You can tell when the Foreign Secretary is in serious mode as he switches from joker to hypocrite.

To mention the fact that Trump’s Muslim travel ‘ban’ was signed on Holocaust Memorial Day, as many angry MPs from every party did on Monday afternoon, was apparently to ‘trivialise the holocaust.’

When Mike Gapes, Labour MP for Ilford South, mentioned ‘Theresa the Appeaser,’ Boris Johnson briskly told him it was, ‘distasteful to make comparisons between the elected leader of a great democracy and 1930s tyrants.’

It certainly is. And he would know, it being not yet two weeks since he himself compared the elected leader of France to a Nazi guard ‘handing out punishment beatings’ in a ‘World War Two movie’ and just over six months since he had said the EU itself was ‘pursuing a similar goal to Hitler.’

We’ve seen this tactic before. When, at party conference, Sky News accosted him with a £350m cheque for the NHS and asked him if he might sign it, he walked off telling them they were doing a ‘pointless stunt.’ This from a chap, who a couple of months earlier, had donned a protective face mask to take an angle grinder to the number £350,000,000 laid out in sheets of rolled steel, then three days later, on an industrial estate somewhere in the Midlands, smelted an aluminium cheque of the same amount.

In his defence, the Foreign Secretary was in a near impossible position. Called to the house ostensibly to condemn the US President’s visa ‘ban’ for citizens of seven Islamic countries (it’s not actually a ‘ban’, the Foreign Secretary made clear, and the above quotation marks reflect merely what Trump himself called it), he also had to preserve the strategic alliance, and honour Trump’s right to a state visit to Britain, which is expected to happen soon.

With customary tact, Johnson reminded the house that the Queen has previously hosted ‘Nicolai Ceausescu and Robert Mugabe’, so could ‘probably cope’ with Donald Trump. How he’ll have loved that.

Time and again, members rose to attack Trump, Johnson telling them ‘exhaust their wells of outrage,’ and reminding them it was not a UK policy.

Yvette Cooper told him to ‘For the sake of history have the guts to speak out.’ He did not do so. It would not be in the UK’s interests.