Let me be clear from the start: it was absolutely wrong to make the claims of the substance that he did. That a foreign leader broke off from allegedly fiddling his election to publicly say so might be regarded as brass neck of the worst order – but accuracy matters. The one does not excuse the other. It was entirely right that the comment was withdrawn, and the MasterChef judge Gregg Wallace going on telly to clarify what he meant about the rendang sauce/chicken skin interaction belatedly went some way to de-escalating the diplomatic fallout with, among others, the Malaysian prime minister.

I know what you’re thinking: how many dodgy foreign leaders are going to accuse the Brits of substance-related disinformation this year? Are these things cheaper in bulk? All I can tell you is that, while artisan greengrocer Gregg Wallace has vaguely conceded his cock-up, artisan foreign secretary Boris Johnson is still trying to style his out in the face of having needlessly handed Russia a propaganda coup. Having previously said that “the guy” at Porton Down had told him there was “no doubt” the novichok nerve agent used in the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, was made in Russia, the Foreign Office has had to offer a more nuanced version of the evidential trail.

The Kremlin has picked up his slopfest and run with it – yet as Britain’s most shameless cynic, Boris hopes 'the world will see through this shameless cynicism'

Clearly, Boris’s needless overstatement was a gift to troll tsar Putin, whose known modus operandi is to encourage and seed multiple doubts and conspiracy theories about any Russia-related misdeeds until the factual environment is more toxically polluted than one of the reactor ghost towns the Soviets forgot to admit to.

Meanwhile, the Russian ambassador to the UN was channelling former KGB bleeding-heart Putin directly on Thursday, when he posed a plangent inquiry about the Skripal pets. “What happened to these animals? Why doesn’t anyone mention them?” he mentioned, stopping just shy of demanding Ace Ventura be seconded to the OPCW investigation.

What happened, alas, has just emerged. The two guinea pigs were not victims of novichok, which would have made them a guesstimated 350,001st and 350,002nd of their species to succumb to a nerve agent, though probably the first pair in a domestic setting. Instead, the poor things were killed by thirst, having been sealed inside the Skripals’ house by investigators. The cat was in such a distressed state when a vet eventually gained entry that it was euthanised, reportedly at Porton Down.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gregg Wallace on Celebrity MasterChef. Photograph: Screengrab/BBC/Shine TV

This is some way from a typical case of animal neglect, though for many of Britain’s 5 million armchair Hans Blixes, the pets’ fate will be inexcusable. It should certainly be more than enough for Labour’s Chris Williamson to take his Lord Hawski-Hawski act on Russian TV again. Don’t worry if you missed the Derby North MP’s sombre-suited explanation that the Skripal story was the British government’s “way of diverting attention from their own difficulties over Brexit and economic policy”. It’ll be played on a grateful loop across Russian state media for days – as a way of diverting attention from their own difficulties, funnily enough.

Idiots gonna idiot. It’s just a shame that foreign secretaries won’t foreign secretary. You hear a lot about post-truth these days, but with each new sack-resistant balls-up, Boris Johnson moves closer to the category of post-shame. He’s a sort of market knock-off of Prince Philip – Le Shark Sportif of not really giving a toss. The foreign secretary who feels less shame and takes less grownup responsibility for himself than Gregg Wallace. Gregg Wallace! I mean, Gregg is the guy who “couldn’t get to the bottom” of one of his former wives’ claim that he was “needy”. “I find it all weird,” he mused. “I mean, she came up to the flat in London last week to change my sheets.”

Once again it will be up to Theresa May and various Swat mandarins to change Boris’s bed after the latest shitting thereof. Obviously it would stay classified for decades, but perhaps Whitehall might undertake a time-and-motion study to evaluate precisely how much Foreign Office time is spent dealing with cock-ups by the foreign secretary. It is difficult to think of anyone more loftily dismissive of the central demands of their role, certainly since Hristo Stoichkov got the Celta Vigo job and used his unveiling to announce: “I do not believe in tactics.” His tenure … did not go well.

Boris Johnson fails to understand that intelligence means doubt | Gaby Hinsliff Read more

It’s remarkable, incidentally, how often the foreign secretary is undone by language. For a man who wears his vast vocabulary so heavily, Boris struggles for lexical precision when it actually matters. He can lavish who knows how much time coming up with the mot juste for Jeremy Corbyn – “mugwump” – and then produce it like he’s James effing Joyce in every news interview for a 24-hour period. But he can’t expend quite so much care when discussing the evidential basis for the deployment of a nerve agent in an attempted assassination on UK soil.

But on he goes. The Kremlin has duly picked up his slopfest and run with it – yet as Britain’s most shameless cynic, Boris hopes “the world will see through this shameless cynicism”. Oh dear. All we need now is Michael Gove to tell Britain to have some respect for the experts and we’ve got the full set.

We are living through a political reboot of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Politicians who stoked distrust of expertise are now desperate for people to take the official word for things. The “ultra-patriotic” provisional wing of the leave campaign openly backs the Kremlin over the British government. And a whole lot of senior continuity remainers who are bemoaning it all have conveniently forgotten their own role in the intelligence misrepresentation that led up to Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war. It’s as if two generations of political chickens have come home to roost at once, and no one in charge knows what to do with them all. Rendang, perhaps. But are they even trusted to know how?

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist