Boris Johnson’s big contribution to reducing plastic consumption is not wearing condoms. Or as Gavin Williamson put it this morning: “Boris Johnson has done more for the environment than any other politician.” Quite. We don’t need a joined-up strategy to prevent climate catastrophe with the largest and most successful trading bloc the world has ever seen, because Johnson’s going to spaff our way to the higher ground, while we serve as galley slaves on his privatised sex ark.

Maybe I’m being a shade unfair. So let me say that this election marks a change of behaviour for the prime minister, who has finally started withdrawing. Unfortunately, he’s pulling out of climate debates and BBC interviews, as opposed to single mothers. Still, baby steps. And he’s certainly missed a few of those.

So that’s the icebreakers out of the way. And, indeed, the ice sculptures. Thursday night saw Boris Johnson refuse to turn up to Channel 4’s climate debate, along with Barboured harbinger Nigel Farage. The broadcaster replaced the pair with ice sculptures that melted while the rest of the UK’s party leaders discussed an impending planetary catastrophe which, according to the BBC’s news headline rankings, couldn’t be more important unless it was a letter of complaint from No 10 to Ofcom. Given the debate’s subject matter, this stunt served as a reminder that the most important skill for an irreversibly overheated world will be being a psychopathic shit. Today’s Downing Street lackeys are tomorrow’s militia chiefs, and you should expect to be either be killing for them or being killed by them in due course.

And so to the morning after the night before, when a Channel 4 floor manager is still applying Kleenex to the prime ministerial puddle, and hopefully making his refusal to mop up Nigel Farage a union matter. Where are our dramatis personae? On LBC a single mother has read Johnson’s recently unearthed 1995 Spectator column, in which he tips all over single mothers. What a quaint period piece, from a time when all you ever heard about was single mothers, and not the deadbeat dads that left them to it. The single mother’s voice is wobbling while she asks how he can talk about her family like that when he won’t even talk about his own. Presenter Nick Ferrari asks Johnson how many children he has and whether he plays a full and proper role in all their lives. The prime minister twice refuses to answer.

Meanwhile, whither Stanley Johnson, the father that public life really needs to be abandoned by? By Friday morning, this desperate ligger had already bagged several media appearances out of his son’s C4 no-show. But I imagine Stanley will now have been spirited to the oubliette in which Jacob Rees-Mogg is being kept, after his appearance on Victoria Derbyshire’s BBC programme. Here, Johnson Snr’s reaction to being told that one viewer had called his son Pinocchio was: “that requires a degree of literacy which I think the great British public doesn’t necessarily have. They couldn’t spell Pinocchio if they tried.” A line somehow redolent of that deathless Donald Trump quote: “I love the poorly educated.”

This triumph of a media round started with Stanley opting to be in the Channel 4 spin room, despite his son wimping out. Having your dad in the spin room is the most embarrassing thing I’ve seen since what feels like forever, which is the new way of saying “yesterday”. It is even worse than Donald Trump’s regular deployment of his large adult sons, Don Jr and Eric. Or, as a friend calls them, Uday and Schmuday. Stanley Johnson is the arguably the most talentless political relative of all, miles outstripping fabled duds like Billy Carter or Terry Major-Ball or Cherie Blair’s sister Lauren Booth, and making Jeremy Corbyn’s climate-denialist brother Piers look like someone you would prefer to have a pint with. Possibly. The pushiest of all parents, living through the child he helped to damage – just think of Stanley Johnson as the Joe Jackson of British politics.

Friday morning brought a press conference featuring Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, which unfortunately turned out not to concern the imminent arrival of an asteroid. I can’t think of anyone who could motivate the living to embrace the kindness of death more gladly than these two, whose images should be plastered over the walls of abattoirs.

Instead, Johnson and Gove – enabled by former Labour MP Gisela Stuart – lied about getting Brexit done in days, with the advance briefing floating the theme as “Remember how you felt that morning?” (a reference to 24 June 2016). I certainly remember how Gove and Johnson looked that morning. Like a pair of absolute journalists, at least one of whom had already tucked away a couple of bottles of rosé, but who’d both just got a massive legal on a story they’d thought would fly under the radar. Three years on, things have only got worse. Can’t believe that letting newspaper journalists run the country has come to this. If only the state of the newspaper industry had offered some clue as to how it would play out.

Indeed, somewhat ironicidally, Michael Gove seems to be pivoting to video. The actual cabinet minister turned up to Channel 4 with his own three-person crew to film what he lied was his “no-platforming” – a reminder that Gove’s frequently waved reusable coffee cup is no offset against his vast output of toxic emissions.

The chilling thing is that even a month ago, this stunt would have felt far-fetched. What will the next 12 days bring, other than things we might place in the file marked “MUCH WORSE”? It’s difficult to be sure about anything, other than the realisation that there are highly unstable radioactive isotopes deteriorating less quickly than our standards of public debate.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian journalist