ALMOST as unavoidable as bumping into Ian Paisley in the Maldives or the incessant coverage of the Women's World Cup is the speculation surrounding the leadership of the Conservative Party.
This, as you will know, involves two men. One of them, if you look past the obvious drawback of being a politician, appears to be at least a vaguely normal individual. The other is Boris Johnson.
By this stage, whole silos have been filled with truths harvested over decades which demonstrate why Mr Johnson is eminently unsuitable - incapable, even - of being prime minister.
Against this, Mr Johnson and his supporters carry with them several tiny grains of evidence.
Chief among these are his 'true' Brexiteer credentials, though it can be difficult to tell if they really prize him more as a superior sort of after-dinner speaker.
The interviews he gave this week were intended to bolster his credentials as a serious person, but found him to be evasive, unconvincing and plain wrong on elements of his Brexit strategy.
This will have precisely zero negative effect on the outcome of the Tory contest.
During an interview with TalkRadio, the PM-in-waiting wittered on about making model London buses out of wine cartons. He paints pictures of happy looking passengers on them, as well, he said.
This was a classic Johnson distraction manoeuvre. Delivered in his trademark bumbling style, like Winnie-the-Pooh explaining politics to Piglet, the model bus nonsense deflected from the fact that he is all over the place on Brexit, not to mention his spending plans.
It must be exasperating to be Johnson's opponent because traditional political battle lines - those around old fashioned ideas of policy, detail, credibility, delivery - cease to exist.
They are blurred almost to nothingness by the force of an ego which sincerely believes the world, fate and history are blessed to orbit him and feel the kiss of his gravitational pull.
Fundamental to the success of the Johnson project is the apparent willingness of the Boriscenti to completely disregard facts and detail as well as suspend reality. The scale of the political hoax would be almost admirable, were it not also so potentially catastrophic.
Delivered by Boris Johnson in his trademark bumbling style, like Winnie-the-Pooh explaining politics to Piglet, the model bus nonsense deflected from the fact that he is all over the place on Brexit, not to mention his spending plans
The media must bear its share of responsibility for feeding the Johnson phenomenon.
It is perhaps a little late to complain about Mr Johnson's looseness with facts when he, and others, have been allowed to peddle them for years, as if his true-untruths were somehow equivalent to true-truths.
This speaks to an issue within not only journalism itself, but also with consumers of media.
Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, is worth reading on this. Borrowing the name of a friend who happened to be an American Nobel prize-winning physicist, Crichton coined the phrase 'the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect' to describe the effect.
"You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics," he said.
"You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues.
"Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward - reversing cause and effect. I call these the 'wet streets cause rain' stories...
"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read.
"You turn the page, and forget what you know..."
The Brexit fantasy is largely based on 'wet streets cause rain' thinking. But so too is much of what passes for politics in Northern Ireland, beset as it is by sectarianism and zero-sum games.
Ideas, thinking and thoughtfulness are endangered species.
As one of Crichton's characters in Jurassic Park puts it: "In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought."
