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. 10 civil servants. One secretary of state for a large department complains that Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, has far more power and influence than he does.

That all changed in the last cabinet meeting of 2021 when ministers collectively decided against imposing more Covid restrictions. The resignation of David Frost, the Brexit minister, had become public the day before and the Prime Minister did not want anyone to follow Frost’s example, so he had to listen. The strength of cabinet’s pushback against new measures has changed the nature of Johnson’s premiership.

Johnson’s 2019 general election victory was larger in scale than any other Tory could have managed. He had forged a new electoral coalition, one that owed as much to his own standing as the tribune of Brexit as his leadership of the Tory party.