Boris Johnson thought he was invincible – but meeting the public has left him well and truly humbled

According to his biographers – and why doubt them? – Boris Johnson likes to be popular. He wants to be loved. Not, that is, hated. It is what has driven most of his political ventures, and, I have to add, some of the adventures in his personal life. It is why he enjoys getting up in front of an adoring audience so much, or a hostile one, and making a few self-deprecating remarks to make friends with enemies. A ruffle of the hair, a shrug of the shoulders, the act of forgetting his lines, the bumbling, the deployment of an inherently absurd prop (a chicken, brick, kippers, a Cornish pasty) a knowing smirk, an over the top cheesy joke (eg “Jeremy Corbyn thinks our friends are in The Kremlin, and in Tehran, and in Caracas - and I think he’s Caracas!") – these all are just some of his little tricks to charm and enchant the adoring and the sceptical alike.

As leader of the Leave campaign in 2016, as mayor of London and now as party leader and prime minister there is nothing he likes more, literally and metaphorically, than to find himself marooned on a zip-wire waving a couple of union jacks, the harness biting into his groin with increasing insistence. He is a very happy clown.

So it must be a bit galling for him to be met with heckling and hostility wherever he goes. The most disarming, and the most difficult to answer, is the sort delivered with impeccably good manners, as when a chap in Newcastle came up to him, all smiles and warmth, and requested that the prime minister “kindly leave my town” (“I will, very soon” was the feeble response). Then it was Doncaster’s turn, with the PM being informed, in unequivocal terms by a young woman: “People have died because of austerity. And you’ve got the cheek to come here.” So it was too with Johnson’s latest visit, when an aggrieved father, and also Labour activist (I add that just for context – he’s perfectly free to say what he likes to Johnson), went to town about the treatment his daughter received at Whipps Cross hospital, though no fault of the clinical staff. Omar Salem calmly and cogently put it to the prime minister: “The NHS has been destroyed ... and now you come here for a press opportunity.”

“There’s not enough people on this ward, there are not enough doctors, there are not enough nurses, it’s not well organised enough.”

So reasonable was Mr Salem that Johnson was discombobulated, stuttering about there being no media on front of the, erm, the media, who gleefully photographed and reported the whole encounter. It’s the civilised ones that hurt most.

From Edinburgh to Luxembourg to Rotherham (“get back to parliament”) BoJo is having huge piles of contumely dumped all over him, and he doesn’t seem to know how to deal with it. His spin doctors say he wants to hear from the people about their concerns, and such like. In one way it is similar to the “masochism strategy” Tony Blair deployed a few years ago, when he did a tour meeting people who despised him over Iraq. He too was heckled outside hospitals, notably Sharon Storer in the 2005 election with an appalling account of her partner’s cancer, and also had to listen to a speech by the father of a dead soldier at the count in Sedgefield on election night.

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Like Johnson, Blair was also a politician who seemed to relish performing and popularity, but he maybe adapted to being loathed a little better than Johnson is, who seems to find the experience incredible, as if no-one should or could resist his magnetic personality, his wizardry with words, and his untamed wit. He looks, frankly, a bit bewildered, and, unlike Blair, doesn’t seem to have any ready answers to engage in debate with his critics. He just looks embarrassed, as well he might.

“Boris” the cuddly lovable teddy bear of a politician is a confection, a front, a kind of fiction. His real name, his first name reserved to the closest of friends and family, is Alexander, or Al, and that is the real Johnson, the person rarely glimpsed by the public, if at all. The second name, the comical, distinctive and memorable “Boris” is a trade name, used to create the image we all know so well. Some of it is, to be fair, authentic, some not so, and some is a mash-up when Johnson forgets where Boris ends and Al starts. In any case the character in the political soap opera called Boris is not well-suited to serious story lines, and the uncomfortable intrusion of reality upon his Wodehousian world.

So the lesson for Johnson’s enemies is to approach him with politeness and firmness, tell him where he is going wrong, and request, in the nicest way, that he buzz off. Preferably in some picturesque corner of Tory England where he might least expect it. I wonder how long it will be before some Private Godfrey type old gent shuffles up to Johnson on some trip to a village fete in the Cotswolds and says “lovely to see you prime minister, but I wonder if you’d mind awfully just dropping dead? It would mean so much to us all here since the cottage hospital closed.”

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