In 2021, under pressure from opposition parties and the press – and from several of his own backbenchers rightly (or sometimes far-rightly) concerned by a number of his administration's more unusual decisions – Boris Johnson established an independent public inquiry into his own government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis.

Billions lost to fraud and wasted on useless personal protective equipment and IT tracking and alert systems that didn’t work were just the tip of the fatberg. There were also the dithering delays in the implementation of lockdown measures and the belated enforcements of border restrictions, as well as the allocations of lucrative contracts to unqualified cronies – including one senior figure’s former pub landlord whose experience in the procurement of specialist medical supplies seemed sketchy to say the least.

That’s not to mention the various social distancing rule breaches at the very heart of Mr. Johnson’s administration, which many might consider indicative of the seriousness, or otherwise, of the blustering braggart’s approach.

Perhaps the biggest issue though was the Conservatives’ long-term underfunding of public healthcare in the UK, a decade-long mismanagement of a once-treasured institution that had led the nation to be woefully unprepared for the catastrophe that unfolded.

Earlier this month, the British Cabinet Office refused to hand over to the public inquiry sets of WhatsApp messages sent by senior government figures at the height of the crisis, citing issues of relevance and confidentiality, and sought a judicial review of the inquiry’s demands.

The chair of the inquiry responded that it was up to her to decide what was and wasn’t relevant to her own investigation.

The Cabinet Office said it didn’t want to set a dangerous precedent whereby the fear of future public disclosures would impede full and frank discussions between ministers and senior officials.

However, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that he’d already handed over his own WhatsApp messages to the Cabinet Office and urged that they be released immediately to the inquiry. He added that he’d pass them directly to the inquiry if requested to do so.

The next day, he said he’d then done so.

Yet The Times newspaper reported that he’d only delivered messages dated from May 2021 onwards, thereby missing those from the crucial first fourteen months of the Covid crisis.

Johnson responded that he was unable to access those earlier messages “safely” as they had been on an old phone whose number had been made generally available online.

You didn’t have to be an expert in cybersecurity to suspect that this excuse didn’t make a whole heap of sense.

What in the name of sanity was the blond buffoon talking about… and what the freaking heck might he be attempting to conceal?

(Admittedly, it’s not especially difficult to imagine what the notorious old liar and Lothario might have been trying to hide. Indeed, in this context, it also seems worth pointing out that Boris Johnson had already been referred by the Cabinet Office to the Metropolitan Police for documents he’d earlier disclosed to them as part of the inquiry, papers which may suggest further breaches of the Covid rules.)

Meanwhile, the former Health Secretary Matt Hancock also said he’d be happy for his texts to be published, but nobody much cared about this as those messages had already been leaked to the press by the journalist whom he’d hired to ghost-write his own pandemic memoirs for him.

Many members of the British public were somewhat taken aback by the idea of government by WhatsApp, rather than key deliberations and decision-making taking place through formally structured and recorded processes, especially at the time of an unprecedented peacetime global crisis.

(This scenario was denied by one former minister who has argued that  “most of the messages are about coffee and about who wants to have what kind of coffee at what kind of meeting”. Somehow, however, this depiction of a crisis administration's priorities also wasn’t especially reassuring.)

So, what the flaming sambucas, we asked ourselves, had been taking place in the core machinery of government during those critical months, and what seventeen shades of shambles were still apparently rampant in the works these tired old shysters continuing to haunt the halls of Westminster?

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None of this seemed to make any sense. As the BBC observed, this was “thought to be the first time a government has taken legal action against an inquiry it has set up”.

This felt like government by paradox, an alternative reality landscaped in the mind of M. C. Escher, and scripted by Lewis Carroll from a story by Dr. Seuss – with a few surreal brushstrokes by Salvador Dali thrown in to properly stir things up.

Franz Kafka couldn’t have made the situation seem more absurd. Jonathan Swift would have found the convoluted politics of it too fantastically silly to be believed.

This unmitigated madness meant that the British taxpayer was paying for lawyers to defend the government against a government inquiry whose lawyers were also funded by taxpayers’ money to argue against the first set of advocates. In addition, the legal team representing Mr. Johnson were also paid out of public finances.

However, Boris Johnson’s decision to bypass the Cabinet Office and provide documentation directly to the inquiry prompted the Cabinet Office to threaten to stop paying his legal fees if he continued to send such material straight to the inquiry rather than via their censors, and thereby to “frustrate or undermine the government’s position in relation to the inquiry”.

In other words, he wasn’t supposed to be helping an inquiry which he had himself set up, as that would be counter to the interests of the government for which the inquiry was working. That government now appeared to be attempting to bribe the former Prime Minister to keep his mouth shut.

What a bunch of Muppets! What the Fraggle Rock?!

The same day that the government effectively took itself to court, one of its ministers commented that he had “very little doubt” that the Cabinet Office would lose its case at judicial review and eventually be forced to hand over the disputed set of unredacted documents to the public inquiry.

So, in effect, the government was spending lavish sums of public money, at a time of economic hardship and spending constraints, suing itself in a case which it didn’t even expect to win… indeed, one which it positively expected to lose.

The fact that the inquiry is being led by a retired and highly respected senior judge, one now elevated to the House of Lords, might of course have suggested that she herself had a reasonably strong idea of the scope of her own legal authority to require the Cabinet Office to hand over the documents she felt she needed.

“Ministers go to war with judge over Covid WhatsApps,” the headline on the front of the Daily Mail trumpeted with typical glee. (It’s a newspaper which enjoys depicting the judiciary as a bunch of leftist crackpots, especially when judges rule against the excesses and transgressions of its beloved Tory governments.)

The Cabinet Office that morning offered its assurances that it would “continue to cooperate fully with the inquiry” at precisely the moment that it was announcing that it had decided not to cooperate fully with the inquiry.

An average, ordinary, and fundamentally rational citizen may at that point have looked at this Whitehall farce and wondered what in the name of the weeping angels and all their blinking victims was really going on.

Conspiracy theorists might have considered this a ham-fisted attempt to cover up a major scandal. More moderate commentators supposed that certain ministers and their officials were worried about being caught out by minor indiscretions, private disclosures and unprofessional remarks.

Many people asked if there might be something among these thousands of messages that could embarrass current premier Rishi Sunak – perhaps Boris Johnson’s unfiltered opinion of the diminutive multimillionaire – but most just felt that this was most likely a case of civil servants seeking to protect their own professional reputations, occupational pensions and prospects of well-remunerated future careers in the private sector.

Whatever the truth behind all this might have been, it was starting to look to the watching world like an utterly crazy mess – even madder than the chaos the inquiry had been set up to investigate.

You honestly couldn’t have made it up. As a satire on the deceit and dysfunctionality of an exhausted administration which has long since lost any trace of moral probity, decency and basic common sense, it would be thought too improbable a fiction to ever get into print.

But this was only the start of these shenanigans. Baroness Hallett’s inquiry is set this week to open its series of public hearings, grilling a range of political heavyweights under the unforgiving glare of its forensic scrutiny.

On the evidence of what we’ve seen so far, one might reasonably suspect that’s when the full extent of the lunacy will truly begin, there on our screens for all the world to see.

What, indeed, the flipping flack! But, at least for now, let’s not even start to speculate upon the degree of further flack with which this crumbling administration will almost certainly then get hit.