When Defence Secretary Ben Wallace today attacked Rishi Sunak’s disloyalty to Boris Johnson, he certainly didn’t hold back. In what felt like a brutal drive-by shooting of the former Chancellor’s character and judgement, Wallace effectively accused Sunak of abandoning his post in the country’s hour of need.

“What if the markets had crashed? What if the Home Secretary had done that and there was a terrorist attack? […] I don’t think people needed to walk out, the public would see that as a government not thinking about the job in hand,” he told Sky News. “I have a duty until I’m replaced,” he told The Sun.

But ever since he was forced to announce his resignation earlier this month, Johnson is the one who has in many ways gone AWOL from running his Government. For all the claims about spending his last weeks in office “delivering” on “the people’s priorities”, it’s his own dereliction of duty that is increasingly obvious.

Away from the spin room fantasy land of the Tory TV debates, for millions living in the real world, this week has laid bare the awful daily reality of having a zombie PM and a Cabinet of the living dead. Wallace’s line about a government “not thinking about the job in hand” was more cutting than he imagined.

On Thursday, a harrowing documentary by ITV’s Paul Brand showed a snapshot of the NHS as you’ve never seen it: 19 patients crammed on trolleys in corridors, waiting to get into A&E; a 92-year-old stuck on a trolley for three days; ambulances queuing as 999 calls pile up.

Health Secretary Steve Barclay may look like The Invisible Man, but why can’t Johnson order the urgent release of the long-term workforce strategy that the Department of Health has been promising for months?

On the same day, we also learned of the cost of living emergency coming down the track for households this winter, with energy bills set to rocket to levels that in any other country could spark riots or revolution.

Where was the response to a plea from consumer champion Martin Lewis for Johnson to convene an emergency meeting with Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak to agree more help like a social tariff or other concrete proposals? What were Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng or Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi doing?

While the PM’s commitment to helping Ukraine has been admirable, and he can credibly claim real achievements on the vaccine rollout and extracting the UK from the EU, little of that may matter to a populace heading for a recessionary winter of discontent.

On the rail strike this week, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps (who now has effective responsibility for our publicly owned railways) has been missing in action too as talks failed to stop more misery for travellers.

The previous week, Johnson failed to personally chair emergency Cobra meetings on last week’s heatwave and wildfires, and preferred instead to take a joyride in a Typhoon jet. This week the pattern was repeated, as No 10 released a video of him playing soldiers at a training camp in Yorkshire before visiting special forces on Monday.

He found time to make a speech to Birmingham business on Thursday, but opted not to attend the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games later that night.

The PM’s absence meant he missed Brummie comedian Joe Lycett’s withering gag as he introduced some athletes: “I’m going to do something now the British government doesn’t always do and welcome some foreigners.” It’s perfectly plausible too that the PM feared being booed as George Osborne was in the London Paralympics in 2012 (and as Johnson was during the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee), but that’s no excuse for ducking his duty.

Some will argue that the PM’s hands are tied by the apparent convention that he can’t do anything new or radical while heading up a “caretaker” administration. That didn’t stop Theresa May signing into law the historic 2050 net zero target in the dying days of her tenure. More importantly, delivering on promises to help tackle the cost of living and to boost the NHS would actually mean keeping his word.

It’s difficult to shrug off the suspicion that Johnson’s real focus instead has been on his luxurious wedding celebrations due to be held at a Cotswolds mansion today. Don’t forget that the original plan was to stage the party at Chequers, the PM’s country house, before a backlash forced a change of heart.

Few would begrudge any couple the chance to properly celebrate a marriage that had taken place in lockdown, but why couldn’t he wait until he was out of office just a few weeks away in September? No 10 has also been very coy indeed about whether Johnson will actually go on holiday this summer. Again, with pre-school age children, surely he could wait a few weeks until he’s out of Downing Street to take a break?

Johnson could have confounded his critics by working day and night with the “relentless focus” on delivery he promised not so long ago. Instead, he’s lived down to expectations as a politician who hates the boring stuff of governing. He doesn’t just lower the bar of prime ministerial conduct, he limbo dances under it.

All too often the PM gives the impression of someone who likes the trappings of office without wanting the hard graft it demands. When Johnson abandoned his post as Foreign Secretary on a fine summer’s day, four long years ago, I’m reliably informed that he told a colleague at the time: “I don’t want to resign! I like being Foreign Secretary, I like living at Chevening!” (the sumptuous, grace and favour home in Kent, used by foreign secretaries).

Still, Johnson will be delighted at the clamour by some within his party rank and file for him to stage a comeback, or at least to be put on the leadership ballot. During the first Conservative leadership hustings in Leeds this week, he was the ghost at the feast, with applause whenever his name was mentioned. By contrast, Sunak was heckled and confronted by a man who said he had “stabbed Boris Johnson in the back”.

Johnson loyalists shouldn’t be too upset, however, because he may relish his renewed status as his party’s prince over the water, a role he thoroughly enjoyed as London Mayor eyeing up Westminster down the Thames. As a Prime Minister “undefeated” (the word he uses pointedly) at a general election, he will be in the perfect position of an unprovable counterfactual: if only you’d stuck with me, you may have beaten Keir Starmer.

His jibe at Sunak at that Birmingham business event this week saw him doing what he loves best, making after-dinner speeches well before dinner, aiming a jibe at Sunak’s U-turn on VAT cuts on energy (“turns out to be easier than we thought”).

Even now, he is still blaming others for his Government’s failings, a giant-like political Gulliver pinned down by little Lilliputians like his former Chancellor. It’s surely only a matter of time before he disowns the health and social care levy he once boasted was a landmark achievement. Outside office, he’ll hit his sweet spot once more of getting all the attention and none of the responsibility.

The harder truth is that Johnson has always been a manana politician, a futurologist who thrives on telling people what might be rather than delivering a coherent plan for the here and now. And thanks to his main domestic breakthrough – “getting Brexit done” – for a chunk of the public, as well as his party, tomorrow never dies.

Ahead of his own resignation in 1937, Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin used an old naval metaphor to reassure his party he would be gone for good. “Once I leave, I leave. I am not going to speak to the man on the bridge and I am not going to spit on the deck.”

Johnson is already spitting on the deck. Instead of being the kind of captain who goes down with his ship, he’s already got his eye on his own survival. The real tragedy is he’s not spending his final days arranging the lifeboats for those who’ll be hit hardest when the economic storm comes this winter.

All rights reserved. © 2021 Associated Newspapers Limited.