Johnson's mettle is about to be sorely tested as Brexit and the fallout from Covid-19 collide

Since he took over last July, he has bounced about after winning a general election before last Christmas. He has been "getting Brexit done", dallied around death's door - allegedly - while his partner gave birth to a baby boy.

For a time late last week it looked like he might be about to "go soft" on Brexit as he abandoned the fiction of no- border in the Irish Sea.

The Democratic Unionist Party - surplus to London government requirements since last year - could fulminate all it liked. Preparations were being made for customs checks on UK goods at Northern Ireland ports and airports.

So, the bigger question loomed, how long can Johnson retain the fiction of not seeking an extension to the transition which means the UK trades as always with the EU?

That trading standstill, precious to Ireland, ends on December 31 - but the EU is prepared to extend it for up to two years.

There are only two small provisos. First is that the UK has to seek such an extension. The second is that, for legal reasons, the application deadline is June 30.

So, we are all back again at a Brexit cliff edge.

If it seems familiar, it will be because we have been here before, and while it is very tiresome, it is also potentially as lethal as any such game of chicken. Dallying on a cliff edge does tempt the fates.

It is reminiscent of the juvenilia we went through last October as the UK risked crashing out of the EU without a deal and Mr Johnson declared he would "die in a ditch" rather than seek an available extension.

This was in spite of an instruction from his own parliament, in a device known as the Benn Act, telling him he must seek more time.

Finally, in an outstanding display of petulance, Johnson sent a total of three letters to the European Union.

There was an unsigned photocopy of the extension request he was obliged to send under the Benn Act; an explanatory letter from the UK's ambassador to the EU; and a personal letter explaining why Downing Street did not want an extension.

We can speculate that we will see a repeat of this "baba stuff" as the deadline looms closer at the end of the next month. The attitude in Brussels so far has been to leave things find their own level in London and allow the English, and here we mean English rather than British, reach their own conclusions.

But the mood is changed in Brussels. They have played along with the legend that a full EU-UK trade deal could be done before October in time to allow necessary member states' ratification and an orderly UK severing of EU ties on December 31.

Coronavirus has reduced Brexit talks to video conferences, which make the idea of real tangling - normally done in the corridors and in sidebar conversations - even more remote. Another round of negotiations ended in deep recriminations last Friday.

In summary, on the EU side chief negotiator Michel Barnier insisted the UK could not have a 1970s-style trade deal all about exempting quotas and tariffs.

If the UK wants the type of EU market access favoured by Theresa May, it has to sign up to EU labour law, environment and state aid rules.

UK chief negotiator David Frost countered that Brexit was all about getting out of these EU legal obligations. He argued the EU did not seek such rigid conditions in making other global trade deals.

Things look bleak for the next round of Brexit talks set for Monday week, June 1.

Brussels diplomats suggest direct political intervention is needed as this row is above the negotiators' pay grades.

The trouble with that view is obvious - the politician is none other than Mr Johnson, who needs saving from himself on EU issues.

But like everywhere else, the coronavirus has fundamentally changed all the challenges Boris Johnson could have expected when he took the big job last July.

Thus far, the British public appears ready to give him the benefit of the doubt on what is a patchy approach to managing things.

But this month two things happened which amounted to reverses for Johnson. First, coronavirus almost obliterated big celebrations on the 75th anniversary of victory in Europe in World War II.

The beleaguered PM could not cadge some of the magic dust of his old hero, Winston Churchill.

The second was the arrival of new Labour leader Keir Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions who brings all his skills to parliamentary questioning. The days of the free pass from Starmer's predecessor, the woolly ideologue Jeremy Corbyn, are well and truly over.