The day Boris Johnson was left badly dented by a shopping trolley

The blame is entirely his own, and his fall from grace is not yet complete, writes Sean O’Grady. The Covid inquiry shows that the Conservatives were united in agreement – our ex-prime minister was a ‘dumpster fire’

In digital communications within Whitehall, the prime minister was reduced to a trolley emoji (Getty/AFP)

Trolley.” Everyone called him “Trolley.” His most senior adviser, Dominic Cummings. The cabinet secretary, Simon Case. The head of communications at No 10, Lee Cain. Virtually the entire staff and occupants of Downing Street and the Cabinet Office – with the possible exception of Carrie Johnson – reduced the prime minister of the United Kingdom to a directionless, lightweight, rickety shopping trolley.

In digital communications, he was reduced to an emoji of a shopping trolley. In the now famous WhatsApp messages, the trolley emoji appeared as a sentence in its own right, a self-explanatory reason for the “dumpster fire”, as Cummings described the official response to Covid.

Cain put it more elegantly, in a phrase that deserves to find its place in the dictionaries of quotations: “It was the wrong crisis for this prime minister’s skill set, which is different I think from not potentially being up for the job of prime minister.” “Potentially,” you’ll note.