ONE of the few BBC comedy shows that is still actually funny is the venerable Dead Ringers on Radio 4. Its Christmas review of the year featured a running joke about Boris Johnson as a kind of Jekyll and Hyde politician, in constant tension.

There is Good Boris, who loves animal welfare, puppies and the environment. But every so often the old right-wing Bullingdon brute crashes through and rampages around abusing foreigners and women. So which is it?

So far, we’ve just seen Dr Boris’s good side. He seems determined to defy Labour’s portrayal of him as a climate change-denying Thatcherite who wants to turn the UK into a sweat shop colony of Trump America.

READ MORE: Boris Johnson swipe at Nicola Sturgeon blamed for Glasgow climate summit feud

There he was, yesterday, at the Science Museum alongside Sir David Attenborough himself, addressing schoolkids and promising action in advance of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

“The evidence for climate change is now overwhelming,” Mr Johnson said, sounding like George Monbiot. “As the first industrial nation, Britain has a responsibility to lead the way.”.He then promised to bring forward the ban on petrol and diesel cars by five years to 2035 (three years after Scotland).

The former Conservative minister Claire O’Neill, insists that “Boris Johnson doesn’t really understand climate change” and that the preparations for COP26 are in chaos. Well, he should know since she was in charge until Friday, when she was sacked.

She told the BBC that the Scottish and UK governments are at loggerheads over arrangements. Nothing unusual about that. But Ms O’Neill’s main grievance is that she was summarily dismissed, for allegedly bullying civil servants, by Number Ten’s bully-in-chief, Dominic Cummings.

The Dom also provoked a walk-out of lobby journalists after he sought to exclude a number of unsympathetic hacks from No 10 briefings. Perhaps Mr Johnson has outsourced his dark side to the dark lord – an understandable move, but a risky one.

Meanwhile, he is confounding forecasts that, upon entering office, he would sell out the NHS to Donald Trump and permit an invasion of chlorinated chickens in trade talks with his American overlord. It hasn’t turned out like that – at least not yet.

The UK Government insists that it won’t “lower food standards” by allowing chlorine-washed poultry or Frankenstein cattle to infect the supermarket shelves of Britain.

Labour’s election claim that Mr Johnson intended to “sell the National Health Service to Donald Trump” was always an insult to the intelligence. The Donald wouldn’t touch the NHS with a bargepole, because there’s no money in it. Nor have we seen any sign that the NHS is going to have to pay “£500 million more a week” on medicines as Jeremy Corbyn claimed during the election campaign. A forecast that rivalled in hyperbolic absurdity Vote Leave’s claim that we send £350m a week to the EU.

Crying wolf in this way not only helped lose Labour the election, it also diverted legitimate public scrutiny from what might actually happen in the forthcoming trade negotiations. Extending patents on proprietary medicines will be a key issue, but will anyone now notice?

So convinced were the Left that Mr Johnson was Mr Trump’s mini-me that they’ve been sending out increasingly confused messages. Many expected him to endorse Trump’s boycott of Huawei’s 5g tech. Surely, the PM would want to score brownie points with the President?

When No 10 announced that it was turning Chinese on 5g, Labour was at a loss. The Shadow Culture Secretary, Tracy Brabin, said the UK government “should have made its own investment earlier”, which may be true but was beside the point.

It was left to Tory MPs to attack Mr Johnson for endangering British national security by letting the Communists oversee our digital future. Iain Duncan Smith is turning into Boris baiter in chief.

Labour was similarly wrong-footed by Mr Johnson’s decision to nationalise Northern Rail. It could hardly object since state ownership was a key plank of Labour’s manifesto. “He should have done it a long time ago”, it said, ignoring the fact that he wasn’t actually in office.

Then came the bailout last month of the regional airline Flybe. This is not what Thatcherite right-wingers are supposed to do. They should be slaughtering lame ducks. Letting the market decide.

Labour had to execute a handbrake turn. “Another taxpayer bailout for Richard Branson,” said Shadow Transport Secretary Andy McDonald on the day of the rescue. He’d previously urged the Government to do “whatever it takes” to rescue Flybe.

Nicola Sturgeon famously called Mr Johnson a “racist and a misogynist”. Well, there were those burqa jokes and his affairs? But again, the PM hasn’t quite followed the script.

On immigration he has scrapped Theresa May’s objectionable £30,000 earnings limit that was contributing to the NHS staffing crisis. Tory right-wingers started wondering if they’d somehow been landed with Rory Stewart instead of Mr Johnson.

Many feminists suspected that he would drop the Domestic Abuse Bill. But it duly re-emerged as a Government priority in the Queen’s Speech. It will create, in England, a statutory definition of domestic abuse, which includes emotional, coercive or controlling behaviour.

And so it goes on. What we have seen so far from Mr Johnson is far from the image of a far-right authoritarian, the “creeping fascist” Guardian columnists warned about. He is turning out to be a centrist dad, much to the concern of his own backbenchers.

They too assumed that, because he was pro-Brexit, Mr Johnson shared the views of his Daily Telegraph readers. But as anyone who knows him will tell you, he is a bit of a liberal softie on most issues. When he was London Mayor he argued strongly for same-sex marriage and an amnesty for illegal immigrants.

However, belligerent Boris still rules in some areas: like Brexit and Scotland. He’ll do anything to avoid joining a regulatory playing field with the EU. He’s got the ball and he’s keeping it.

And you’ll have had your Indyref2. The idea that this PM will allow a second independence referendum after next year’s Scottish parliamentary elections is fanciful.

Mr Johnson may be a liberal on social issues, but he remains a full-fat Bullingdon bruiser over British nationalism. There is no way he is going to accept the break-up of Britain or any accommodation with Brussels. The beast is about to be unleashed.

Read more: There won’t be a 'legal and legitimate' referendum next year or for many years after that. Get used to it