‘Operation Red Meat’ won’t beef up the government

Are you ready for ‘Operation Red Meat’? If not, then you should brace yourself. For it looks set to be one of the most fearsome operations of modern political times, liable to make Conservative voters quiver with excitement and feel almost too stimulated.

Alert readers will have noticed that Boris Johnson did not have the best end to 2021. Unfortunately he hasn’t had the best start to 2022 either. Hardly a day has gone by when we haven’t learned of some new shocker from No. 10. The impression has been not just of shambolic-ness but of dishonesty, double standards and general incompetence.

The point is that the Prime Minister and the fawning court around him seem to have noticed that he has lost his lustre. The joke has worn thin. The only politician of his generation who could actually make people feel good about things has become the punchline of an especially unfunny gag. Watching him at the dispatch box last week was like watching Michael Barrymore after the body had been found in his pool. This had been a man capable of great hilarity. But the desire to be amused by him has vanished.

He recognises he is in trouble. Earlier this week he apparently told the cabinet that ‘2022 must be the year of delivery, underlining the importance of demonstrating to the British public that we are changing the country for the better’. What a blinding ambition for a government’s third year in office.

But political disaster clearly focuses the mind, and reminds even this PM that there was something else he was meant to do while living in Downing Street. What was is exactly? Why yes, of course: what his party said they would do when they won the general election.