Boris Johnson is a coward in charge of a bunch of B-list politicians unworthy of us.

He’s got form, our cowardly lion of a Prime Minister, for doing a runner when the heat is on.

Today, he’s rushed off to give COP some hot air. He could have gone at the weekend, but the alternative was facing Prime Minister’s Questions over the worst display of Parliamentary sleaze since the MPs expenses scandal.

Boris Johnson bolts from tricky situations like a man diving into a wardrobe, underpants round his ankles, at the sound of his mistress’s husband arriving back home from work early.

As analogies go, this is not such a stretch. He literally hid in a fridge to avoid a grilling from Piers Morgan at the height of our national Covid debacle.

As foreign secretary, he avoided having to vote on the third runway at Heathrow – having billowed about lying down in front of bulldozers to prevent it – by flying off to Afghanistan on an impromptu and pointless visit. Safer in Afghanistan than facing the west London Tory MPs he had so royally shafted.

He has similarly gone missing in the States as Mayor of London while the city tore itself apart in rioting, was away in Marbella on a £25,000 freebie while most of Britain was stuck in a queue for petrol. On Monday, he ducked the Commons debate on the Owen Paterson debacle.

Perhaps most grotesque is his continued cowardice over the diabolical situation in which he has left Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her husband and daughter. As foreign secretary, his laziness and carelessness conspired to publicly reinforce the conspiracy that she is a spy.

That Nazanin remains still captive, that her husband starves himself to provoke some meaningful action, and that still Johnson does nothing, is … well, what is it? Contemptible? Disgusting? Heartless? All of the above.

Running away and leaving the mess to others to clean up is something of a habit. Why do the others do it? The Peter Principle, a management concept from the late 60s, gives one explanation.

Employees tends to rise up the ladder of an organisation until they reach what the author of the term Laurence J Peter, termed a “level of respective incompetence”. In plainer English, they get out of their depth, at which point they become utterly dependent on their boss.

Dominic Raab, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel … they all fit the Peter Principle nicely. B-list bozos all. The only point at which they will pay any penalty for their patent uselessness is when they threaten to damage Johnson himself. Gavin Williamson found out the hard way. Jacob Rees-Mogg will be next.

It’s a bad way to run a company. It’s a terrible state of affairs when running a state.

Talent in this government – and in parliament more broadly – is as thin as it’s ever been in my lifetime. True leadership, the confidence to tolerate dissent, the willingness to take hard decisions, to put in the hard hours to reach those decisions and then to stand by them confident in the knowledge that you are, at the very least, doing your best, is absent.

And yet, the public’s indifference to the poverty of our politics appears to be largely unshakeable. How bad are things going to have to get before we realise we’re not watching some fantastical dance along a yellow brick road, but are ourselves caught in the twister … spiralling off to who knows where.