It's simple: Johnson should not be considered accountable. He's won a five year term and he doesn't HAVE to appear in front of the public, or the HoC. This is how dictatorships work - the leader is a chimera, a fantasy figure much speculated-about in their physical absence.../

It's also how abusive relationships work - the abuser withdraws, physically and emotionally, in order to whip up the abusee's self-doubt and cultivate their obsession. To make yourself available is to dispel the mystique. That's not how politics work here anymore.

You'll notice that he will be much talked about in his absence: his every message pored over in the press, the minutiae of his recovery discussed and dissected by right wing hacks. He will have a kind of chimerical presence in a space where fantasy and personality cult can grow.

Meanwhile his underlings will be wheeled out to give press conferences as the death toll continues to mount, thus becoming associated in the public mind with the unfolding human disaster, while "Boris" looks on from the hygienic distance of Chequers.

In case you haven't figured it out yet: the whole country is being psychologically worked over by people for whom - even (or perhaps that should read "especially"?) in the middle of a crisis - the gaining of power and its consolidation are the supreme, the only, objectives.