It’s a tribute of a kind to the topsy-turvy nature of 2022 that Johnson, Truss and Sunak were all eligible to be both Minister of the Year and Backbencher of the Year.
He’s recently been in the news for laying into Gary Neville, which will have done his cause no harm at all.
And the ConHome team wishes all of you a very Happy New Year.
He found a way of guarding his right flank and winning out against the odds. Downing Street will want to study how it was done.
Neither recent by-election suggests a coming Labour landslide – but turnout has been so low, and both seats so safe for the party, that the results may tell us very little.
When push comes to shove, what will matter will be whether or not the arrivals stop – or at least that the voters believe that the Prime Minister really wants to halt them and is sparing no effort.
If you take a charitable view, the Government is circling the unions and Labour like a wary gunslinger, waiting for the right moment to move.
The ousting of Boris Johnson, the summer’s leadership election, the Truss premiership, the ousting of Truss, the second briefer leadership election, the various financial events – none of it has made any discernable difference to this tale of ratings decline.
The Prime Minister must make up his mind whether or not to see through a policy to stop the small boats – now an issue of profound symbolic importance.
It’s unjust to sack an Minister, rather than suspend him, over unproven claims. Now those against him have been dismissed, he should be restored to government.
Perhaps the best way of reading this finding is the most simple – as a cry of pain from Tory activists as prices rise, the economy slows, and the tax burden moves towards its highest level since World War Two.
Is he fated to be a fire-fighter, a leader grappling with crisis? Or can he find the political space to deliver a more personal message – perhaps to do with education?
The next generation of Conservative MPs may be no less gifted. But there’s one thing they can’t provide: institutional memory.
There is no reason to believe that carrots without sticks would deliver the homes that Britain needs – however many shiny new facilities, street votes and new money local voters are offered.