“Boris Johnson asked me to do something that I wasn’t prepared to do because I didn’t think it was right.” Rishi Sunak was explaining why he’d decided to block his predecessor’s appalling resignation honours list, which proposed gongs that were at best undeserved and at worst an actual insult to the nation. The prime minister, seeing that, had known his duty. “I didn’t think it was right. And if people don’t like that, then tough.”

To explain their position, they were going to need someone utterly without shame

Except, hang on, that wasn’t what he was saying. He’d waved the vast bulk of Johnson’s list through. Is “Party Marty” Reynolds, Downing Street piss-up convenor, getting a medal from the King? Yes he is! Jack Doyle and Rosie Bate-Williams, press spokespeople who repeatedly and falsely denied that there had been any lockdown parties? That’s Jack and Rosie “CBE” to you! Shaun Bailey, pictured at a Christmas lockdown party? He’s going to the House of Lords, where he will be able to draw an allowance and vote on laws for the rest of his life! And if people don’t like that, then tough.

Indeed, Downing Street spent much of the weekend insisting that all the things that had so upset Johnson — there’s a lot of them, but it boils down to actions having consequences — had nothing to do with Sunak.

So what was all this talk on Monday morning about standing up to Johnson and doing the right thing? It turned on the question of the small number of peerages that were refused. Not refused by Sunak, no, he was clear about that. Refused by the Lords vetting group. Sunak was asking us to applaud him for letting someone else stand up to Johnson.

The prime minister seemed thoroughly irritated that his exciting event about artificial intelligence was being overshadowed by the Great Boris Blow-Up, but it bears repeating that Sunak gave an important endorsement to Johnson in the 2019 leadership contest. As he complains now that Johnson continues to be exactly the person he always obviously was, there is a sense here too of actions having entirely predictable consequences.

Still, the government had decided it was time to get out on the offensive. To explain their position, they were going to need someone utterly without shame, a man to whom the more demeaning a job was, the better. They had sent for Michael Gove, a man who endorsed Johnson before denouncing him before endorsing him before denouncing him. If we could only attach a turbine to Gove’s view of Boris, we could power Cumbernauld.

Why had Sunak endorsed the Johnson list of wrong ’uns, the BBC asked? “It is a process that we all are familiar with as part of our constitution,” Gove oozed, as if giving medals to press officers was one of the clauses in Magna Carta. It would have been simply unthinkable for Sunak to intervene. This is codswallop, of course. Sunak and Gove were part of a Cabinet that the Supreme Court decided misled the Queen into proroguing Parliament. They can live with seeing the constitution flexed a little when it suits them.

Johnson banked the gongs and then threw his toys out of the pram anyway

Speaking of confusing Her Late Majesty the Queen it was pleasing to see “Sir” Jacob Rees-Mogg in the Johnson List of Shame. Johnson’s one great service to the nation has been the utter humiliation of whole classes of people. There are Conservative MPs, obviously, busily telling anyone who’ll listen that the actions of their party and their government are nothing to do with them. There are the commentators who assured us that once in office, Johnson’s entire character would change, and those who insisted, long after it was clear that this hadn’t happened, that the rest of us were just too small-minded to grasp his political genius. And there is Rees-Mogg, who spent years banging on about his deep attachment to parliament, propriety and honour, only to reveal that his conscience was in fact at the service of Mr Johnson, true and parfait Christian gentleman. It won’t profit a man to lose his soul in return for the whole world, and Rees-Mogg gave his away for a knighthood.

“All the people on the list are people who contributed to public service in different ways,” Gove went on. “Dame” Shelley Williams-Walker, for instance, was the disk jockey at the Number 10 party the night before Prince Philip’s funeral. Meanwhile it’s not exactly clear why Johnson’s hairdresser deserves a medal. What would he have looked like if she’d been doing a bad job?

On Gove wriggled, contorting himself with such ease that you could have used him to unblock a u-bend. It would have been quite wrong to judge Johnson before the Privileges Committee had reported on whether he lied to Parliament, and also quite wrong to hold off approving his honours list until the report was out. The Johnson list, Gove claimed, recognised “the multitude of heroes and heroines within our NHS”. It’s not clear who with was referring to. Perhaps “Sir” Michael Fabricant has a side-hustle as a brain surgeon.

The other possibility, of course, is that Sunak knew this list stank, but decided to agree to it in the hope of buying Johnson off. This has not, politely, been a complete success. Johnson banked the gongs and then threw his toys out of the pram anyway. If only there had been some clue that he was like this.