A LAST minute but highly promising entry to the Understatement of the Year Competition was received yesterday from a Mr A Marr of London.

“This weekend, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is unpopular,” said the host of The Andrew Marr show.

He added: “I’ve been covering politics for 40 years and it’s hard to remember the press being this hostile to a premier. Not in the last days of Margaret Thatcher, not over Maastricht, or when things were going wrong in Iraq, or during the last days of Theresa May.”

The public and press appear to be on the same page on this one. An Opinium poll in the Observer found more people (51%), were shocked by the Downing Street tape of aides joking about a Christmas party, than Dominic Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle (28%), or the CCTV footage of Matt Hancock and his adviser Gina Coladangelo (21%).

The tipping point with the Downing Street tape is that it surfaced following a week of denials, from the Prime Minister down, that any party had taken place.

This week there is a new question to answer, one prompted by a photo on the front page of yesterday’s Sunday Mirror showing Mr Johnson taking part in a Christmas quiz with the headline, “Taking us for fools (again)”.

When the first Downing Street story broke no Minister would go on the breakfast shows to defend the Government. Matt Hancock put himself forward, which simply reminded an irritated public of the former Health Secretary’s contribution towards the policy of “one rule for them, another for the rest of us”.

I doubt it was luck that Nadhim Zahawi, England’s Education Secretary, was on the roster to do the Sunday shows before another crunch week for the government.

There will be Commons votes on reimposing Covid restrictions, with reports that more than 60 Conservative MPs could vote against the Government. This will be followed with a byelection in North Shropshire, seat of recently resigned MP Owen Paterson, where the Tories are defending a huge majority.

READ MORE: Labour leader says quiz 'broke the law'

Back to Mr Zahawi. As the host of Sky New’s' Trevor Phillips on Sunday said, the Government has played a great deal on Mr Zahawi’s success as Vaccines Minister. If anyone had a chance of containing “Quizgate”, as it was inevitably dubbed, it was him.

Nothing to see here was his response to the photo. The Prime Minister took part in the evening via Zoom and only stayed a few minutes. Yet Mr Johnson was in a room with at least two people at a time when any indoor mixing of households was banned. Moreover, there were other groups in other rooms, up to 24 in one instance.

On Marr, the Labour leader Keir Starmer said it looked as though the PM had been breaking the law. "He must have known that other groups were in other rooms in his own building," he said.

Labour would back the Government in this week’s Commons vote, said Mr Starmer. This was despite, Marr reminded him, the Labour leader saying the PM was unfit for office, and a threat to public health. Sir Keir said it was not Mr Johnson Labour was backing, but the NHS which would be overwhelmed if Omicron infections led to hospitalisations in the numbers feared.

The same mix of moods, from foreboding to furious, surfaced on BBC Scotland’s The Sunday Show with Martin Geissler helming. John Swinney, Deputy First Minister, took care of the fear factor, saying that Omicron was “galloping” its way into Scotland.

Douglas Ross, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, was so angry at his party leader in London he could not identify a single attribute the PM possessed, other than he was leading the country “at the moment”.

READ MORE: Ross on Johnson quiz

Earlier on Marr, the writer Robert Harris was asked if there was a novel in Boris Johnson’s life.

Harris, whose novel Munich, about the 1938 meeting between Chamberlain and Hitler, has been turned into a film for Netflix, said of Mr Johnson as a character: “I’m not sure one could possibly come up with anything from one’s imagination that could outdo the real thing. You could put Boris in a novel but he wouldn’t be believable.”

In a clip from the film we saw Jeremy Irons playing Chamberlain. Telling his worried aides that he did indeed want to meet Hitler face to face with no-one else present, Chamberlain says: “We must rise to the level of events.”

It was a quote that, perhaps more than any other yesterday, caught the mood of the times.