Lying liar lies some more as Boris Johnson braves BBC studio for debate

The truth is a foreign country. The US. This has been an election dictated by the Sunbed God’s kinks, where the bigger the lie and the more often it is repeated, the more chance you have of getting away with it. Just replace one overweight blond sociopath with another. When no one believes a word most politicians say, you might as well go for broke. Fantasy is so much more thrilling.

The Conservatives have consistently thought big. The only person in the whole of Britain who believes the Tories will build 40 new hospitals is the needy spaniel, Matt Hancock.

Yet Boris Johnson repeats it over and over again. On Friday’s Today programme on Radio 4, Michael Gove – Westminster’s very own primordial ooze – casually remarked that the reason the NHS was such a mess was because “we must all do better”. I must have missed that bit when I served as a Tory minister.

Related: Johnson v Corbyn: who won the day?

Labour has been outplayed. It has stuck to old-school exaggeration rather than outright fabrication. How very 2015. Even when Labour does tell the truth, no one gives a toss. Six days before polling, Jeremy Corbyn called a press conference. He had something big to reveal: he was going to allow a pallid Keir Starmer to sit alongside him on the platform for the first time in the entire campaign.

There were hopes it might be one of Boris’s missing children who had been found at a food bank. Instead, we had to make do with a leaked Treasury document that clearly showed Johnson’s Brexit deal would create a hard border down the Irish Sea and weaken the Northern Ireland economy. Boris had lied again. The only flaw was that Johnson’s lies are the new normal, so the Labour exposé was met with indifference. Whatevs.

Even so, the Tory spin machine went into overdrive. First Boris said he hadn’t read the report but was sure it was complete nonsense anyway. Touching to know he has such faith in his own Treasury team. Then CCHQ said it was just some rough jottings that an intern, who had since been fired, had knocked up on the basis of a deal that Boris had forgotten he had negotiated. Within hours the whole business was largely forgotten as the entire country had lost the will to live. Again. Shares in Dignitas must be soaring over the past few weeks. I’ve certainly bought mine.

At the start of the final leaders’ debate, which appeared to have been set in the Blockbusters studio, the BBC’s Nick Robinson crossed his fingers as he hoped this one would be different from the previous ones. Some hope. Right from the off it was the same old, same old. We might as well not have bothered.

Corbyn did try to keep bringing the debate back to some kind of reality, something which won him frequent rounds of applause, but Johnson was merely hellbent on doubling down on all the lies that had served him so well throughout the campaign. Within a minute he had told three old favourites. 50,000 nurses. 20,000 more police. Get Brexit done. One day he’s going to find out that the Tories have been in government for 10 years and that no one had done more to prevent Brexit happening than him.

For someone who has made a career out of lying, Boris is surprisingly bad at it. His tell-tale giveaways would be obvious to a five-year-old. He smirks, his eyes dart sideways and his arms shoot out in strange directions. This must be horribly familiar to so many women.

Worse, Johnson is utterly shameless in his lying. He now acts like a participant in the Radio 4 panel show The Unbelievable Truth. Only no one has yet told him that one of the key elements of the game is that you are supposed to smuggle five truths into a tirade of lies.

The topics were as predictable as the answers: Brexit, the NHS, security, Islamophobia and antisemitism. Both men had their wobbles, but at least there was a coherence to the Labour leader’s attempts to answer questions. There was a seriousness to Corbyn that will always be beyond Johnson. There have been more intelligent sounds coming out of my arse than from the prime minister’s mouth.

There was a brief moment when Johnson’s facade cracked a little. That was when a member of the audience asked about lies on the campaign trail. Boris smirked – of course he did – and said that would be a terrible thing and that anyone who did it should be held to account. Somewhere inside his subconscious there must be a desperate urge to be punished. Or at least to be called out. To be seen for the damaged child he is.

As the hour came to a close, Johnson breathed a sigh of relief. It hadn’t been great, but he’d just about got away with it. Personal questions of trust and honesty had been kept to the bare minimum and no one had challenged him on his cowardice at refusing to be interviewed by Andrew Neil.

He’d repeated a few untruthful slogans over and over again and it was job done. As so often, no one had really laid a finger on him because he is so well-defended. Often he doesn’t even realise he’s lying, it’s so deeply embedded. He has become the nation’s voice of mendacity. The man who lies so we don’t have to. Lucky us.

John Crace’s new book, Decline and Fail: Read in Case of Political Apocalypse, is published by Guardian Faber. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.