims. It was a heroic job, and a largely successful one, but also very hard work. 

Interviewing Johnson is like trying to get through an automated telephone menu that only has three answers programmed in. Press One for “semi-Marxist Labour party”, Press Two for “paralysis over Brexit” and Press Three for “fastest vaccine rollout in Europe”. Or stop speaking for a microsecond to hear these options again and again and again.

A new line for the promo tour is “Brexit saved lives”. Although he often pretends to be one, Johnson is no fool, and knows that he’s tied to a project that is now widely viewed as a failure. His first answer to this is, of course, that True Brexit hasn’t been tried. His second is that Brexit allowed the UK to procure vaccines faster during the pandemic. We have Chorley to thank for painstakingly demolishing this. Johnson talked over him, changed tack, attacked the question, and finally conceded he could have issued the vaccine under European Union rules. “But I don’t believe for a second we would have done.” 

In both interviews, bluster rolled on like a river, excuses like a never-failing stream. It was the Tory whips’ fault, it was Waheed Alli’s fault, it was Sue Gray’s fault. He’d got the right people in, but they’d done the wrong things. He’d needed better advisers. He’d simply had no clue that he was like this.

The weakness of the Ferrari approach, presumably intended to put Johnson at his ease and get him to open up, is that it required him to let an awful lot of things go past unquestioned. 

It was Gray who had held the “the so-called parties in Number 10”! Gray who had bought the karaoke machine! Not that there had been any parties anyway. The whole idea that civil servants had been partying was ridiculous. At this point even Ferrari felt moved to point out that there had been quite a few photographs, but Johnson is a master of the deflection, the innuendo, the sly subject change. 

“I had no donors paying for my clothes,” Johnson said. Although he did have donors paying for his meals in Downing Street and his wedding, and he’d sought donations to pay for his flat renovations. But this had been, he told Ferrari, because it looked like “a crack den” after he’d ripped the carpets out because his untrained dog had soiled them. It was the dog’s fault!

It was the fault of the “liberal media establishment”. Only Johnson, promoting a book for which he is being paid millions, with a dull column for which he is paid hundreds of thousands, after a career in which he has been attended at every turn by fawning praise and journalists tying themselves in knots to excuse his latest act, could complain that the media is against him. Readers will have to take my word for it that there is no-one else, in politics, journalism or publishing who gets this kind of money and this kind of support.

As the interview with Chorley went on, it was clear he’d got under his guest’s skin. Johnson became snippy. Everyone was out to get him. They said horrid things about his advisers. They said his bus had lies on the side! Chorley pointed out that he’d admitted this in the book. Johnson said he hadn’t. Chorley said he’d read the book, and he had. One of them was telling the truth. See if you can guess which.

“Nobody has ever accused Remain of being big fat pants-on-fire liars!” Johnson stormed, inadvertently revealing that he doesn’t read the newspapers that employ him. 

Anyway, he was bored of talking about Brexit. He’d never wanted to implement Brexit, he’d expected David Cameron to do it, but he’d resigned. “We then had a devil of a job, because we suddenly owned it.” It was the public’s fault for voting for it! They should never have believed the things Johnson told them. Which is fair. He’d never hidden who he was.

Anyway, he’s sick of all that. Brexit had “fried” people’s brains. “We all need to get over it and move on.” Good advice, though it’s hard to see how it fits with buying his book.