Boris Johnson has found a way to be taken seriously – by not turning up

The last time the PM answered questions on Iran, he accidentally extended the jail term of a British woman wrongly incarcerated there. This time he just didn’t show up

It was Boris Johnson’s first major House of Commons moment since his stunning election victory and, in fairness, he didn’t put a foot wrong.

He didn’t put a foot right either, of course. He didn’t put any kind of foot at all. He didn’t even so much as put a foot through the door of the chamber.

The assassination of a key Iranian leader by a cavalier US president, putting UK forces stationed overseas in direct danger, is the sort of thing you imagine might push the winner of a stunning general election result to the dispatch box, not the loser.

But – and this really won’t surprise you – you would imagine wrong. Boris Johnson was nowhere to be seen.

It was, in its way, a shrewd move. The last time he answered questions on Iran, he accidentally extended the jail term of a British woman wrongly incarcerated there. And he was only foreign secretary then. Now things were really serious.

And serious times, even Boris Johnson knows, are not the times for Boris Johnson. Now would not be the time for loltastic banter, like his previous material about dead bodies on beaches. Now would be the time for somebody else. And that somebody else was the defence secretary Ben Wallace.

Ben Wallace, after all, is a safe pair of hands. Admittedly, it was the same Ben Wallace who accidentally admitted on camera last August that parliament had, very obviously, been prorogued to try and force through no-deal Brexit, which was not the government’s official position at the time.

(Its official position at the time was to lie about its official position, as the Supreme Court ultimately found. Unfortunately, for Ben Wallace he was caught on camera not lying, which, when you’re working for Boris Johnson, is very much a no-no, so don’t expect him to keep his job come the reshuffle next month.)

But Mr Wallace ranks higher on the Safe Pair of Hands Scale than his predecessor, Gavin Williamson, who was sacked because he was deemed to be a danger to national security. Mr Williamson became, along with Priti Patel, one of only two government ministers to be sacked for being a danger to national security and then return to the cabinet within a year. What times.

Anyway. We digress. Ben Wallace did a sort-of-passable job at explaining away the impossible position into which Donald Trump has forced us, of admitting that he was both right and wrong to have assassinated the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.

That they had every right to assassinate him, but they maybe shouldn’t have assassinated him, but that now they had assassinated him, the right thing to do would be to “de-escalate” the situation, all the while sounding never more like Sick Boy in the Trainspotting pub scene, quietly telling Begbie to “leave it”, but crucially after, not before, he has glassed the man who accidentally spilt his pint.

Jeremy Corbyn was there, obviously. If the Iran situation does escalate to nuclear conflict, who of us can say with any certainty that Mr Corbyn will not survive it? The world’s most pious cockroach, creeping into the noontime darkness to reassert his moral superiority?

In theory, he will cease to be Labour leader in April of this year, but – just as Hugh Grant ponders in About a Boy the certain fact that soon, the mad woman and her weird son will stop standing round the piano singing Killing Me Softly and he will be able to go home – it has begun to stop feeling like such a thing can ever possibly happen.

There he was again, not listening to a word that has been said, insisting that all avenues should return to his solitary sound bite about a “Trump trade deal”.

This was embarrassing enough during an election campaign which he had not, at that point, lost by miles. That it is all he can come out with after Sedgefield, Blythe Valley, Don Valley, Wakefield and God only knows I could go on all voted Tory for the first time since people used to tweet pictures of woolly mammoths at polling stations, is truly the measure of the man.

Still, there’s a good 10 years of this to come. There will be no shortage of days in which Boris Johnson will be found utterly wanting: 3,650 of them, give or take.