None of the campaigns has yet begun in earnest but already we’re straight in to the Brexit but not Brexit election.

Which is to say, the election that is happening to resolve Brexit, even though Brexit stood a pretty good chance of being resolved before Boris Johnson withdrew it in order to have a Brexit resolving election instead, is going to resolve Brexit by talking about absolutely anything but Brexit (and it probably won’t resolve it).

Naturally, the rows about whether or not there’ll be TV debates and who will or won’t chicken out of them are already well underway, so much so that precious little attention could be spared to the TV debate that happened on Wednesday lunchtime, as it does, theoretically every Wednesday lunchtime been Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.

It was, predictably, a foretaste of what is to come. And what is to come, I suspect, is the country coming to realise what’s already long been known.

That Boris Johnson really, truly, isn’t very good at this stuff. And though Jeremy Corbyn isn’t either, he does have a certain knack for turning it on when an election comes round (and if you include Labour leadership elections, they tend to almost every year).

Privately, the Conservatives are worried that Jeremy Corbyn will turn the election into an election on anything but Brexit, and specifically the crisis in the NHS. And privately, the Conservatives are slightly concerned that they’ve accidentally scheduled this election to take place slap bang in the middle of what NHS chiefs are confidently predicting will be the worst NHS winter crisis in decades.

That would explain why Boris Johnson doesn’t want to talk about it. But it doesn’t explain the quite stunning lack of emotional intelligence he displayed over the despatch boxes at PMQs. (There are, of course, other things that explain that. Secret court cases to suppress knowledge of the existence of his own children, for example.)

At one point, Jeremy Corbyn read a letter he had been sent by a woman called Gillian, whose mother had died earlier this year, and in her final years of ill health had suffered as a direct result of shortages of doctors and nurses in the NHS and lengthy waiting time for treatment.

There was a moment’s respectful pause among MPs, then Johnson rose.

“I can certainly say that we will deal with his constituent Gillian’s concerns,” he said, before switching directly into a wild pre-scripted rant.

“It’s all very well to be an Islingtonian protester, siding with Russia over what happened in Salisbury,” he blithered, pointing his finger. “Flip flopping one way, now the other. Leave one week, remain the next.” Blah blah blah.

Gillian, we must assume, was watching. Gillian’s concerns, that he had just promised to “deal with”, were that her mother had died a harsh death in shocking circumstances.

And here was the actual prime minister, wafting it all away with a lie so wearily quotidian he didn’t even realise he was telling it. Yes yes, Gillian’s mum. I’ll sort that out, whatever it is. Dead is she? Oh right. Yes, We’ll sort all that out. Anyway Salisbury. Hugo Chavez. Get Brexit Done.

It was risible stuff. Johnson is a walking gaffe machine. That’s well known. That, indeed, is why his handlers in the Tory leadership campaign wisely placed him under house arrest almost for its entirety. (They would discover, of course, that he was more than capable of screwing it all up even from inside there, when the police were called to investigate reports of domestic abuse.)

The question is not if or even when he will hopelessly humiliate himself in the next six weeks. It’s only the degree to which it matters.