BRITAIN was presented with a new pandemic threat yesterday: the Johnson Variant. In truth, it sounds less like a virus and more like a Bourne-type thriller title.

Indeed, from yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions, we could create quite the library, going all JK Rowling with Boris Potter and the Perils of Ping, or plumping for whimsical English novelette Mr Blackford’s Identity Crisis.

Sci-fi horror your thing? Here’s one: The Invertebrates are Back!

But first up with his latest Borisbuster was Sir Keir Starmer, leader of yonder opposition, with another anglo-centric concern: Freedom Day for all good Saxon folk on 19 July. You may have seen this headlined as “Freedom Day for Britain” in London’s mid-market madsheets, typically equating England with Britain in their blissfully ignorant way. But that date is “except for viewers in Scotland”. Our freedom comes, as ever, later.

Sir K was concerned that infections could rise to 100,000 a day which, through the principle of pinging (being warned via track-and-trace app after contact with an infected person), could see 2 million people a week self-isolating, according to the Financial Times and, never knowingly undercooking a problem, 3.5M according to the Daily Mail.

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Mr Starmer wanted freedom to be reintroduced in “a controlled way” – bit sinister! – with masks still required on public transport and ventilation in enclosed places.

Boris Johnson, the PM under advisement, insisted he was taking a “balanced and reasonable approach”. Righty-oh.

He then proceeded to deploy the old Gratitude Gambit. Can’t think of an answer? Just thank someone, anyone: the NHS, the Army, Strictly, the people, the dead, the living, the living dead, Winston Churchill, Bob Monkhouse, any British hero.

Accordingly, quoth Mr J: “I want to thank everybody who self-isolated.” Aw.

And they all replied: “You’re very welcome, sir, we’re sure.” Boris also wanted to know the opposition’s position on Freedom Day. Did they oppose it?

This kind of interrogative answer gets right up Mr Speaker’s proboscis and, accordingly, Sir Lindsay Hoyle warned Mr Johnson that the event they were attending was Prime Minister’s Questions, not Opposition Questions.

Unwillingly addressing the question, therefore, the PM said he was moving from legal diktat to allowing people to take responsibility for themselves. That old freedom thang. Very dangerous. Surveys show that around 58.89 per cent of the British people are irresponsible nutters. That’s why we have laws or, so to say, legal diktats.

Mr Johnson conceded it was “common sense” to wear masks on public transport, but rallied his troops with his hoary old taunt: “We vaccinate, they vacillate!”

Except this time, he added a twist: “We inoculate, while they’re invertebrate!”

Sir Keir had a bone to pick with this, harumphing that it was “ridiculous” to agree that mask-wearing on public transport was common sense but not to make it policy.

The PM, he reminded the House, had already “let the Delta – or we could call it the Johnson – variant into the country”.

Cassandra-like, Mr Starmer concluded: “We are heading for a summer of chaos and confusion.” So? What is it about such British traditions that Sir Keir detests so much?

Speaking of which, Ian Blackford, the SNP’s Westminster leader, again used his slot to raise another UK-wide issue. Following last week’s plaintive violin piece about EU nationals, this week we got more vaguely hipster concerns about voter ID.

The admittedly ominous sounding Electoral Integrity Bill would require voters to show ID before getting a ballot paper. But Mr B described it as “a solution in desperate search of a problem”.

The proposal, he said, “could lead to voter disenfranchisement on an industrial scale”.

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Alas, Ian’s weakness for industrial quantities of over-egged pudding was exposed when he referred to “Trumpian voter ID laws”, which prompted derisive laughter.

The PM, wearing incidentally a St George’s Cross lapel badge (Ian was wearing an SNP one; it’s in case they get lost), said the bill was designed to protect one-person, one-vote. It was common in many countries, he averred, adding gnomically: “I remember vividly what used to go on in Tower Hamlets.”

Oh, do tell!

Mr Blackford retorted: “Goodness gracious, great balls of liar, Prime Minister.”

Well, he didn’t say the middle bit, but he did say there were 34 allegations of impersonation in 2019. Yes, but one of those was Boris impersonating a prime minister.

The SNP man had a nice, if hyperactive, line about, “Government choosing their voters rather than voters choosing their Government”.

But his main beef was that millions of people don’t have photo-ID, presumably having never boarded a bus, gone abroad, driven a car, or bought a cinema membership.

Mr Blackford called on the PM to withdraw this “vote-rigging” proposal or “continue down the path of being a tin-pot dictator”.

Faced with this hyperbolised choice, Mr Johnson might have said: “All right: tin pot dictator it is.”

As it was, he merely accused Mr B of “making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill”, at which dizzy height of rhetoric we leave PMQs for another week.

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