I wonder – just what were the BBC questions Boris Johnson managed to dodge?

And then, as if by magic, the interview was pulled. The BBC’s correspondent accidentally emailed her questions to Boris, rather than her research team, and decided it wouldn’t be appropriate to proceed.

Like a boxer who reveals his game plan, like a football manager who hands over his intelligence dossier, like a cop who tells the criminal who grassed them up, the cover was blown.

We might wonder what questions were revealed prior to the non-event. What questions had the BBC lined up for the man who once hid in a fridge, rather than be interviewed on TV?

Did they ask him about the events in August 19 when he decided to prorogue parliament, so that he could force through his economy-battering Brexit? After all, BoJo thought he’d got reasonable justification, only to be told a month later by the UK’s highest court that his actions were unlawful.

If the BBC didn’t want to ask about that, maybe it wished to quiz him about his pole-dancing friend, Jennifer Arcuri, who referred to Boris as Alex the Great. Arcuri was the recipient of tax-payers’ money during Johnson’s time as London Mayor and it was later revealed they’d had an affair, with Johnson allegedly asking her to send racy images of herself. One picture, Arcuri said, was “enough to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.” The mind boggles.

Perhaps the BBC wanted to ask Johnson why he’d avoided Piers Morgan ahead of the 2019 General Election, by hiding in a walk-in fridge. He later emerged, bizarrely, carrying milk, claiming he was categorically not hiding in the fridge in which he was categorically hiding.

There might have been questions about Boris Johnson’s illness, when Covid broke. He’d a month earlier been at a hospital, shaking hands with Covid patients, which might not have been the wisest way to tackle a pandemic that killed an estimated 205,000 in the UK. While Johnson recovered, one of the nurses who tended to him gave up the ghost. “We’re not getting the respect and now pay that we deserve. I’m just sick of it. So I’ve handed in my resignation,” said ITU specialist, Jenny McGee.

Maybe the BBC wanted to ask him about his dog’s poor toilet habits at Chequers, or his defence of Dominic Cummings’ journey to Barnard Castle, during the pandemic. Or perhaps they wanted to review Wallpapergrate, in which Johnson secretly borrowed £112,000 from a Tory donor to get rid of Theresa May’s furnishings, which included wallpaper at £840 a roll.

There may have been other questions, like Johnson’s remarks to the Confederation of British Industry when he decided to bang on about Peppa Pig World, rather than exports to America and China.

There would certainly have been a question or two about Partygate, which became the catch-all term to describe the parties that went on at 10 Downing Street during Johnson’s watch. And there’d very definitely have been stuff about Johnson’s final downfall and ignominious exit, when the Chris Pincher affair became the straw that finally broke big dog’s back.

Sadly, we didn’t get to hear Johnson’s responses, though he covered some of the ground in his over-hyped book, Unleashed, a volume in which he claimed Partygate was cooked up by Cummings and communications director Lee Cain.

The boosterish man whose demise taught him precisely nothing about humility or penance was baffled that the Tories ditched him – and sure he’d have won the election this year, had he still been in post.

In typically-deluded ramblings, Johnson’s biggest failing, as he recalled it, was not buttering up Tory MPs. “Too often I would go back to the Number Ten flat, tired out, and work into the evening, when I should have been talking to colleagues and keeping them cheerful.” If his colleagues had “stuck together”, he has “no doubt that we would have gone on to win in 2024”.

Sadly, the Beeb blew it – and whether or not Boris regrets any of the above is anyone’s guess. Though I think we can all guess that he assuredly doesn’t.