Boris Johnson’s ridiculous tactics are starting to make Jeremy Hunt look like an appealing successor to the prime minister

The foreign secretary may not know where his missus was born, but he knows an opening when he sees one

Jeremy Hunt tries to contain the Boris blast with a blanket whimper of defiance on the facing page (PA)

So this is how it ends, the phoney war for the Tory leadership, with crazy talk of a giant bang and a vapid retaliatory whimper.

Launching the real battle for Downing Street, Boris Johnson concluded a lively week even for him with that lunatic suicide bomber analogy. If accusing Theresa May of wrapping the “constitution” (what constitution? show me the paper) in a suicide vest, and handing Michel Barnier the detonator, was a calculated diversionary tactic, his calculation of the timing was unfortunate.

A cunning plan to divert attention from personal revelations, in this case with an incendiary Mail on Sunday article attacking the PM, is a fine thing.

However, when a rival title splashes with a Downing Street-sourced catalogue of your personal misdemeanours, the calculation suggests the class buffoon of remedial maths sparing 23 seconds from a fantasy game on the iPhone to tackle a quadrilateral equation.

The “Dodgepot Dossier” was compiled by May’s leadership team in 2016, before his withdrawal from the race rendered it unnecessary. You might wonder why, being familiar with its contents, she then appointed him foreign secretary. But the list of things for which life is too short is way too long as it is.

Presumably, though this is denied, the dossier was steered towards to the Sunday Times within hours of Boris’s divorce becoming public to maximise the damage.

Since it was cobbled together from Google and a couple of biographies, and contains as much original research as Alastair Campbell’s near namesake did about Saddam’s WMD, it may not have the desired effect.

Boris’ hands-off relationship with the truth, use of archaic racist terminology, and all but the latest of his adulteries were common knowledge.

Any Tory MP or member who saw him as a beacon of marital fidelity has a red-flag cognitive dysfunction symptom, and needs to see a neurologist urgently. If the others were going to vote him for before, they will probably vote for him still.

For all that, the timing is dreadful. For the casual observer of the Westminster zoo, sex is so much sexier than Brexit. Whatever inflammatory impact Boris hoped the suicide bomber nonsense would have on his fan base will be dissipated.

His casual ridiculing of concerns about the Northern Irish border conundrum will be drowned out by more ribald discussions about the woman he took to Rules for a Valentine’s Day lunch. Leading culino-historians will note that this is the traditional Covent Garden restaurant (roast beef, pewter tankards, an oil painting of Thatcher as Boadicea; just soooo romantic) where the future Edward VII entertained his mistress, Lily Langtry, while waiting for a stubborn woman to make way for him.

May seems as unwilling to abdicate as Queen Victoria, and to share her knack for surviving assassination attempts.

But all things must end, and with this in mind, Jeremy Hunt tries to contain the Boris blast with a blanket whimper of defiance on the facing page. Nominally, this is a declaration of loyalty to May. But you don’t need the enigma machine to decode it as: “I’m the sensible, centrist anti-Boris candidate – and I’ve never done to a woman other than my wife what I did for all those years to the NHS”.

The minister of state designed its spread after a title fight poster, with the two faces angrily facing each other across the fold, and it could have a point.

Johnson’s Foreign Office successor may not know where his missus was born, but he knows an opening when he sees one. “As it happens,” Hunt writes, subtly pointing to the lasting insignificance of that decision, “I voted to Remain … but I have found my views changing since then.”

Of course you have, love. How could you not when it’s been such a smooth ride on the road to Brexit these last two years? There are more compelling reasons than this to resent Boris Johnson, not least the coin flip decision to file his Leave column to the Telegraph, rather than the equally passionate Remain alternative, that diverted Britain down this monstrous path.

Even so, a corner of Dante’s missing tenth circle of hell wants reserving for anyone capable of creating a binary prime ministerial choice in which Jeremy Hunt, that fecklessly opportunistic ninny of a human asterisk, is so plainly the lesser of two evils.

In all the high excitement, it would be easy to overlook what on a less dramatic Sabbath would stand out as the pinnacle of mania. But while Boris and Hunt scrap it out on facing pages, it emerges that Jacob Rees Mogg’s barmy army, aka the European Research Group, has been fine tuning its post-Brexit master plan.

Apart from slashing various taxes in pursuit of that national Tardis trip back to 1936, it wants to spend the “Brexit bonus” on a nuclear missile shield system – it could hardly cost more than a couple of trillion – like Ronald Reagan’s thankfully abandoned “Star Wars” initiative.

This was too whacky even for Johnson, who has reportedly distanced himself from the ERG in shock. But the fact that he has spent months and months in bed with Moggy, without even taking him to Rules for steak and kidney pud first, helps to explain why – God have mercy on my soul for such words – Jeremy Hunt is a less laughable PM in waiting than common decency and sanity ought to allow.