Boris, truly one of the greatest slapstick artistes of our age

QUITE a few Tory MPs were guffawing at Boris Johnson’s expense again yesterday. Labour MP Peter Dowd (Bootle) had come up with a corker for the first question at PMQs. He wondered if Theresa May had made a mistake. When she pencilled in ‘F.O.’ against Boris’s name for her Cabinet, did she intend the letters to form ‘an instruction and not a job offer’?

This won a long peal of laughter from the House, not least from the ‘naughty corner’ of the Tory benches where big-voiced Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) was sitting. The expansively waistcoated Mr Shelbrooke, we may deduce, is not as keen on Boris as he is on sausage rolls and second helpings of jam roly-poly.

Sarah Wollaston (Con, Totnes) also found Mr Dowd’s joke greatly to her liking. Dr Wollaston is that amateur tandem cyclist who switched from Leave to Remain during the EU referendum campaign.

She can often come across as a little arid – as dry as an Esquimau’s armpit – so it was interesting to see her laugh so merrily.

The Dowd wisecrack really did tickle her, missus. The release of buckets of resentment?

Boris was not in the Chamber for the joke, alas. Recently it has been put around – presumably by Foreign Office spin doctors (Boris not having been allowed by No 10 to employ the long-serving press officer he wanted) – that the Foreign Secretary is NOT TO BE LAUGHED AT. Absurd.

HEis one of the great slapstick artistes of our age. You might as well ask people not to stare at Pamela Anderson’s shopfront. I bet Boris wouldn’t have minded the Dowd joke. On Wednesday night he was making a joke of his own – about Theresa May’s ‘lederhosen’.

And we all know how good Theresa is at swallowing jokes made at her own expense.

Mrs May had to respond to the Dowd question. The House was still bubbling with mirth. Mrs May is not a natural at repartee. Witticisms, to her, might as well be one of those African dialects where they click their tongues against the palate of the mouth.

But after a brief pause (created by a merciful intervention from Speaker Bercow) she came up with a serviceable answer, saying that Boris was ‘doing an absolutely excellent job; he is, in short, an FFS – a Fine Foreign Secretary’.

It is just as well that the acronym FFS does not stand for anything else. Isn’t it? Beside Mrs May sat the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd. She was dressed entirely in black. Last week saw the untimely death of Ms Rudd’s former husband AA Gill, the newspaperman.

For the past three months she has been carrying the sadness of his illness and now she grieves. She has done so with the greatest dignity.

Later in the session Jeremy Corbyn, becoming quite shouty, told Mrs May to ‘get a grip’ over social care. It is a measure of how PMQs has changed since the argy-bargy days of Cameron v Miliband that Mr Corbyn’s aggression jarred somewhat.

For the record, no one in the entire PMQs mentioned Mrs May’s leather trousers.

And she, when talking about the railway unions, chose not to personalise the argument by mocking that Tosh McDonald horror from Aslef – the chap with the tattoos and custardy Rick Wakeman hairdo. I am not sure David Cameron would have been able to resist the temptation.

The afternoon was spent watching Brexit Secretary David Davis pad away questions from the Brexit select committee.

The committee seems unlikely to extract many disclosures from the Government for at least several months. Its main function may be to become a lobbying opportunity for windbags.

But Mr Davis did let slip that it is only starting to dawn on senior Eurocrats that we really do intend to leave the EU.

One came up to him in late October, he said, and asked of the referendum result: ‘How do you intend to reverse this?’

Sounds like a High Court judge.