Now Johnson must face the Commons

Boris Johnson has always been good at portraying energy and optimism. It’s why he talks about those qualities so often, as he did today, and even his harshest critics — of which I am one — recognise he has plenty of both.

But was it too much to expect that a changed Boris Johnson might emerge from his brush with mortality and  short spell in intensive care?

Journalists blathered away in advance, as we stared at a lectern on TV, about how there would be a change of tone from the Prime Minister, and having thus blathered in advance, immediately set about analysing this change of tone. So far as I could tell, there was none.

If they mean that he didn’t make jokes, didn’t talk in Latin, and didn’t do anything crass like say he went round shaking hands with infected patients in hospitals, fair enough.

But if we actually look at the content of what he said, this was the same old Boris Johnson.

Empathy was formulaic. More than 20,000 people have died in hospital alone, that’s enough to fill a football stadium. Another stadium-full has died in care homes. He uttered not one word about care homes. Not one single word, about thousands of dead, the dying, the grieving, the staff struggling to keep them alive, without proper protection. Instead we heard about the “apparent success” of the government strategy. Success! As we get coverage around the world for having one of the highest death rates, linked to decisions he made, and decisions he did not make, early in this crisis, which he refused to take seriously. He calls it success! This is deliberate delusion.

Not a hint of an apology for the many mistakes he made. President Macron, who made far fewer, apologised for those he did make, and I believe the French people thought better of him for it. How Johnson could stand there, as families grieve in their tens of thousands, and talk of this as a success story, is frankly weird.

Not a word about the NHS staff who have given their lives. None of them named. Not one. None of their families offered words of comfort. None of their contribution recognised. Dominic Raab was name-checked — he did a fantastic job standing in for him, apparently. Captain Tom Moore was the only other person name checked — and many will have liked and appreciated that. But to come back to work from his own brush with death without a word for the doctors and nurses who have died — dreadful. He was full of empathy on leaving hospital for those who saved his life, Jenny from Invercargill and Luis from Portugal. That he said nothing about NHS doctors and nurses who died, nor committed finally to delivering on the oft-made pledge for frontline workers to get the protection they need — unforgiveable.

Of course we got plenty of war rhetoric as he continues with his lifelong attempt to portray himself as Churchill, grit and guts, national resolve, right up there at the top.

He talked the talk about transparency, yet as so often refused to be questioned on what he said. The lack of openness on government thinking in the early days was one of the many mistakes he made. He talked the talk about involving the Opposition, yet speak to any of the Opposition parties and they complain they are not being kept properly in the loop, in the way that even Theresa May did when dealing with Brexit. So it is hard to escape the conclusion that this was a line thrown out to allow the media to talk about change of tone, but was not something likely to happen in practice. We shall see.

One thing we must see soon is Johnson in the Commons. If he is well enough to be back at his desk, and back at the lectern outside Number 10, he is well enough to face questions from MPs. The fact that the only question I could hear from a journalist as he walked back inside was “How are you, Prime Minister?” underlines the fact that Parliament has never been more important in scrutinising a Prime Minister for whom the avoidance of scrutiny is a strategic objective in its own right.