The writing has been on the wall for some time. All that Boris Johnson has ever wanted has been to be loved. More than that. Adored. Worshipped. By as many people as possible. And for a while he felt the love, his narcissism fed by the laughter at his jokes, the respect for his classical allusions and the amusement at his zip-wire antics. As the crowds grew, so did his need. Filling his inner emptiness became his life’s work.

Then it all began to fall apart. He’d never expected to be on the winning side of the referendum and was horrified to find that many people both held him responsible for Brexit and expected him to come up with a solution to it. He tried carrying on as before, but the end-of-the-pier showman schtick wore thin. He told himself it didn’t matter that people were laughing at him, not with him. After all, any laughter had to be better than none.

Then the laughter stopped completely and Boris was left as his own echo chamber. One that kept repeating “failure” back at him. Just two weeks ago, his big pitch for a positive Brexit had been greeted with near silent disappointment even by his few remaining allies. No one was listening and no one cared.

Any dreams he might have once harboured about becoming prime minister had long since turned to dust. Now it was all he could do to hang on to his current job, and as of 8.30am on Tuesday, after his interview on Radio 4’s Today programme, his grasp on that had become a little more tenuous.

After a brief discussion about the situation in Syria, Mishal Husain asked the foreign secretary about the draft legal text to be published by the EU later this week. Specifically the section about Northern Ireland, which it is likely to insist will remain fully aligned with EU law because everything the UK has so far proposed so far appears to have been drawn up by five-year-olds. Ireland has never been Boris’s strong point and he is usually at pains to avoid the subject. Now we were about to find out why.

It was like this. The situation between the Republic and Northern Ireland was basically the same as that between Westminster and Camden. Two London boroughs over which more than 3,000 lives had been lost fighting for ownership of the border territory of the A501.

He, Boris, had singlehandedly brought decades of violence to a halt by setting up a congestion charge system. Camden Market and Covent Garden Market had been united into a single market by “anaesthetically and invisibly [taking] hundreds of millions of pounds from the accounts of people travelling between those two boroughs without any need for border checks whatever”.

Husain sounded as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing and did a quick double-take to check the foreign secretary was being serious. Apparently he was. Yes, there had been some initial hiccups when the congestion charge cameras were installed, but armed patrols had prevented them from being blown up. Now the technology was so good it could act as border guards and check that all goods specifically made in Westminster would pay the appropriate tariffs in Camden with an Oyster card.

Having gone on to dismiss Martin Donnelly, the former top civil servant in the international trade department, as some kind of half-witted EU stooge for saying that Britain would be mad to leave the single market and the customs union, Boris reverted to his default settings of mumbling “take back control”. Inside Number 10, Theresa May was wondering if it was about time she took back control of Boris. The man was fast becoming a liability.

There was still time, though, for Boris to dig himself in just a little bit deeper. The truth was he was a wee bit bored with all this Brexit stuff. It was too complicated and no fun. “One day, Mishal, we will be sitting here not talking about Brexit,” he said. “It is going to be fantastic.” He was right on one point. It is fantastic that the foreign secretary can’t be bothered to talk about Brexit, but he was wrong on another count. In a few years time Mishal will still be sitting in the Today studio, but Boris will be home alone.