Ever since then, we’ve been told over and over again that the Johnson premiership has been a total car crash. It is the worst government in our lifetime. The lowest of the low. The wheels are falling off. The Project is unravelling. The Emperor is Not Wearing Any Clothes. But what are ordinary voters saying?

You might not hear this on social media but the short answer for Number 10 is that it’s really not that bad. While Labour has drawn level in the polls, Johnson’s coalition remains pretty resilient. A year ago this week, just before the election, Johnson’s government held a net approval rating of -37. This week? It is actually up a little to -26. And after one of the most turbulent years in post-war British politics that includes one of the worst pandemics in the modern era, an economic meltdown and two national lockdowns the Conservatives are currently averaging 38% of the vote — down just 6 points on the election. Six.

Johnson’s slump in the high thirties is pretty much the best that David Cameron could ever hope for. Drill deeper and you will find that the Conservatives retain strong leads among the groups that were key to their victory last year — a 41-point lead among Leavers and a 9-point lead among the working-class. Nor have I seen any convincing and robust evidence that Labour is fixing the structural problems within its electorate. Ask Johnson’s supporters how he is doing and 83% of Conservatives and 56% of Leavers say “well”. These numbers have come down, certainly, but they remain resilient.

And while we are discussing leadership it is worth pointing out that with the coronavirus vaccine en route and hope in the air, Johnson’s leadership ratings have recently been improving, not falling. His lead over Starmer as “best prime minister” has doubled to 11-points while he holds commanding leads over the Labour leader on who is most likely to bring people together, build a strong economy, “get things done”, “stand up for the interests of the United Kingdom” and tackle coronavirus.

These are not popular points to make in a political bubble that remains largely a proxy battle over Brexit, but it’s hard to look at these numbers and conclude that Johnson is in trouble. For example, after everything, if you ask people today what they would prefer — a Conservative government led by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, or a Labour government led by Keir Starmer and Anneliese Dodds — the blues lead the reds by fifteen points. It’s not even close.

Why is this, exactly? Some will say that nobody outside of SW1 really knows who Keir Starmer is, or what he believes. And I do think that in our heart of hearts we all know that there is something missing — there is just not much charisma, much va-va-voom. There is certainly an intellectual hole at the heart of the Johnson Project; the general absence of a philosophy holding the entire thing together is something that he should prioritise in 2021. He needs more thinkers and fewer campaigners; they are not the same thing.

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But at the same time if you asked me to set out the Starmer Project I’m not sure that I’d know where to start. I might mumble something about him being Director of Public Prosecutions, opposing Brexit, taking the knee for Black Lives Matter and falling out with his father, which I heard on Desert Island Discs. But that is about it. I know nothing about the man, what he believes or where he wants to take Britain. That is not a criticism, just how I suspect most voters see it.

But nor do I think that this is why the Conservative electorate is proving to be a little more resilient than Boris Johnson’s critics, including those from within his own party, would like. The real reason is because whether knowingly or not our Prime Minister has tapped into a deeper realignment that is unfolding not just in this country but across many other Western democracies. His premiership was not just made possible by a single campaigner, a single issue or a well-run campaign; it was related to the underlying tectonic plates of British politics being on the move and long before he even became the leader of his party.

There is a reason why, for the first time in our recorded history, Johnson and the Conservatives emerged from the last election as more popular among people on low incomes than among high earners. Both parties have inverted their traditional base of support, the Tories no longer the party of the rich and Labour no longer the party of the poor. How could it be when Johnson walked away with an astonishing 18-point lead among the C2 skilled workers who we used to call “Essex Man”, and a 15-point lead among all workers?

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The real reason, the root cause of Johnson’s resilience, is the new values divide that is cross-cutting our traditional loyalties. In today’s world, where cultural questions have become more important than economic ones, people routinely put their values ahead of their wallets. The moment that Johnson’s team decided to unify the Leave vote was the moment they were destined for victory. Transfer the Brexit referendum result from councils onto constituencies and you are left with the simple but crucial fact that more than 60% backed Brexit. This is what unified the loose alliance of blue-collar workers and affluent conservatives; it was not their very different economic experiences but their shared views of the nation.

Johnson’s exploitation of this realignment was helped by Labour’s disastrous strategy. Having already lost Scotland long ago, and having not won the popular vote in England since 2001, Labour then opted to pursue an ultra-Remain strategy for a Remain vote that was too geographically concentrated to win a general election. It merely confirmed what we had already discovered during the People’s Vote debacle; that many of the people who claim to be wizard campaigners are not wizards at all and that more than a few senior voices on the liberal left essentially have no interest in parts of the country that do not share their view of the world.

