Johnson is a well known ditherer which is one of the reasons he is such a practiced liar. Constant, rootless flip-flopping means you are frequently faced with colleagues demanding to know why you have changed your mind. In order to defend yourself against the dreaded U-turn charge you are forced to invent an excuse (a lie) and then another one and another. It is the result of having no clear plan or political conviction.
Soon, you begin to learn that the casual lies don't have much in the way of negative effects. It's a bad lesson. Everybody knows Johnson is 'manically disorganised' and a liar. It is hardly a secret, but now the lies are getting to the level of Donald Trump.
Andrew Mitchell is the latest to realise it when he recently claimed Johnson had sat in his office during the leadership campaign and, to get Mitchell's support, he assured him the Department for International Development was "safe". Within a year it had gone - subsumed into the Foreign Office.
I mention this because the dithering and the inherent, unresolvable contradictions of Brexit are now having a real impact on the nitty-gritty of policy making. Brexit is like the optical illusions in art where the artist shows something which is geometrically impossible. This sort of thing:
This is fine when you are talking in conceptual terms and selling the idea as a solution to a problem. The customer has now accepted your plan and you are trying to make it real. Not so easy, eh?
The problem is writ large in today's Mail on Sunday although there are plenty of good examples, the current shenanigans with the Irish sea border is one that springs to mind. But the Mail carry a report about Britain planning to lobby for low tariffs and greater powers for the WTO once we are free of the EU.
"The UK will also push to give the WTO back its legal teeth with which to inflict painful punishment on countries that break trading rules. And officials will strive to work with a loose coalition of like-minded states, such as Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, to turn back a tide of protectionism that started after the financial crisis in 2008."
We are adamant about not being under the ECJ under any circumstances but apparently quite happy to lobby for the WTO have its legal "teeth" back. Strange. We also want to turn back the tide of protectionism. All well and good, but then we turn to another article in the same news outlet on the same day.
"Tory MPs tell Liz Truss to beef up post-Brexit plans to safeguard British farmers from sub-standard US food imports," is the headline and the article explains:
"Boris Johnson has been warned to beef up plans to keep out sub-standard US food imports – or risk letting down British farmers. Tory MPs say a proposed panel to advise on post-Brexit trade deals must have real teeth and not just be a 'talking shop'. In a private meeting, they insisted the new 'trade and agriculture' commission – announced last week by International Trade Secretary Liz Truss – must be established on a statutory footing.
"Environmental campaigners have welcomed the new body but say it does not go nearly far enough in safeguarding the UK from the products of so-called American mega farms."
This is what the US see as "protectionism" - the kind we are trying to "turn the tide on."
It's the sort of rabbit hole you are dragged down by trying to have it both ways, to have cake and eat it, to enjoy a sort of exceptionalism where you don't even notice that you are demanding rules for others that you don't want to obey yourself.
Of course, Johnson has spent a lifetime surrounded by such people, his father for one - now in his Greek holiday home - and Cummings for another, and presumably sees nothing wrong in it.
The result is a sort of schizophrenic foreign and trade policy that we will be trying to follow over the next few years. Also, this kind of thinking infects every other thing we are trying to do. We want to encourage the brightest and the best to come here by making immigration as hostile as possible.
We want to encourage foreign direct investment by shrinking our home market by 85 per cent.
We want to grow more of our own food while importing much more cheap "sub-standard" food from abroad - just not from the USA. We want the financial sector to have continued access to the single market while not subject to its rules - or we want a role in setting the rules of the market, the one we have just flounced out of.
All of these things are just beginning to come to a head - and Johnson the ditherer will be forced to make real choices.
