“The weather, it’s absolutely lovely here in Rwanda today,” beamed Boris Johnson to a cavernous marquee of suits.
“Here’s an amazing statistic - it’s actually hotter in London!”
It actually wasn’t. East African city Kigali had notched up to 27C, while London was basking in 24C.
But attention to detail’s not always the top priority for our Prime Minister, who like a car salesman, falls back on his bumbling charm to sell Britain abroad.
In a three-day visit to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), the Tory leader took his usual form and turbo-charged it.
Still recovering from Monday’s dawn sinus operation - due to an old rugby injury, he said - he got on his private jet for an eight-day diplomatic jaunt.
At the Commonwealth Business Forum there was no Peppa Pig, but delegates applauded as he called the alliance a "miracle fertiliser of business”.
(“S***, then?”, a weary observer in Rwanda told us later.)
At a school, he sat on a child’s chair looking bemused as kids read him a story about Hetty the Unhealthy Hen.
He drew the kids a rudimentary pencil sketch of a doctor with a circle for a head, which a teacher quietly folded up as he left the room.
The PM praised the “successful” plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda (but not, er, Rwanda’s human rights record) with President Paul Kagame.
That’s despite none of them being sent to Kigali yet.
All so far, so Boris.
But there’s a problem with his free-wheeling style. When it starts to go wrong, it goes really wrong.
Enter Prince Charles. The heir to the throne, who branded the asylum plan “appalling”, had a cuppa scheduled with the PM at 11am on Friday.
What could go wrong? A lot, it turned out.
Downing Street spent days valiantly insisting the Charles “showdown” was no such thing and the asylum plan was barely on the agenda.
But Boris Johnson could not help himself, telling broadcasters he would “of course” urge the Prince to “keep an open mind” about the policy.
I understand some quiet conversations of unknown politeness with Clarence House followed, and Downing Street screeched their boss into reverse.
The Rwanda plan was now “unlikely” to come up, we were told, and the PM dutifully refused to spill the beans on his 15 minute, 10 second “chinwag”.
It didn’t matter too much by then - because Boris Johnson had bigger things to worry about.
The night before polls opened I sat opposite him in a private jet suite, and asked if he planned to stay on if he lost both of Thursday’s by-elections.
“Are you crazy?” he protested.
Twenty-four hours later he did, indeed, lose both by-elections.
Now some of his Tory critics plotting back home may have the same verdict about him.
Stuck 4,000 miles from home, the Prime Minister’s first reaction to hearing the news was to go for a 6am swim at his highly-guarded hotel.
The pool at the Radisson Blu was overlooked by a tower of rooms. Did other world leaders, perhaps, look down at his exertions and feel his pain?
Barely would he have towelled off when the PM received a phone call from Oliver Dowden confirming even worse news - he would resign with a blistering letter.
Officials scrambled to find loyal replacements for the party chairman's TV interviews, while Mr Johnson held a 7am meeting with aides.
He told them he would not to come home from his trip to CHOGM, the G7 and NATO early - and he steadfastly refused to resign.
He spoke to Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Chief Whip Chris Heaton-Harris as rumours spread of Mr Dowden being part of a plot to oust him.
And he burst onto TV screens just after 8am Rwanda time, saying he would “keep going” to solve the cost of living crisis.
As the Friday dragged on into Saturday, the Prime Minister kept being asked the same questions - and his reasoning became more dramatic.
He insisted it was “not extraordinary” to lose a by-election in mid-term, despite Tiverton being the worst defeat in by-election history.
He said he would not change, telling the BBC : "If you're saying you want me to undergo some sort of psychological transformation… that is not going to happen.”
With a slight hint of Trump, he misleadingly said he was “very happy to have got a bigger mandate from my parliamentary party that I got in 2019.”
That’s despite 59% backing him in a Boris or no Boris confidence vote, while 51% backed him in a 2019 three-horse race with Hunt and Gove.
Eventually, in a chat at the opulent, whitewashed British High Commissioner’s residence, he even told me he was “thinking actively” about a third term.
I’d only asked him if he would serve a second, to 2028/29. But he took it and ran, saying: “At the moment I am thinking actively about the third term. And you know, what could happen then.”
Allies of the Prime Minister still furiously blame the intense coverage of Partygate scandal - broken by the Mirror - for many of Boris Johnson’s woes.
“I don’t think feeding people a diet of Partygate helps them understand what this government is going,” a source said.
"The endless reportage and kremlinology of Partygate is nonsense if you choose to still go on and on and on about it.”
Whoever you blame - Boris Johnson, or the media for reporting (accurately) what he does - everyone can agree it’s all a huge distraction from the business at hand.
Even the PM losing his bid to oust Commonwealth chief Baroness Scotland (which delayed his press conference by three hours) received little attention.
The Commonwealth summit was the first for four years after two delays due to Covid, and we arrived as morning mist rolled over Kigali’s beautiful hills.
Roadblocks and armed police littered the streets as our minibus rushed through and world leaders flitted between sterile, sparse convention centres.
In a brightly-lit semi-sphere much like London’s City Hall, which one wag branded the “blue b****ck”, leaders talked food security, investment and girls’ education.
At a dinner hosted by The Five Foundation, a charity working to end FGM and other violence against African women, I listened intently to the attendees’ stories.
Time and again, they made the same points - that they loved the Commonwealth, but not to be some outpost for Britain. Instead to be an equal partner.
They had detailed, thought-through ideas about how African nations will stand more firmly on their own two feet, rather than taking aid and giving something in return.
And they spoke powerfully of how, during Covid, many poorer nations were left behind by the richer powers in Europe.
The theme I was left with was that the world outside Britain is advancing and developing all the time, making our place in the world just a little smaller.
Of all the things he spoke about at the summit, Boris Johnson was most thoughtful about world affairs, especially the war in Ukraine. He knows we live in a changing world.
But as long as he’s fighting for his political life, it will be harder for him to do anything about it.
