y favourite ever political doorstep question came from Michael Crick, who greeted a certain New Labour figure with the early morning salutation: “Will you be telling any LIES today, Mr Mandelson?” It only needs light repurposing to apply currently to almost every Conservative MP, who should really spend Christmas being greeted by their spouse at the breakfast table with the inquiry: “Good morning, dear. Will you be telling any lies to yourself today?” The answer, as it was with Peter Mandelson, is a decided: yes. Yes, very much so. I will be leading myself right up the garden path this morning, then taking myself for a ride this afternoon. The sheer volume of bullshit that Tory MPs are currently required to feed themselves and swallow includes the notion that they’re getting out of tier 3 soon; that they’re getting out of tier 3 in February; that they’re getting out of tier 3 in March (wake up, guys!); that there isn’t effectively going to be a tier 4 AND another national lockdown; that Rishi Sunak is extending the furlough scheme to the end of April but tiers are going to be just a distant memory by April; that this lot aren’t likely to significantly cock up the vaccine rollout; that any Brexit deal Boris Johnson may or may not deliver imminently is good; that said deal or no deal will address all their concerns and demands; that it will address even ANY of their concerns and demands; that it is absolutely the best thing for Britain to be doing; that it is absolutely the best thing for Britain to be doing right now in the middle of all this; and that Johnson gives one hundredth of a toss about a single one of them. It is, let’s face it, an incredibly busy schedule of self-deception to juggle. Ultimately, though, you’d have to think some of the complete balls are going to get dropped in the next couple of months. Even Boris Johnson, the nation’s leading liar, simply couldn’t maintain that level of full-spectrum mendacity for an entire winter without coming a cropper. For now, Tory MPs have smaller fish to fry. The problem of “low-information voters” is far less acute than the problem of low-information politicians. Consider Michael Fabricant, who lavished the opening minutes of prime minister’s questions this week not on getting closer to the bottom of any of the above, but on repeatedly honking some line about Keir Starmer being a “smarmy lawyer”. While I can’t get at all inspired by the leader of the opposition, it does feel somewhat excruciating watching everyone from the home secretary to quarter-witted backbenchers attempt to crawl to Johnson by parroting his favourite attack line on Starmer, which amounts to “You’re a LAWYER”. Mate – you’re a JOURNALIST. Everyone got hit with the shitstick here, OK? In fact, if you needed a third equal partner in this adult game of rock, paper, scissors, it would be … what? Lawyer, journalist, estate agent? Serial sex killer? Animal pimp? Anyway, 2020. Where are you with it all? I know a lot of people use the Christmas period to catch up on TV they’ve missed, so if you’re only up to July in “the news”, you’re at the bit where Boris Johnson is gibbering that it’s back to “virtual normality” by Christmas. And yet, you’re not an idiot – you have foresight – so you won’t mind the spoiler that it really doesn’t end up being virtually over by Christmas. Yet while you, me, several species of the animal kingdom and even a couple of rocks could see that a second wave of the coronavirus was logically going to hit in the winter, Boris Johnson’s government believed one would be avoided. He didn’t think “we will be in that position again,” he breezed dismissively in July, even as his chief scientific officer was suggesting we probably would. The quality of being constantly surprised by events is winsome in puppies but increasingly mindboggling in prime ministers. See also “Christmas travel tsars”. Are you familiar with Sir Peter Hendy, perhaps the most doomed tsar since Nicholas II? If not, don’t worry – you will be in a few days’ time. Or as Sir Peter put it this week: “I am not envisaging terrible scenes in train stations or elsewhere.” As for other unenvisageable scenarios, if only the government hadn’t lost its celebrated 4D chess grandmaster Dominic Cummings. Arguably the sole benefit to Cummings was that he seemed to be able to silence Jacob Rees-Mogg. After the spectacle of Rees-Mogg lolling all over the frontbenches during a crucial Brexit debate went viral last year, Jacob had to state on Twitter that he had been forced by what he called “the powers that be” to pull out of every event he had booked to promote his abysmal book on the Victorians. This is the literary equivalent of being made to stand outside a playground wearing a sandwich board reading: “Ask me why I can’t come near this playground.” Next, shortly after last year’s election was called, Rees-Mogg would accuse the Grenfell dead of lacking “common sense” – only to be spirited away to the same black site where the Conservatives detain Chris Grayling and Iain Duncan Smith at such times, and never heard of for the rest of the campaign. Alas, there is no Cummings to mute him now, so this week finds Rees-Mogg resurgent after declaring Unicef should be “ashamed of itself” for donating funds to feed deprived children in the UK. “Unicef is a wonderful organisation,” retorted loony lefty Chris Patten – no, hang, on, former Conservative party chairman Chris Patten – adding: “You shouldn’t be denouncing it if you’re a British minister for the fact that it actually finds it necessary to give some help in this country.” Winding up this final column of 2020, it must be said that the government’s commitment to hindering children remains undimmed. This week we learned it would prefer school pupils to miss a week at the start of next term, which any teacher will tell you is far more packed and important than the last week of the current term, when infections are rising rapidly. I’ve stared at that single piece of executive decision-making multiple times over the past few days, and it’s still worthy of no more charitable analysis than “why are u like this??” Still, no doubt there’s some brilliant lie MPs are telling themselves to answer that question. Sling another fib on the fire, and see you on New Year’s Day. Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist