I SEE Boris Johnson is back to his old trick of promising the moon to voters – with his fingers crossed behind his back.

Now he’s pledging to cut income tax for the big earners in Britain, i.e all his friends, family and core voting support, a paltry 8% of the population, but every single Tory MP who are his upcoming electorate.

In other words, make Johnson PM and save yourself thousands on your tax bill. You’d be mistaken for thinking there are lots of wealthy people in the UK if this plan is going to be a vote winner. Hemmed into the bubble of privilege makes you utterly blinkered about the reality of life for most people who will never earn £50,000 never mind £80,000.

But Johnson doesn’t care, he knows he can say whatever he likes and get away with it. To hell with public services or national debt, lets further line the pockets of those who least need it, let’s pretend that austerity doesn’t exist – stick that on the side of a big red bus.

We all know there is no love lost between Tory ministers vying for the top position – Boris is more a pin sticker than a pin up with some of his colleagues. But regardless of personalities, even dry-as-dust Andrea Leadsom commented on how pie in the sky Johnson’s tax plans are given the relatively few numbers they have in the Commons, which would make it nigh impossible to pass this kind of tax legislation. Those numbers could be even fewer if a General Election is on the cards, which would explain Johnson’s extravagant promise – his window of opportunity is closing fast. In public, big announcements, but in private, Boris will be worried – long dark nights looking for a soul. For once I agree with Labour shape shifter, John McDonnell, who commented that Johnson “will say whatever it takes to get votes”.

Of course, Johnson believes his personality is bigger than any pesky details, with much of the mainstream media colluding in not asking him for more information on his crazy plans, while the old Etonian plays cat and mouse with those looking for the truth behind his lies.

It’s the same with his extravagant promise to walk away from the EU without paying the £39 billion divorce bill should he become prime minister. Just how he’s going to get away with that in legal terms is, to say the least, opaque.

And this is where he shares much common ground with his bitter rivals – an inability to look at the reality of Brexit in the eye and come up with a workable solution.

They’re all still harping on about “delivering” a deal or no deal, or worse, the oxymoron “managed no deal”, and they’re still discussing new negotiations when the real negotiations are already over. And still the clock of doom ticks ominously towards October.

The word we are looking for is “delusion”. Another leadership hopeful, Sajid Javid, was at it last week when he promised the Irish millions to create “alternative arrangements” for the very same backstop the UK has already pledged to protect as part of an international UN peace treaty.

At the time of writing, these make believe “alternative arrangements” are yet to be revealed as anything more than a daydream. In his case it would have to be an idle fantasy since Javid seems to be the only candidate who has not owned up to a mind bending experience, youthful or otherwise.

And Michael Gove has promised to cut VAT if he gets into Number 10. Makes you think that the effects of this youthful drugs dalliance (in his 30s!) have been a bit more long term than he thought.

But in my opinion, the gold medal for the biggest delusion of all should be awarded to Ruth Davidson. In a newspaper piece, surely ghosted by a scriptwriter for Have I Got News For You, she postulated that the Tory leadership contest shows “just how determined the Conservatives are to end the constitutional paralysis and get Britain back on track”. Well that’s a relief!

In fact this leadership contest is pure puff and fluff! It’s all about personalities and wild whims and promises that can never be kept in reality. It’s all about diverting the electorate from the truth. Because the Tories have destroyed the social fabric of the UK, they have plunged millions into abject poverty, they have abandoned the elderly, the young, the vulnerable and the sick, they have targeted British citizens for their race and religion with draconian immigration measures, they have ignored the devolved powers and treated democracy with contempt, and utterly mismanaged the greatest constitutional crisis of our time.

They cannot be trusted to get anything back on track because they have torn up the rails. They have caused the paralysis. Thanks to this lot Britain is the laughing stock of world diplomacy and the chances of building trust after how they have behaved with Ireland, and with the wider EU, is growing weaker by the day. Britain has lost an Empire and has now abandoned its role in Europe.

To top it all, Davidson has backed long-shot Javid as the next leader, the man who spawned his own sarcastic hashtag in Scotland, #PermissionfromSajid, when he said he would refuse the Scots another independence referendum. He’s proven himself as rather unpopular in Scotland. As Sean Connery would say, “shurely shome mishtake” Ruth?

We’ll leave the last word to another leadership hopeful and equally deluded character, Robo-cop Raab, who at least has had the guts to declare out loud the reality behind Tory manouverings when he admitted that Brexit is about “the survival of the Tory Party”. Not the survival of the country and the people in it, nor indeed the maintenance of democracy.

Because behind the unicorn and the fantasy, the inconvenient truth is that it has always been about them and only them, and to blazes with everyone else.