Can anything save Boris Johnson?

As Boris Johnson faced the possibility of a no-confidence motion earlier this year, a large number of Tory MPs decided they would neither back him nor sack him. ‘Wait until the local elections,’ they said. The Prime Minister was chosen as party leader not because of popularity among his political peers (he has never commanded much loyalty in the Commons) but because he was seen to be the best at winning elections. If he lost his touch with voters, surely that would be proof it was time for a change?

There is an obvious problem with this reasoning. Local election results in the United Kingdom have always been a poor gauge of confidence in the prime minister. Different seats are up for grabs at different times, and the question voters are asked is who should run the local council, not who should run the country.

Do voters want a Labour-run council to be deposed? If so, then a tactical vote for the Liberal Democrats is often the best bet. Or vice versa. In Northern Ireland, voters have far graver concerns than which Tory occupies No. 10.

Neither Gordon Brown nor Denis Healey grabbed as much of other people’s money as Sunak is doing

One of the biggest problems facing the Conservatives is not keeping the Red Wall but losing the ‘Blue Wall’ – Tory voters are tired, not just of partygate, but of being taxed at a 70-year high by a PM who presented himself as a tax-cutter. Yet few of the Tory shire councils have held elections, so we won’t learn very much about the extent of that disgruntlement. We see a Conservative party which is just six percentage points behind in national opinion polls: a pretty small deficit given that it is facing two by-elections due to a sexual offence and a sexual misdemeanour committed by its MPs.