Andy Richardson: The trouble with dictators is you can’t believe a word

Whatever happened to Brexit? Did we get the £350 million a week we were promised for the NHS or was that £350 figure simply recycled and given to those hosting Ukranian refugees as a monthly payment, less the million? Yes, probably that.

Someone in 10 Clowning Street has a thing for the number 350. Just like they have a thing for cake. And bubbles. And partying. But, I know, try and write something you don’t know.

Covid was the crisis that undid Dominic Cummings’ grip on power. Having railed against the power wielded by unelected bureaucrats, the unelected bureaucrat went on a not-that-clever-for-a-bloke-who-thinks-he’s-clever field trip to a pretty little wood.

And there he lay to rest his career as a SPAD.

Perhaps someone can invite Putin to Barnard Castle and offer him an appointment at the local Specsavers.

But then again, rumour is he doesn’t get out much. Can’t imagine why. What with his orders that police crackdown on pro-Russian-war Muscovites who tell visiting journalists that they’re in favour of Putin’s War only to find themselves dragged into buses alongside protestors with opposing views who have dared to hold up blank sheets of paper.

What is the world coming to when you can’t run a military dictatorship without someone holding up a piece of blank A4 in defiance?

Covid taught us not to snog old university friends in offices installed with CCTV, especially if we were the health secretary who’d made up the rules in the first place. Matt ‘James Bond’ Covid fell in love, however, and who are we to chide the public way he humiliated his nearest by throwing them under the bus?

The man whose pal seemed to do pretty well out of the pandemic has made a comeback in his black polo neck and is actively auditioning for the role of The Milk Tray Man, should a vacancy arise.

Don’t give up the day job, Matty, that’s our advice. Oops, you already have.

Big Dog Johnson, on the other hand, is a man who’s never really had much of a day job. Preferring his underlings to defend his indefensibles, Big Dog started the pandemic a hero to Brexiteers and ended it with egg on his face. The egg had been mixed with flour, milk and butter, to make a beautiful cake – and that’s what he was ambushed with when he was busy trying to avoid breaking any rules or look like he didn’t give a tuppence what the rest of us were going through.

Good job Sue Gray’s report hasn’t been published and The Met has kicked the ball so far into the long grass that giraffes are unable to see over the top of it.

It’s not just been about Big Dog, of course, though his campaign to save his own bacon by allowing others to fry seemed to work out pretty well. Those who called for him to go during the Pork Pie plot are now ordering more Branston Pickle as they chew things over from the luxury of their Westminster bunkers.

Meanwhile, while British boxers squabble over their share of an eight-figure purse – yes, eight figure, that’s tens and tens of the big ones – Ukranians show what it is to be a World Champion by pitting themselves against the might of Putin. The one thing they won’t have to fight is Covid, because Russia seems to have had a pretty good pandemic, if its figures are to be believed.

In fact, one of the few countries that appears to have done better is North Korea – another military dictatorship – which has somehow managed to have no cases of Covid and which turned down the offer of three million Covid-19 jabs.

Presumably, Kim Jong-un thought they might be contaminated like the cloth laced with VX nerve agent that was used to wipe out his half-brother Kim Jong-nam.

That’s the thing with these military dictators – and Big Dogs – you can never believe a word they say… even when we’re in the world’s first pandemic for a century.