We’ll miss Boris. He gave us comedy without us having to dream it up

On the hottest day since the dinosaurs, the Commons was packed – and not just because it has air-con. This vote of confidence in the Government was Boris’s chance to set the record straight – to tell us what he believes and what he’s done.

But what we got wasn’t a swan song. More a dead duck. And the cruel quacking on both sides of the House reflected the politics of our time.

All the gang were there: Liz Truss in blue (funny: she told the ITV audience she wouldn’t put Boris in her Cabinet, but she’s happy to serve in his); Nadine Dorries in smashing pink crimplene; Jacob Rees-mogg in, well, you can guess. And Boris wore a green tie so long that it touched his knees, giving that impression of contrived chaos that sketch writers loved, and will miss, because it meant we didn’t have to dream up comedy, we just had to write what we saw.

Up he leapt. “This is the most dynamic government of modern times!” he declared, and rattled off the achievements, from Brexit to jabs.

But somewhere above the Earth, quite appositely for he announced that Britain would be launching a satellite soon (apologies to whatever Amazonian tribe that hunk of metal and Sellotape falls on), the engine sputtered and died.

Not because there’s nothing to say or he doesn’t have the wit to say it but (this is characteristic), he just seemed to lose interest.

Boris began cannibalising from a speech he’d given earlier that day about flying a Typhoon jet. “I looked down,” he said, “on that ghostly forest of windmills in the sea” – a triumph of British engineering, powering our economy.

But the average Tory hates windmills, and Cop26 and HS2 and all the other boondoggles he mentioned – and shouldn’t we expect a little philosophy from the British Cicero?

Boris merely observed that a plane should fly on two engines – public services and the market – whereas Labour would fly on one.

He confessed that he is probably more popular now in Kyiv than Kensington, and maybe this speech is why. It had no clear constituency.

Then he was rescued by Labour. As the Tories always are.

This was Sir Keir Starmer’s chance to claim a scalp, yes – but with grace and humour. He displayed none. There was one flash of brilliance. Jonathan Gullis, the hooligan Tory loyalist whose resignation from Boris’s government was doubly surprising given that none of us realised he was in it, was back to shouting the odds at the opposition: Sir Keir suggested he reread his own resignation letter.

But Nadine’s chant of “Boring! Boring!” at the Labour leader, though crude, was critically exact, for all he gave us was a litany of accusations peppered with nasty insults. Jeremy Corbyn, now an independent MP, delivered a much better speech about food banks but Labour refused to cheer it because, well, you can guess.

Now, that was a Labour leader who didn’t like Typhoons at all, a socialist who would have taken us back to the economic equivalent of Icarus or the Hindenburg. Labour, as well as the Tories, ought to be grateful to Boris for rescuing us from him.