It is time for Cameron to shape the team that he thinks can chase Brown from office

Boris Johnson is being rather coy about his chances for promotion. ‘Statistically, I am due to be fired again,’ he tells this month’s GQ magazine. ‘It may be that the psychological effort needed to haul myself around into a more gaffe-free zone proves too difficult.’ This is not the orthodox view: most in Westminster consider this magazine’s former editor overdue a promotion. The only question, as for other rising Tory stars, is: to what job?

The new Conservative line-up has been the subject of frenzied gossip for months. For a while, there was a theory that Mr Cameron would announce his new team before Gordon Brown became Prime Minister — as an act of sheer bravado. ‘It would show that we run our own agenda,’ one aide told me. But since the grammar schools debacle, there is little taste for swashbuckling risks. Labour is now recovering in the polls and Mr Cameron is once again on the defensive.

Mr Brown is expected to keep a few old hands (Jack Straw is tipped to return to the Home Office, for example) but otherwise surround himself with new ministerial faces. It will be a mix of youth and experience, and the two men at the top of the Tory party — Mr Cameron and George Osborne — have more of the former than the latter. For this reason, a theory doing the rounds is that Mr Osborne, shadow chancellor, would swap jobs with his old boss, William Hague, shadow foreign secretary.

This is highly unlikely. As Mr Cameron has now told several people in private, there will be no such manoeuvre. Mr Osborne has disarmed his critics by repeatedly getting under Mr Brown’s skin, and even outpolling him on economic competence. And Mr Hague has no immediate appetite to move.