How does Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson do it? The wriggling out of things, I mean. The not getting snagged or nabbed. We’re all scratching our heads. We all want to know, only not really because that would mean peeking behind the curtain and ruining the magic.

David Cameron once called him “the greased piglet”, the wisest thing he has said since ‘I resign’ and ‘I think I’ll stop writing and put the shepherd’s hut on Gumtree’. Speaking in late 2019, ahead of the Commons vote on Mr Johnson’s “oven-ready” Brexit deal, Mr Cameron said of his Old Etonian and Bullingdon Club chum: “The thing about the greased piglet is that he manages to slip through other people’s hands where mere mortals fail.” And of course Mr Cameron would know a slick and slippery porker when he saw one, having once been embroiled in that salacious porcine scandal now referred to as Pig Gate (Google it, do. But finish your breakfast first, particularly if it comprises sausage and bacon).

Since then the word ‘albino’ seems have appended itself to the description when it is used by pundits, a reference to Mr Johnson’s Milky Bar-coloured, Shockheaded Peter-style thatch. The web is host to a bonanza of eye-popping piglet memes and, in the hands of satirical cartoonist Martin Rowson, the creature threatens to morph into a sort of four-legged tapeworm. Mr Rowson, for the record, gives credit for the phrase to Charles Moore, former editor of The Daily Telegraph. Go, Chick!

Meanwhile, if you find yourself in Greggs queueing next to political commentator Harry Mount, son of a baronet and another former Bullingdon Clubber, you can ask him about his assessment of Mr Johnson because he too has something to add. However, if on the off chance Mr Mount is not in Greggs and is lunching instead at a place with tables and cutlery and waiters and a wine list and a mineral water sommelier – I pause here for breath – let me be his mouthpiece and relate a few of the titbits he would offer if he could.

Item: Mr Mount worked with Mr Johnson at the Daily Telegraph for five years and knows him well enough to have edited a book titled The Wit And Wisdom Of Boris Johnson (192 pages!).

Item: Mr Johnson was always late filing his copy to Mr Mount (a column for which he was paid £250,000 a year, or “chicken feed” as he put it) and would come up with extraordinarily excuses for his tardiness. Stuff like: “It’s just whizzing down the threadbare copper wires of the internet” (and this is the guy who is ultimately in charge of delivering 5G).

Item: Mr Johnson once told Mr Mount (because he asked) that his favourite oratorical device is a thing called imbecilio, or pretending to be a fool.

It works, doesn’t it? Sure, many who knew him at Eton and Oxford and who don’t in any way have ulterior motives for such boosterism say he is as sharp as a tack. But the rest of the planet thinks he’s an idiot. Job done, I say.

Mr Mount, for his part, refers to Mr Johnson as “the blond onion” because no matter how many layers you peel away you never quite get to the bottom of him (to which I would add something about also crying tears of pain when he opens his mouth and words come out).

In short, everyone including friends and political allies thinks Mr Johnson a slippery, elusive, hard-to-pin-down so-and-so. To draw on another well-worn quip, he is ruthless and truthless (as opposed to the Scottish Tories, who are Ruthless and toothless. Boom boom).

Mr Johnson was at it again last week when, to the chagrin of many and the surprise of none who know his capacity for escapology, he was not issued with a second £50 fine in the ongoing Partygate scandal. He seems to have been one of the few people in government who went un-fined: it was revealed on Thursday that 83 individuals had received a total of 126 fixed penalty notices. Now, not all the recipients will be Downing Street employees. Some may work in other departments elsewhere. But many will be based in Number Ten, so even if you take the upper end of the staffing guesstimates – it’s thought that on a busy day there are up to 400 officials crammed into the place – it’s a sizeable percentage.

“Downing Street is already the biggest law-breaking workplace in the country,” wrote Labour MP Chris Bryant, and that was before this latest batch of fines. But the man who heads up that workplace, who we know was at several parties there? Not among this second batch of transgressors, apparently. A miracle.

To date, then, the sole reason for the Metropolitan Police slipper being applied to the Prime Ministerial bahookie was for a party thrown to celebrate his birthday – and even then only because, in the now-immortal phrase of shameless Johnsonian cheerleader Conor Burns MP, he was “ambushed with cake” (though Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Pope of Pompous, prefers “ambuscade” as a more correct term. Whatever).

The fact is the Prime Minister seems to have escaped. Again. “He is in a great place,” Conservative Home editor Paul Goodman told Newsnight on Thursday, trying (and failing) to fight back an enormous grin. “The greased albino piglet has slithered through the legs of the butchers and he’s running away oinking through open county because he knows that with just one fine issued, it’s unlikely that Conservative MPs will launch a leadership challenge any time soon.”

I agree. It is a truly appalling image.

The thing is, though, even a greased albino piglet disguised as a blonde onion and oinking its way through open country with a string of apron wearing butchers in hot pursuit is eventually going to run out of space, luck, time, friends and excuses – especially if someone can be bothered to rig up a blonde onion/greased albino piglet trap.

I’m struggling to imagine what that would look like in the wild, admittedly. But in the world of politics it’s a string of papers strung between two procedural poles. Holding one end is top civil servant Sue Gray, whose report into the events surrounding Partygate has had the epithet ‘long-awaited’ applied to it for so long now it must have originally been phrased in Latin or Old English or something.

At the other end is a little thing called the Commons Privileges Committee, a cross-party grouping of seven MPs which has the power to call witnesses and request documents as well as, yes, photographs. In another unwanted first for Mr Johnson, he will become the first Prime Minister to face scrutiny from the committee on the question of whether he ‘misled’ parliament by claiming no laws were broken in Downing Street. Misleading parliament, by the way, is a resigning matter, at least it’s supposed to be. The committee was headed formerly by Chris Bryant (see above), but he has excused himself on account of having said things like “Johnson was lying when he told the Commons no laws were broken” and “Boris Johnson is toast – if that’s not doing a disservice to toast”. Fair enough. I’m not a lawyer but that could be considered prejudicial.

As for the timeline, the inquiry will begin after Mr Gray has (finally) published her report – which happy event is scheduled for this week. So can the man who is the very epitome of jammy escape this procedural double whammy? We’ll see. But I suspect he will. Somehow. I suspect the greased albino piglet has some oinks in him yet.