Rishi Sunak is the chancellor who can be trusted to do as he is told

That drink Boris Johnson was given at a nearby Wetherspoons at the weekend could just have been the best freebie Tim Martin has ever handed out. First up he got a 15% reduction in VAT, only some of which would probably get passed on to the punters.

But he then got the promise of £10 meal vouchers for his slackest trading days of Monday to Wednesday. This was the kind of ‘Meal Deal’ Big Tim could relate to. And who knows? It might even come in handy for his customers, provided they ordered twice as much as usual and took home the leftovers in a doggybag that they could eat during the rest of the week.

It’s a sign of the times that the chancellor’s summer coronavirus bailout package was greeted with little more than mild curiosity by politicians from both sides of the chamber. Only a year ago, a £30bn package would have been unthinkable economics for a Tory government, but now it’s merely yet another drop in the ocean on top of the nearly £180bn already promised. What’s more everyone knows this is merely the start. Come the autumn, billions more will be needed to even try to stave off a major recession and mass unemployment.

Throughout his 25 minute statement, Rishi Sunak had looked profoundly unbothered about the sums he was spending. Then, to be fair, he has had rather more than his fair share of practice, over the past few months – ever since he unexpectedly landed the Treasury job after Sajid Javid had stomped out when Classic Dom had sacked his special advisers – he’s given the equivalent of eight budgets already. Come the end of the year and he will be well into double figures. And the coronavirus has made him demob happy. Sums that might once have given him sleepless nights now barely raise his pulse.

Then apart from the Groupon-style voucher scheme, there had been nothing in the chancellor’s statement that hadn’t already come pre-briefed. So Rishi rattled through his list of spending commitments as if he was reading out the contents of his weekly shopping list.

Though most MPs might, on reflection, have preferred some more money for a track and trace system that actually worked as that really might have saved more lives.

But you get what you get. So there was £9bn for firms that didn’t sack their furloughed staff until January. A kickstarter scheme for the young unemployed which looked set to encourage people not to rehire their more expensive older employees. A cut in stamp duty for houses under £500K. And £2bn in grants for home owners to make their buildings more energy efficient. Great for renters, that move. By the end, even the chancellor was having trouble sounding that interested in what he was saying.

In reply, Labour’s shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, was caught between insisting that the bail out package had been totally inadequate to meet the scale of the pandemic crisis, observing that the Kickstarter fund looked suspiciously like Labour’s Future Jobs Fund that the Tories had axed in 2010, and wondering how on earth the government was going to pay for it all. Rishi merely shrugged, amazed that anyone could question how the bill was going to be met. That sort of talk is so last year. These days it’s Tory policy to max out the credit cards.

For most of the time Sunak had been on his feet, Boris Johnson had looked on like a proud Dad, beaming extravagantly with every new spending promise. Rishi is the chancellor in his pocket. A man who can be trusted to do as he is told and who doesn’t have his eye on the top job. A Matt Hancock character, though with rather more brains.

These days Mattbeth’s ambition is limited to merely being allowed to remain as health secretary: something far from guaranteed given the ongoing coronavirus disaster. Maybe he can one day look forward to being nominated as the next director for the World Trade Organization. After all, if Liam Fox can make that grade then there’s hope for all of us.

But towards the end of Sunak’s statement, Boris’s knee began to jiggle up and down uncontrollably. As if the excitement of the summer holiday spending plans had been replaced by a flashback to yet another disastrous encounter with Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions.

What’s more it has been a totally self-inflicted wound as all the Labour leader had to do was to ask Boris six times to apologise for having blamed care workers for the high levels of care home deaths.

Saying sorry isn’t Boris’s style though. He’s yet to apologise or take responsibility for any of his actions – both political and in his private life – and he wasn’t about to start now. So he did what he always does when under pressure. He lied. He had never said the things that everyone had quite clearly heard him say.

At times like this, you have to wonder just how emotionally damaged Johnson must be to behave in this way. It’s just our luck that at a time of crisis we have a car wreck of a prime minister in charge of the country.

The more Starmer pressed him to apologise, the angrier Boris became. “You’ve become Captain Hindsight,” he snapped. In which case this must make the prime minister General Oversight. Because his repeated assertions that no one had warned of the dangers of asymptomatic transmission are blatantly untrue. Scientists were flagging up this possibility back in January and for the government to have discharged untested patients into care homes was at best reckless. In the absence of proper data, any normal government would have erred on the side of caution.

But Boris has never done caution. He is a compulsive risk taker. The dealer who is watching for the card that is so high and wild he’ll never need to deal another. Pushed into a corner by Starmer – a man he despises for his quiet and greater intelligence – Johnson could only yet again lash out wildly.

Boris is so lost in his own bubble he has no idea just how bad an impression he is making on the country. Yet there will be a reckoning. It may not be this summer. It may not even be this year. But Boris’s days are already numbered. And his ending will be of his own making. His mistakes will not be forgotten and without humility, only humiliation awaits.