I'd rather my PM was a bollard, not a shopping trolley

This is supposed to be a country where nothing works any more, where remedies and solutions are platitudinously promised but always take too long to come into effect, indeed often never do.

Well, tell that to those who laid siege to asylum seekers’ hotels or lobbed bricks at police or looted sausage rolls from shops – and especially the culprits banged up at breathtaking speed.

But one of Starmer’s predecessors doesn’t agree. Can you guess which? That’s right, Boris Johnson. Addressing the PM in his newspaper column at the weekend, he wrote: “It has become ever clearer over the past week that your presence has made no difference whatsoever to the disturbances – or if anything, made things marginally worse.”

Anti-migration protesters riot outside of the Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham last week.

To me this sounded like Johnson had been left wrong-footed by Starmer’s decisiveness. Not as wrong-footed as the rioters, perhaps, but definitely caught on the hop. Hang on, the man was supposed to be a wet North London liberal! During the election campaign we accused him of wimpishly wavering and not having a plan! Turns out Starmer does.

All that was left for Johnson was to toss around a few insults. The new Labour premier was a “stunned mullet” when publicly pronouncing, and a “human bollard”.

Actually, Johnson didn’t end his Daily Mail column there. He offered advice, one PM to another, and it was astonishingly, cringesomely, hilariously awful. He suggested Starmer simply “packs the Factor 50” and gets away from it all.

Starmer’s family holiday was due to start last week but understandably the Southport stabbing atrocity kept him at home, and he wasn’t about to leave when the country began to burn.

Wrong decision, opined Johnson in his Saturday piece. “Come on, Starmer, man or mouse? Never mind the blasted ‘optics’ of the situation. Fight this cowardly anxiety about your personal ratings, and whether the public will mark you down for going on holiday.

Starmer needed the break, he went on, to “reflect on the events of the past month, and the whole strategy of the Labour Government, because it is starting to look like a frenzy of utter stupidity”.

On Sunday, No 10 confirmed that Starmer had cancelled his holiday entirely, believing the crisis still requires full scrutiny, despite the tough initial sentences having the effect of dousing the threat of another wave of riots.

What’s Johnson playing at with his macho jibes? Is he being mischievous in urging Starmer to get to the airport or is he forgetting, or thinking we’ve forgotten, that when in positions of power and responsibility he was holiday-mad?

Rioting, flooding, heatwave, school exams fiasco and, yes, global pandemic – whatever the emergency, Johnson would invariably be somewhere else relaxing, only to have to be hauled back to the office.

The riots of 2024 and the images of blazing buildings and looted stores have stirred memories of London in 2011 - but where was the mayor when the earlier trouble erupted? On a campervan road trip in the Canadian Rockies. Johnson’s absence quickly became embarrassing, similarly the excuses for being reluctant to return. There was the claim his sudden appearance would have the mob whooping a victory. And the claim his then wife couldn’t possibly be expected to pilot the hulking Winnebago by herself.

When the one-man cavalry eventually appeared, Johnson rushed to an especially bashed-up corner of the metropolis and grabbed a broom for a whizzo photo-op. When he eventually appeared at a Cobra meeting, PM David Cameron’s comms director Craig Oliver recalled how “the door flies open and Johnson bursts in … with a battered rucksack”. At one point he rested his head on an arm and some in the room wondered if he was dozing. Perhaps he was tired after sweeping up the broken glass, although disgruntled shopkeepers would insist there was no evidence Johnson had actually used the brush.

After that, and by then the occupant of No 10, it maybe wasn’t such a shock that when what would turn into terrifying news began to trickle out of Wuhan, Johnson was sunning himself on the millionaires’ island of Mustique. And, Covid-19 was ripping across the globe when Johnson missed the first five Covid summits on the pandemic, having installed himself at the country estate to thrash out his divorce and crack on with his book about Shakespeare.

Gordon Brown as premier chaired every Cobra session on foot-and-mouth when the danger was just to animals. Later, when Johnson was serving his notice as the country’s leader – and, as it happened, on holiday – Brown urged him to come back to deal with the energy crisis.

That farewell tour for Johnson included a Tom Cruise impersonation aboard a Typhoon fighter jet. And then – whoosh – he was off for good, leaving a legacy of a man who loved his R&R. Hey, not always at a Slovenian “soothing energies” villa where guests must give up their phones. Sometimes he roughed it in Scotland until his hopeless attempts at erecting a tent on a rocky Wester Ross outcrop were rumbled by the Daily Star which had embarked on a desperate mission in the midst of yet another crisis to track down “Mr Invisible”.

Johnson when he was in charge created a new Cabinet post of Minister for Holidays. Well, technically, Dominic Raab was Foreign Secretary but during the evacuation of Afghanistan he was in Crete. History does not show if he was paddleboarding at the moment Kabul fell but when Raab eventually cut short his trip the jibes in the Commons were: “You’re orange! You’re orange!”

The Tories weren’t much cop in an emergency with Johnson being compared to a “shopping trolley”. So far under Labour I’d rather be led by a bollard.