Philip Collins We know Boris can’t change but here’s a plan he can get his teeth into

BORIS JOHNSON has told us that he is not about to undergo a psychological transformation. The Prime Minister we have is the Prime Minister we are going to get. There is little sign that the Cabinet have decided to tell him his time is up. His ratings are terrible, he cannot change and his colleagues seem unable to organise an effective coup. So what else might he conceivably do? Is there anything Mr Johnson can do to get better?

I worked in the Blair Downing Street during the torrid third term in office, when the Labour Party, encouraged by the Chancellor Gordon Brown, was fast losing its patience with the Prime Minister. Every day seemed to bring another disaster or further pressure. In the midst of the mess, Mr Blair was fond of pointing out that having a viable government programme was your only hope of changing the subject. Though it didn’t always work, the only chance you had of shaming journalists into concentrating on policy rather than the tempest of politics was to have something important to say about education or crime or the NHS.

It might not be much but, when trouble strikes, that’s all you have got and three lessons follow from that experience for Mr Johnson. The first is that the Prime Minister has to be associated with a mission. At his political best he was defined by the issue of Brexit. Mr Johnson now needs a new purpose. At the moment it looks like there is no reason beyond the satisfaction of his own ambition for Mr Johnson to be in politics. He cobbled together the idea of levelling up and prevailed on Michael Gove to write a White Paper but nobody who knows Mr Johnson would tell you that he has been seized all his adult life with a passionate desire to correct regional inequalities. It just turned out that he needed something to say to the people in the North of England who voted him into office because he shared with them a dislike of the European Union.

Once that mission is defined Mr Johnson needs to give the impression that, somewhere in his operation in Downing Street, someone has got a grip. Mr Johnson himself has always been a far better campaigner than he is a governor. He is a political winner, but he doesn’t look as if he has much idea what to do once he has won. This fuels the suspicion that, as his embittered former consigliere Dominic Cummings repeatedly points out, Boris Johnson is ill-equipped to be Prime Minister.

The truth about government is that, unlike the sport of politics, it is a bit of a grind, even a little boring on a daily basis. Achievement in government demands patience and constant application, day after difficult day, to problems that yield only slowly to pressure. There is nothing in Mr Johnson’s history as a journalist to suggest that he can knuckle down in the way he needs to. He needs to take this deficiency seriously and appoint people to fill in the gap. A process cannot hope to convince the world that the Prime Minister has changed but he should make a series of sober and detailed speeches on policy progress, to suggest that at least the Government is seeking to do something.

Quite what those policy priorities should be, however, is a difficult question and this is the third reason that Mr Johnson’s government is running on empty. The Conservative Party is fatally split between two parts of a divided electoral coalition. This was perfectly illustrated by the twin by-election defeats in Wakefield and in Tiverton and Honiton. In Wakefield, a former Labour seat, the electorate want levelling up to be made a reality, which means state spending and an active government. In Tiverton and Honiton, a wealthier and more traditional Tory seat in the South-West, the usual message would be tax cuts and a smaller state. This is the new divide in British politics and Mr Johnson needs to find issues — crime and the state of the NHS, for example — which resonate in both places.

None of this is going to be easy. It is hard being in power when inflation is running in double digits. But a Prime Minister cannot choose his own circumstances. All he can do is react to them and, to a limited extent, change them. Boris Johnson may not be capable of transformation but he will be in trouble if his government can’t either. • Philip Collins is founder & writerin-chief of The Draft; thedraftwriters. com

Mr Johnson is a political winner, but he doesn’t look as if he has much idea what to do once he has won