This too is reflected in how, at a more fundamental level, Labour has lost its ability to even converse with its more instinctively culturally conservative working-class supporters. This became apparent even after the historic defeat when Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy tried to sound “patriotic” but were then flooded with complaints from liberal middle-class members in Brighton and London that they had sold out to the far-right group “Britain First”. Win back the Red Wall? Good luck.

Rab Butler, the Conservative politician and contender for one of the best prime ministers that we never had, once said that the secret to making it to Number 10 was being like the butcher who knows how to navigate the joints. You need to know how to cut up a carcass. You need to have the killer instinct. There is no doubt that Boris Johnson has struggled to convince many onlookers that he is the butcher, but he has at times shown the killer instinct by ruthlessly exploiting the realignment of British politics.

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It was this reshuffling of the Conservative electorate that also allowed him to emerge as the first Conservative Prime Minister who can credibly claim to have triumphed over the “Europe question”, an issued that played at least some role in bringing down all four of his Conservative predecessors in Number 10 — Margaret Thatcher, John Major, David Cameron and Theresa May.

The Red Wall did not simply fall because Jeremy Corbyn was unpopular. It fell because many of those people put their instinctively “small c” conservative values ahead of their specific attitudes toward things like redistribution and inequality. Johnson certainly appealed to a bit of the latter through his “levelling-up” agenda, which should return to being his overriding priority for 2021, but his appeal was more strongly rooted in people’s belief that he was a Conservative who would finally stand up for family, nation, tradition and established ways of life.

But will he? There have been some signs. Contrary to the meltdown on social media the moves on international aid will be popular among his key supporters, and delivering Brexit is the backbone to his entire premiership. But even still, throughout this year we have been left wondering whether Johnson is simply too liberal for his more socially conservative supporters. Is he really willing to stare down more radical elements of the left?

Is he willing to venture into the culture wars on issues like intellectual freedom and freedom of speech, which enjoy widespread public support? Will he do more to protect and promote the family? Will he speak a little louder for the symbols, institutions and myths of nationhood? Will he do more to not only reform but also ideally lower the level of net migration to sustainable levels, which according to the latest figures remains at a historically high 270,000 per year?

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And will he reconcile himself to the fact that when it comes to Brexit there remains a large chunk of his electorate that is not simply looking for the sort of global free trade on steroids that he outlined in his Greenwich speech earlier this year? In other words, can he set out a framework for Global Britain that also acknowledges and addresses the fact that globalisation has not delivered the broad-based growth that its advocates told us it would and think more seriously about how to compensate and repair those communities that have lost out?

All of these questions and others are the ones that will ultimately define what happens next. It was once said that some Prime Ministers are only ever remembered for one thing; Anthony Eden and Suez, Tony Blair and Iraq, Gordon Brown and the financial crisis, David Cameron and Brexit.

While Johnson always assumed that his premiership would be about three things — Brexit, building Global Britain and “levelling-up” the country — his too quickly became about one thing, Covid. But now the clouds are, finally, lifting. The arrival of a vaccine within only ten months of the first case of coronavirus in a British national is a remarkable achievement and the looming sunny uplands will play to Johnson’s optimism. So far, his electorate has weathered the storm, but his supporters will not remain loyal forever.

Who hasn’t stopped to think about the alternative universe where the novel coronavirus first reported in Wuhan just fizzled out in late 2019? What would 2020 and the first year of the Johnson premiership have looked like then?

The flight of fancy that follows from that question is not to minimise or trivialise the real experience of Covid-19, which includes more than 60,000 dead in the UK alone. But by imagining what might have been, we can sometimes see more clearly the things that are in front of us, hidden in plain sight.

*

The club at 67 Pall Mall was heaving with happy Tories, drunk on good champagne and opinion polls. When Boris Johnson finished his brief speech to the faithful, there were chants of “ten more years”, not all meant ironically.

The PM himself withdrew to a small private bar reserved for his nearest and dearest, where alone he munched a plate of manchego and chorizo with a large glass of Clos de la Roche. Carrie’s joke about his waistline soon exceeding his approval ratings still rankled a bit, but what’s the point of being world king if you don’t enjoy it?

And enjoy it he had. As he’d recently told Cameron Minor on WhatsApp, this prime ministering lark was actually pretty easy when it came to it — “Can’t understand how you made such heavy weather of it all, Dave.”

