Politics is going to get very silly very soon in the long year ahead - Vladimir McTavish

Any time I see another comedian using props in their act, I think “this person has clearly run out of jokes”. The same with politicians.

In the run up to the 2019 election Boris Johnson displayed some extremely silly behaviour including driving a forklift truck through a wall, dressing up as a milkman and hiding in a fridge

This week, Rishi Sunak was told off by the Speaker of the House of Commons for using props at Prime Minister’s Questions. He’s quite clearly running short of ideas.

This happened during an exchange with Keir Starmer over the Rwanda scheme, which sometimes got quite heated. After all, it is an election year.

At the moment, the sparring is pretty serious and based around real political issues. That will all change once the election is called.

When the campaign eventually starts in earnest, expect the whole pantomime aspect to “meeting the people” to be ramped up, and embarrassment levels to drop below zero.

Party leaders will take to the streets to engage in a series of inane photo opportunities. Someone will definitely be photographed eating an ice cream, kissing a baby or holding a fish supper.

I’m never quite sure what goes on in the minds of the PR people who set up these stunts.

Do they genuinely believe that the public are so stupid that they’ll see these pictures and think – “That bloke eats fish and chips. He’s got my vote. I didn’t like his policies until I saw him holding that ice-cream cone”?

Bizarrely, the next day, these very same party leaders will doubtless be laying out their policies on how to encourage healthy eating.

Politicians also like to get their photo taken behind a bar, pulling a pint of beer. This must be particularly galling to anyone running a business in the hospitality sector struggling to recruit staff in the wake of us leaving the EU.

Although what pub landlord would be so desperate that they’d give a bar job to Jeremy Hunt?

In 2017, when Theresa May’s shambolic government were getting themselves tied up in knots and facing endless backbench revolts over the incoherent approach to Brexit, she and the chancellor Phillip Hammond were photographed taking a ride in a driverless car.

Which pretty much summed up her three years in office. Heading off on the road to nowhere with nobody in control.

Of course, Boris Johnson had absolutely no shame when it came to these ridiculous spectacles.

In the run up to the 2019 election, we saw him driving a forklift truck through a wall, dressing up as a milkman, and pretending to hide in a fridge.

Oh no, I remember now. He really did hide in a fridge to escape a TV crew. The actual Prime Minister actually did hide in an actual fridge. Over four years later, that sentence looks no less surreal than it did at the time.

Let’s not forget this is the same Boris Johnson who wanted to be seen as a modern-day version of his political hero Winston Churchill. Hiding in a fridge? Hardly Churchillian behaviour.

What would the British people have thought as, huddled around their wireless sets at the height of the blitz they heard the Prime Minister promise: “We will fight them in the air, we will fight them on the beaches, we will hide from them in the fridges.”

Anyway, everyone’s focussed on the serious stuff right now. But it’s all going to get very silly very soon in the long year ahead.