About 20 years ago, when I was a fervent supporter of Reading FC, the then manager Mark McGhee, was up to some naughty business behind the backs of his employers, flirting with Leicester City and their vacant managerial post.

It was the first time I took interest in the word machiavellian and it has kind of remained one of my favourites ever since, often competing in my list that features words such as omnishambles and buffoon.

Remarkably, you can write about Boris Johnson and use all those three words in the first sentence, yet some people still think this loathsome bastard who would rob his own grandmother, is good laugh.

The list of Boris Johnson crimes goes on and on. Endless lies in newspaper columns resulting in sackings, at least two illegitimate children (allegedly) an abortion (what would Rees-Mogg think?) sacked by his former leader (Michael Howard) for lying about his extramarital affairs, stabbing his other former leader in the back over Brexit, preparing to knife the current one, giving out the address of a journalist who his friend wanted roughing up, calling Conrad Black a decent bloke…shall I go on?

I don’t know the teaching methods at Eton, Oxford and the various Oxbridge Boys Clubs that smash up restaurants for a laugh, but it seems that they are ideal preparation for intolerable bastards. Yet he still gets away with all his serious misdemeanours that make him unfit for public office by simply falling off his bike or getting stuck on a trapeze.

The only thing I will say about Boris Johnson is that he is very clever. He has worked out that the British public, who have very little time on their hands to study his horrific history of lying, cheating and deceiving, love a bit of good old fashioned buffoonery.

Like Savile hiding behind charity, priests hiding behind religion and bankers hiding behind knighthoods, Johnson expertly uses buffoonery and carefully prepared dishevelment to disguise his cunning path to power.

To quote The Jam song, Eton Rifles, time and time again, Boris loads his guns and runs off home from his tea when his skullduggery doesn’t go quite as planned, as was with the case with his deliberately provocative article in The Torygraph at the weekend and of course, when he unexpectedly came face to face with the Brexit vote he didn’t think would happen.

I’m no fan of Theresa May (possibly the worst PM in history) or David Cameron before her, but what Johnson has done to his own allies in his pursuit of power that will ultimately descend into utter chaos, sums up a man with a total lack of human empathy and a pathological lust for control at any cost.

Time and time again, Johnson has looked like soiled goods after damaging interviews and yet more revelations about his conduct but he simply fends them off by getting stuck on a trapeze or going on about the Queen, bunting and all things that make him a Great British patriot.

This buys him time until he is yesterday’s chip paper and he emerges again, guns fully loaded, with the kettle already on back in the Shires, just in case he has to do another runner. How long will it take before his number is up or will he get his big job in the end?

If he does, it will get ugly quickly, as Johnson is a machiavellian omnishambles of a man disguising his hideous and devious personality with increasingly abject buffoonery.

There you go, my three favourite words in one sentence.