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.