Sorry about the varieties of text in the following paragraphs but with my limited technological knowledge, I don’t know how to adjust them. The larger letters are not meant to be in any way significant.

So much for Bunter Johnson’s claims that this is a land of liberty. Since half way through June, people have been visiting the shops that are open without masks and the Coronabug figures continue to improve.

Yet, the Government has now decreed that we must all wear masks in shops. Science is divided over the effectiveness of masks and the effects of the disease are lessening daily, but Bunter seems to be changing his mind as often as he – presumably – changes his socks. I wonder if he feels that he has to be seen to be doing something, even if it makes no sense at all.

Whenever he is interviewed or filmed now, he has a mask on, but why damnit? He has had the bug and had it badly so he must surely be immune and he hasn’t bothered to wear one until recently.

Consistency and logic have been sadly missing in this government’s approach to the pandemic and most of us are horribly confused. For instance, I met up with a friend in the local pub yesterday and we sat maskless, but when the new regulation comes in, I will need to don a mask to visit the post office directly across the road.

I do not like wearing a mask but have religiously done so for weeks now when visiting supermarkets. Somehow it seemed like common sense but now I am to be forced to wear one whether I like it or not and if I don’t cover my face up, I can be fined. A land of liberty did the man say?

I am not the only person I know who does not enjoy wearing a mask and I fear that most ‘mask-haters’ will now avoid shops in general and won’t be spending money at all. Yet spending money is what our Revered Leader and his Chancellor keep urging us to do.

After my visit to the Prince of Wales – the pub not the man – yesterday, I settled down to watch Prime Minister’s Questions on the iplayer. I am sorry but it is becoming ever more like a strange version of Tom and Jerry. No, that probably isn’t fair to the little mouse and old Tom! At least they are funny.

In his first few outings against Keir Starmer, Bunter was completely out of his depth and he has remained so I’m afraid. Unable to cope with the detail in Starmer’s questions, he lashes out and blusters, either accusing the Labour leader of doing something thatn he obviously has not, answering a different question to the one he has been asked or generally playing to his non existent gallery of Tory back benchers.

But I am afraid it is not working. Every week, Bunter shows what he is really made of. He is a thin-skinned unprepared opportunist who not only wants to be supremely popular but cannot tolerate scrutiny or criticism. It is like dealing with a spoiled toddler. If you are not one hundred percent behind him and telling him what a clever fellow he is, then you are an enemy out to get him. In terms of emotional development, I am afraid that our elected leader is barely out of nappies.

How else can you explain his performance yesterday as other than a full-on narcissistic breakdown? Starmer had started by asking about the lack of sector-specific support for aviation. Boris was outraged. Labour had broadly backed the chancellor’s bailout plans for other industries last week, so why was Starmer now choosing to make a fuss about widespread redundancies and BA’s somewhat nefarious plans to fire thirty thousand employees and rehire them on worse terms and conditions? This was just talking Britain down.

 “The Labour leader says one thing one week and another the next,” Boris yelled, hammering on the dispatch box with his index finger in a temper tantrum. I couldn’t help thinking about pots and kettles at that one! In recent weeks, we have had U turn after U turn from the motley crew of failures running this country.

Starmer moved on to a report from the Academy of Medical Sciences that has apparently warned that Britain risks another hundred and twenty thousand deaths from the coronabug this winter. He suggested that now might be a good time to make sure that the government’s test-and-trace system was working properly?

Now Boris just leapt into the realms of fantasy. Britain’s test-and-trace system was the envy of the world. The best there was. The very bestest, bigliest best. In which case the world might as well prepare for its end now as the test-and-trace figures are getting worse by the week.

Where once the system was reaching eighty percent of the contacts – of the twenty five percent of infected people it was managing to track – we are now down to barely seventy percent. At the current rate of decline, the whole system will be little better than guesswork in a few months. Or less if Mathew Hancock’s ‘world-beating’ app makes an appearance in the meantime.

“He should be building up the system, not undermining it,” Boris roared at his opposite number yesterday. He seemed blissfully unaware that no one has done more to reduce public confidence in the government’s response to the pandemic than him – Dominic Cummings excluded of course. Because at every opportunity, the prime minister has done too little, too late, which is one of the main reasons why the UK death figures genuinely are world beating.

When Starmer asked the prime minister whether he had actually read the report, it would have been comical to watch if it was not so tragic. ‘Um…er…um… er…. I am aware of it,’ was his feeble reply. In other words, he had not.

The Labour leader ended by basically accusing the prime minister of lying about the success of his government’s response and wondering what he might like to say to the families of those who had died – and of those who would die in the future – as a result of his negligence. It was a serious, solemn question. And one that was treated as a joke as Boris responded by saying Starmer had ‘more briefs than Calvin Klein.’ I’m sure that gave all the bereaved relatives a good chuckle. The prime minister’s ability to misjudge the mood of the nation he leads is verging on sociopathic I am afraid.

I switched off when it came to the run of the mill and sometimes sycophantic questions but I really did feel vaguely ashamed of having voted to put this clown into power. Prime Mister’s Questions is supposed to be a serious event but this was an utter travesty of its true purpose and an insult to us all. People are dying. People are losing their jobs. People are terrified about the future. And yet to Boris it all still feels like a big game where the only thing at stake is his fragile ego.

I wonder who he will blame when he finally consents to holding a full enquiry into the Coronabug fiasco. At times like these, Britain needs a leader who commands respect. What we have instead is a prime minister who urgently needs a bout or two of serious therapy.

He was humiliated again yesterday when that master of ministerial disasters, Chris Grayling who was his choice to lead parliament’s powerful intelligence and security committee, was unexpectedly rejected by fellow MPs.

The former cabinet minister was defeated by another Conservative, Julian Lewis – prompting an embarrassed Downing Street to kick the victor, who was accused of duplicitous behaviour, out of the parliamentary party.

One source said Grayling ‘didn’t see it coming’ as the nine members of the MPs’ committee voted five to four in favour of Lewis, with the four opposition members all voting against Grayling.

But how is this possible? Even Theresa Maybe was forced to fire Grayling for incompetence and his knowledge of security and intelligence must be miniscule as he has had no experience of such things. Lewis on the other hand chaired the committee in the past and chaired it well.

A furious Downing Street responded by stripping the whip from Lewis – a Tory MP since 1997 – ‘because he worked with Labour and other opposition MPs to his own advantage.’ Surely it is time we had adults rather than petulant children governing this country – or is that too much to hope for?