What Boris must do to survive

In recent years, the notion of cabinet government has been a polite fiction. In theory, the prime minister is merely the first among equals when he meets his secretaries of state. In practice, they all owe their position to No. 10 and usually do what they’re told. The situation was summed up by an old Spitting Image sketch showing Margaret Thatcher at a restaurant with her cabinet ministers. She orders steak. ‘What about the vegetables?’ the waitress asks. ‘Oh,’ she replies, ‘they’ll have the same as me.’

For the first two years of Boris Johnson’s premiership, cabinet ministers were more claque than cabinet. ‘How many hospitals are we going to build?’ he asked at their first meeting after his general election victory. ‘40!’ came the response. ‘How many more nurses?’ ‘50,000!’ On it went. One minister recalls how when cabinet meetings went online at the start of the pandemic anyone who came off ‘mute’ was quickly re-muted by No.