see Boris Johnson continues to be a thorn in the prime minister’s side. It has been his political role for more than a decade, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at Johnson’s continued failure to act in the government’s interest. Sabotage is his middle name. Sorry – de Sabotage. The departure of the spudhead spads last Friday was supposed to reset the current government. Unfortunately, however, the problem of Boris Johnson remains. Or to put it another way: despite the expulsion of Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain, the call is still coming from inside the house. The past couple of days have been an object lesson in how difficult it is for a government to get things back on an even keel when you have a character like Boris Johnson saying cosmically inept things in public. I mean, are needless firefights cheaper by the dozen? We have to ask after Boris Johnson told a Zoom call of 67 northern MPs on Monday that devolution has been “a disaster north of the border” and was “Tony Blair’s biggest mistake” (inaccurate, but we move on). The fallout was as swift as it was predictable. The Scottish parliament is a long-established fact, and generally approved of as an idea by Scottish people, including a lot of Scottish Conservatives. Does this Boris Johnson character really want to argue with the will of the Scottish people, his irate prime minister might wonder? Furthermore, how on earth is a unionist prime minister supposed to counter the increasingly consistent majority polls in favour of Scottish independence when you have a high-profile figure such as Boris Johnson making imbecilic and unhelpful interjections such as this? Things are already difficult for Boris Johnson, who only discovered some way into this pandemic that he was effectively prime minister of England, a job he perhaps feels is falling short of his noted childhood ambition to be “World King”. If he ends up being The Last World King Of Scotland after this, I’ll bet he could swing for that Boris Johnson. Incidentally, is this the same Boris Johnson who took advantage of devolution because he wanted to become mayor of London, twice? It’s unclear. There is, as we’ve established, more than one Boris Johnson; and whenever you need the one, you tend to get the other. Either way, the incendiary Zoom remarks on Monday night set in train another familiar chain of events: the scrambling of the prime minister’s Downing Street officials to defuse a needless row started by Boris Johnson. As has been the case for many years with these casually lobbed Johnson hand grenades, the trick for the government in question is: look as though you’re hugely relaxed about them, perhaps even laughing indulgently along with them, even though in private you might be spitting about why in his own name this serial saboteur did it. On this occasion, Downing Street “clarified” Boris Johnson’s remarks that devolution had been a disaster by explaining that “the PM has always supported devolution” and that “devolution is great”. I would have gone marginally further, perhaps along the lines of: “Boris is just being Boris and is a much-loved jester, but should not be allowed to distract from the serious work Boris is doing.” Even so, certain psychiatric tensions are laid bare by having a prime minister who cannot help but serve as his own disloyal backbencher. Often, the prime minister even serves as his own irreverent newspaper columnist. We keep seeing it in these press conferences where he announces tiers and lockdowns, at the same moment as making distancing, tongue-in-cheek jokes and wordplays about said tiers and lockdowns. Boris Johnson acts for all the world like a non-operational commentator on events, as opposed to the guy who has ordered them. He continues to play Falstaff to his own Prince Hal. Ultimately, this tension will prove fatally irresolvable – largely because both Boris Johnsons are 56, and have been living like this since they were in short trousers. The Brexit he won was the policy manifestation of this cakeism – and his No 10 is the formula distilled into a hugely dysfunctional seat of power. Here are the women he can whine to about being misunderstood; there are the men who can do his nasty work so he doesn’t have to. It’s no surprise that Boris Johnson’s Downing Street is slapdash, chaotic, hypocritical, dilatory, inattentive and a place of endless drama and infighting – because his own head always has been. What’s that expression? Tidy house, tidy mind. Twee, but I think I’d currently take it. Instead, we’re stuck with a prime minister who can’t even stay true to himself. Luckily we don’t have a lot on, as a country – or, you suspect, this might end quite badly. • Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist