Jon Culshaw, impressionist

‘His comfort blanket has been taken away’

I’ve been doing Boris impressions ever since he emerged as Boris the Menace in Private Eye. He stuck out from the more orderly politicians – a bumbling, peroxide-haired loose cannon who spouts Latin. Boris has always used comedy and bluster to paper over inadequacy and problems. Comedy was a tool to distract, sending the focus elsewhere the way a magician does. That method has gone now. Like frozen snow from the top of a slanting shed roof, it has slid off and landed with a real thump.

Now we’re in falling-to-bits mode and seeing an angry, frustrated Boris. At first he seemed to think it was all quite easy against a “mugwump” leader of the opposition. But Corbyn now has a bit of traction. Boris is a boxer in round four, frustrated by his opponent, and he doesn’t have a plan B. The closest we got to this in the past was the 2013 interview with Eddie Mair who told him: “You’re a nasty piece of work aren’t you?” We’re seeing him under pressure. The way he is hugging himself in the Commons with arms folded, it is as if he is trying to shield himself from an unexpected hailstorm. The regular trusted game plan is not working any more. When you’re prime minister it’s an entirely different level of scrutiny. His comfort blanket has been taken away and he has to find a new strategy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shielding himself from a hail storm … Boris Johnson in the House of Commons. Photograph: Jessica Taylor/HOC

I met Boris once, briefly, at an awards ceremony. As we passed each other he sort of gave a nod and a grunt. His body language is like when a child mimics an elephant. To do an impression of him when he’s getting into Latin mode you need real octopus gesticulations. He should have been a compere at the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club.

In the Spitting Image days, they had to invent a comic persona for certain characters like John Major. You certainly don’t need that with Boris or Trump. It feels as if the pendulum has swung from the homogenised, bland tidiness of David Cameron and Nick Clegg right over to the political equivalent of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer hitting each other with frying pans.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

James Graham, playwright

‘The week Westminster jumped the shark’

If we must have relentless high drama in our once relatively stable parliamentary democracy (The Crown took a year off while they recast – can’t we?) then Johnson and his showrunner Dominic Cummings had probably aspired to something a bit more “HBO”, a bit “subscription model”. The sword-swinging violence but also the classiness of Game of Thrones. Theirs would be a shocking, bloody first season with enough larger-than-life characters and an unpredictable approach to killing off audience favourites that it might just run and run and run.

The classicist Johnson (whose political hero is Pericles) may have even been hifalutin enough to eye-up the Greek theatre format, which created the very conditions for the birth of democracy itself. However, there’s another format that in times of turmoil plumps for an improbably high death toll, the swallowing up of story and the return of cancelled characters – and that’s the soap opera.

Play Video 0:56 Boris Johnson rambles through attempt to recite police caution – video

Point of order, Mister Speaker, there is absolutely nothing wrong with British soaps. I didn’t see a straight play outside of panto until my late teens but gobbled up Emmerdale and Corrie and ’Stenders, getting my neighbours to tape hours of episodes if we ever went on holiday. I wouldn’t be a playwright without them. When they work it’s because a loyal audience who have invested in the longrunning undulations of fictional lives are rewarded with plausible outcomes seeded in for months in advance if not years. They work less well when a new exec arrives and wants to shake things to make some noise.

And so we have the week of jumping the shark in Westminster. Wiping out 20 – 20! – rebel Tories in one go (for committing the same crime that Boris and Rees-Mogg did under May). It was meant to feel like the Red Wedding but is in fact just the plane crash in Emmerdale. The expulsion from the formerly-known-as-the-Conservative party of Nicholas Soames by whip Mark Spencer was meant to be the killing of traitor Alan Bradley by that noble Blackpool tram, but it was more the beloved Tiffany Mitchell run down by Frank Butcher one fateful night in Albert Square. The early prorogation of Parliament aspired to invoke that carefree derring-do of the lesbian kiss in Brookside but (rightly) engendered the queasy unease of David Wicks fancying his own daughter. Chancellor Sajid Javid’s character had incidentally indicated he would leave the show if that happened, but has miraculously developed classic soap amnesia. And so we are left with John Major returning Dirty Den-style to inject some old-school heft by suing the government for being illegal (Bouncer’s dream).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Like Barbara Windsor leaving the Queen Vic … expelled Conservative MP Kenneth Clarke, far left, in the House of Commons. Photograph: Jessica Taylor/AFP/Getty Images

I say none of this with writer’s relish, incidentally. I don’t revel in the wealth of potential material. Some formats need rebooting and starting afresh, no question, but you juxtapose that with the comfort of constants. Ken Clarke being forced out of the Conservative party after 50 years feels like Barbara Windsor no longer being behind the bar of the Queen Vic. It has all the foreboding of the ravens leaving the Tower. You can’t help but feel the storyliners may have watched the show, sure, are maybe able to talk convincingly about the canon. But they just don’t quite like it enough. They’re not true fans. And an audience can always tell.

Bridget Christie

‘This is a spectacularly bad run of gigs’

“He thinks the friends of this country are in Tehran, in the Kremlin, and in Caracas. I think he’s Caracas!” “He’s worried about trade deals, but there’s only one chlorinated chicken I can see in this room!” “The police have to learn a caution … what is it? You do not have to say anything … no, wait … but if you do say something … what is it? … I’ve got a puppy … something that you rely on in court … he loves the stairs … anyway you get the gist!” “You are a big girl’s blouse!”

Boris Johnson is having a spectacularly bad run of gigs. Even worse than May’s coughing one and that dancing one, and she’s a woman, and, as we all know, women aren’t funny at all. He’s doing the kind of material Alan Partridge would do if he suddenly found himself as prime minister, and none of it’s working.

Play Video 2:01 Caracas and chlorinated chicken: Johnson's first PMQs clash with Corbyn – video highlights

During his first PMQs, the PM had the demeanour of a comic who’s had to dash straight to a gig after giving birth. This came after his catastrophic address to the nation on Monday, where he was drowned out by the noise of protesters. There wasn’t much he could have done to rescue this one. Watching it, I thought about the daytime show I did to 80 screaming babies at Soho theatre once. It’s an unwinnable situation. You can’t negotiate with a baby or with a hostile crowd you can’t even see.

But he’s had missed opportunities, too. When Phillip Lee crossed the floor of the Commons and defected to the Lib Dems, instead of ignoring it and letting it rattle him, Johnson should have owned it. He should have committed to the bumbling, oafish posh-boy character he does, wrestled him to the ground, sat on him and farted. His fans would’ve loved that.

Play Video 0:34 Tory MP Phillip Lee defects to Lib Dems midway through Johnson speech – video

Were Johnson a fellow comedian, or literally anyone other than Boris Johnson, my heart would go out to him. But he isn’t and so it doesn’t. What we’re watching now is a man realising that the character he invented for himself in order to get something he didn’t want doesn’t work when you’re prime minister. It was fine for panel shows and PR opportunities, and for getting him into No 10, but he didn’t think it through. He failed to write the final act, and now he’s trapped in his own clown, in a costume that doesn’t fit any more, being forced to perform in a circus that’s packing up around him. How funny is that?

Critic Mark Lawson

‘A mock-Churchillian mocked by TV’

In November, it will be 30 years since the proceedings of the House of Commons were first televised. Opponents of the move argued that politicians might come across as false (or falser) because speeches pitched at the chamber would be too shouty and spitty for the lower-key medium. This position echoed the long hostility to TV of Winston Churchill, who perhaps knew closeups would not suit his grand operatic oratory.

Supporters of parliamentary broadcasting argued that good politicians would find a way to mediate their speeches between the interior audience and the viewers beyond, while bad politicians would be found out by the camera’s scrutiny.

Boris Johnson, the ultimate mock-Churchillian, was this week mockingly exposed on and by television.

Play Video 0:15 Boris Johnson appears to call Jeremy Corbyn a 'great big girl's blouse' – video

The best public performing politicians of the mass-media era – Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair – had the ability to recalibrate their delivery for outside arena, indoor hall, media interview, TV address to the nation. Even Barack Obama, an astonishing high public orator, sometimes struggled to find the lower keys.

Although often ridiculed as a speaker, Jeremy Corbyn has recognisably different registers for a campaign rally, the despatch box, and a Laura Kuenssberg interview. In contrast, Theresa May spoke the same way in any situation, a consequence of the robotic quality identified by the Guardian’s John Crace.

Johnson’s problem is that, while his style is far more engaging and populist than May’s, he also has only one – channelling Churchill. Although Johnson’s hosting of Have I Got News For You? earned him a reputation for being “good on television”, the impact came from a mismatch between his grand manner and the usual demeanour of a TV presenter, in the same way that it is amusing to see Brian Blessed booming lines from an Autocue.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A comic figure … Boris Johnson on Have I Got News For You in 2002. Photograph: BBC

And, whereas Churchill had an inherent gravitas, Johnson is essentially a comic figure – the joke on him rather than, as he hopes, from him. As a result, his oratorical style is a jokey karaoke of Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour, bizarrely arrhythmic vocal rises and dives, punctuated, as when he was barracking Corbyn this week, by hollered insults presumably perfected at the Oxford Union and Bullingdon dinners.

What it means for a politician to be a good media performer is partly a matter of personality, but also of content and context. Philip Hammond, long pilloried as a dreary speaker, was electrifying this week in both broadcast and parliamentary appearances, because what he had to say was so devastating. (Geoffrey Howe made an equivalent transformation in the final days of Thatcherism.)

Johnson’s problem is that, drilled by his wacky handler “Dom” (increasingly seeming to be an abbreviation of Dominatrix) Cummings to keep his public utterances free of possibly incriminating substance, he has been reduced to a series of verbal and facial tics that are not even his own. Cummings has kept Johnson off the box as far as possible. However, while the Commons is still sitting, its proceedings will be televised; and the prime minister’s inability to adjust his high, ripe style to the more conversational form has shattered his myth as a charismatic communicator.

It seems fitting that Johnson should have been exposed as the third-rate Churchill impersonator he is by the medium that the original so feared.