How Boris Johnson survives

When the Conservative party looks in the mirror what does it see? Beyond the bruising, what face peers back from the glass? The problem for the party is that no two MPs can agree – and that just might be Boris Johnson’s best chance of survival.

Contradictions shatter a unified surface that might once have offered the chance of self-reflection for the Conservative party. Some of the cracks are obvious, such as the one running through Downing Street over the proper size and limits of the state, for example, or that which separates No. 10 from many of its backbenches over Covid public health measures and liberty.

It has been obvious for some time that the Conservative heartland in the south was reaching the limits of its tolerance for resource transfers to the Midlands and the north dressed up as ‘levelling up’ – even if these resources were more rhetorical than real. What was supposed to be the unifying anthem of ‘levelling up’ still lacks a coherent tune with less than two years to go before the most likely date of the next general election.