LONDON

BORIS JOHNSON’S REVELATION that he contemplated invading the Netherlands to seize millions of Covid vaccines, has caused such a wave of hysterical laughter to spread across the world that it actually led to a dip in industrial productivity right around our planet.

The former British leader’s new biography, which is being serialized and hyped in equal amounts by his current employers, the Daily Mail, is entitled Unleashed.

“Sounds to me like a mad dog broken free of his restraints!” says Freudian psychiatrist George St English, whose latest essay for the New Amsterdam Review of Trends, If You Really Want to End Your Life, then Just Read Some Old Pauline Kael Movie Reviews, has caused some controversy in the Assisted Dying Community .

Mr Johnson, who was suffering from Covid himself around the time he came up with the plan to invade his NATO ally, admits he was not thinking clearly in those days and seems to accept that the scheme was “nuts”.

“When has he ever thought clearly?” remarked Winston Spion Kop, a former diplomat who resigned from the British Foreign Service after Brexit failed to deliver his share of the hundreds of millions of pounds promised by its trumpeters. “This memoir is clearly not founded in any thinking, clear or otherwise. Theresa May’s nostrils? I mean, come on that’s pure *Alan Clarke.”

“And this man was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom,” said a former Tory colleague who did not wish to be named. “At least **Pericles had the good manners to succumb to the plague.”

“Bonkers, completely bonkers,” said a woman trying to get to Spain for the winter to avoid freezing to death after losing her fuel subsidy. “But then they’re all bonkers, aren’t they? Do we really need governments at all? Look at the damage governments have done these past few decades.”

*Alan Clarke, rich, amiable Tory MP and sometime historian, whose political diaries are quite amusing – he admired Margaret Thatcher’s ankles – ED

**Mr Johnson appears to compare himself to legendary Athenian leader Pericles who was taken by an outbreak of plague during the Peloponnesian War – ED