IT’S easy to assume that everything Boris Johnson says at Prime Minister’s Question is either a fudge or a full-blown lie, so it’s a novelty when someone pops up to provide actual facts in support of his claims.

But yes, it’s true that four years ago Keir Starmer suggested it would be a bad thing for the UK to be outside the European Medicines Agency. A viewpoint that was hardly controversial at the time but has aged badly in light of the sluggish pace of the EU’s vaccine rollout. Well, give Brigadier Hindsight a medal and make Mark Francois chief toady.

The Speaker couldn’t care less about points of order by this point. He’s wanting a cup of tea and a headache tablet.

READ MORE: Ian Blackford rips into Boris Johnson over visit to Scottish vaccine lab

Starmer wasn’t actually asking about vaccines, you’ll be unsurprised to hear – it’s just that Johnson had hoped he would and had prepared this zinger to fire back. Good to know his current top priorities include combing through Hansard and practising his “I’m flabbergasted!” face.

In fact, he hailed the 10 million vaccinations landmark as “remarkable”, then asked why the UK’s borders had not been shut in line with SAGE’s recommendation, to protect the population from new strains of Covid-19.

There followed a tedious back-and-forth in which Johnson pretended to believe Starmer was advocating closing the border to essential supplies of medicines and food, which is a bit of a cheek given last month’s chaotic scenes around Channel ports. He then hailed the UK’s tough measures to keep out new virus variants, despite this effectively taking the form of a game of whack-a-mole in which we don’t pick up the mallet until after several moles have managed to jump out of their holes and scamper onto our soil.

On a note totally unrelated to verminous creatures, the PM was in Scotland last week and Ian Blackford wants to know what the hell he was playing at. We’ve seen the images of him clowning around at the Valneva laboratory in Livingston, apparently confusing two metres with two inches, and there are now reports that he pressed ahead with that visit despite knowing there had been a Covid-19 outbreak on the premises. What does he have to say about that?

Nothing, that’s what! His visit was “fantastic” and oh, by the way, he’s happy to offer rubbish old Scotland with help rolling out vaccines. Blackford condemns the PM’s “utterly, utterly reckless” move and asks “isn’t he the worst possible leader at the worst possible time?” The PM clarifies the most important point – he had a fantastic time! – and adds that “nobody, by the way, raised that issue with me before or since”.

Maybe the problem here is that they did raise the issue with him, but he was bellowing “FANTASTIC!” on repeat at the time and didn’t hear it. “Nothing and no-one is going to stop me!” he thunders, like the hubristic villain in a Saturday-morning cartoon series.

The SNP’s Angela Crawley attempts to ask why the PM is “watching, waiting and hoping for the best” instead of putting in place a comprehensive system of supervised quarantine for those arriving from overseas, but in return he essentially just blows a raspberry and repeats that the UK’s vaccine rollout is the best and slowcoach Scotland can have some help if it wants. How fantastic.