Let’s be honest, Boris Johnson is a liar.

You cannot believe a word he says.

Since getting the keys to Number 10, he has tried to cover up the part he played in inflicting the Tory cuts on our NHS, our schools and our police service.

He’s trying to take us all for mugs.

Does he really think that we won’t remember that it was his Tory government that cut education funding to such a shocking degree that teachers now routinely tell me they don’t know how they manage to get through the school year?

Does he assume we’re so stupid that we think the absolutely dire state of some of our hospitals – with crumbling buildings, leaking roofs and dirty wards – is part of some natural process of decline, and not as a result of massive under-investment by his Tory party?

And how dare he try to make out that we don’t know what’s happening on our own streets and in our own communities on crime.

The Tories have cut billions from police funding, breaking promise after promise to protect the frontline. We’ve lost 20,000 police officers under the Tories and violent crime has soared.

But we’ve heard all of his bluster before, haven’t we? He did exactly the same when he was Mayor of London.

He said he’d recruit more police – and actually the numbers fell.

He promised to keep ticket offices open on the London Underground, then he closed them all.

After he left and wangled himself a safe Tory seat as an MP, he tried to blame his own failures on the new mayor, Labour’s Sadiq Khan .

I was there when he promised his constituents that he would lie down in front of the bulldozers to stop Heathrow expansion – and then went missing when the vote on the third runway was held in Parliament.

This is a man who has been sacked twice for lying. First when he worked as a journalist for making up quotes, and then as an MP for lying to his party leader.

As if all that isn’t bad enough, he has admitted to conspiring with a friend to have a journalist beaten up. Yes, you read that right.

This man is now the Prime Minister.

But he wasn’t voted in by you and me. He was chosen by just over 90,000 unrepresentative Tory members – roughly the same number of people who live in Darlington.

He’s a Prime Minister who represents just a tiny number of Tory party members and his super-rich backers.

He’s a serial liar who has blagged his way to the top, cashing in every back-scratching favour that someone with his sense of entitlement and privilege thinks is theirs by right.

Now he’s willing to sacrifice our jobs and living standards with a no-deal Brexit to satisfy the extreme right of the Tory party.

Boris Johnson cannot be trusted on Brexit and cannot be trusted with our country.

He must be stopped – and Labour under Jeremy Corbyn can, and will, stop him.

Mirror, 15 August, John McDonnell