Of course, the critics — many of them his former Fleet Street colleagues — were forever whanging on about him not understanding the difference between campaigning and governing, but he took no notice. Likewise the whining from Lobby journalists given ever less information by a Downing Street operation they described as aggressive and dysfunctional. A career in newspapers had taught him exactly how much the good opinion of hacks matters.

Instead of the papers and the Lobby, Johnson had spent his first year communicating his government’s record directly to the people who put him in office. Every week he was in another Red Wall seat, talking about “getting Brexit done” and “levelling up”.

The pundits, sometimes kindly but generally not, compared this approach to that of Donald Trump: a permanent campaigning operation built around the appeal of “Boris” and often largely detached from the actual record of his government. And as that first year since the 2019 election ended, that record was patchy. The UK economy had crawled through 2020, growth barely breaking 1% amid uncertainty about Brexit and what was looking increasingly like a full-blown trade-war between the US and China — Trump himself having decided that America First was his best bet at re-election in November.

Probably the most significant thing the Johnson government did in that first year was unveil its March Budget, which was heavy on spending promises and a programme of income tax cuts aimed at lower earners. Economists fretted about the deficit and the new young Chancellor “let it be known” that he too had wanted a more hawkish approach to the public finances. But with no real public profile, Rishi Sunak had little chance of resisting the economic cakeism demanded by his far more prominent and powerful boss.

Johnson’s decision to hold a 5pm press conference on Budget day to talk about the package in time for the evening bulletins only confirmed No 10’s dominance over No 11. “It is my great honour to serve Her Majesty as First Lord of the Treasury,” Johnson grinned when asked if he was stealing the Budget.

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Domestically, there wasn’t a great deal else of substance to report from that first year — the deliberately skinny 2019 manifesto was far from an agenda for government, and for all its dominance and aggression, the No 10 team didn’t have much in the way of detailed reform ready to roll out. Instead, they revelled in charges that they’d started a “culture war” by organising repeated attacks on the BBC and “woke” universities. Both of those went down well with the Red Wall group of Tory MPs, whom some commentators described as the most Right-wing cohort of Conservative Parliamentarians in a generation.

In May, a pamphlet co-written by Red Wallers called for “welfare conditionality”, which would deny benefits to people without a clear record of work; the reintroduction of prison ships; and the construction of detention camps for asylum claimants. The pamphlet was, eventually, disowned by the Prime Minister for being at odds with “my One Nation principles”. Despite that disavowal, when it later emerged that the pamphlet had been strongly encouraged by advisers in No 10, no one was surprised. Especially since its publication caused journalists to repeatedly ask Sir Keir Starmer if he agreed with the proposals: his answers spawned dozens of Facebook memes, made by the ongoing Tory campaign operation, depicting the new Labour leader as a north London human rights lawyer who backed welfare cheats, yobs and illegal immigrants. The most effective of these was a crude photoshop of Starmer wearing Jeremy Corbyn’s beard.

Meanwhile, “Levelling up” was a popular slogan and tended to go down well on the PM’s weekly tours, even though the critics kept pointing out that the Government didn’t seem to have a clear plan for actually doing it. By the late summer, there were even whispers starting to emanate from the Treasury that the Chancellor himself had doubts about the “economic blueprint” his team had been given by their line manager in the Spring. “Setting up BARPA and re-arranging the furniture in No 10 don’t constitute an economic strategy,” one Treasury source was reported as saying in September.

This had not gone unnoticed and Dominic Cummings was stepping up his efforts to have the PM move Rishi in the New Year, possibly under the cover of the New Deal with Europe.

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Mind you, Dom had problems of his own to worry about. To the surprise of many observers, the Prime Minister’s Senior Adviser was widely seen as the decisive force behind Johnson’s decision to strike a deal with the EU in October.

That deal went down well with business and allowed Johnson to give some speeches about a new era beginning and looking forward to an early trade deal with what he privately expected to be America under a re-elected Trump Administration. But it also saw the first stirrings of unease on the Conservative benches. The day after Johnson announced his deal with the EU,  Steve Baker and Iain Duncan Smith were spotted by a passing hack arriving at No 5 Hertford Street in Mayfair. The MPs later insisted they were there for a “private lunch” but a persistent — and accurate — rumour suggested that they dined on rare roast beef with several of the financial backers of the Vote Leave campaign. At a table where the diners’ collective net worth was measured in ten figures, one red-trousered guest cheerily christened his meat “Dom” before driving the knife home.

But then… not much. For all that Baker and a few other Tories enjoyed some TV hits lamenting the deal as a “betrayal of Brexit”, not many colleagues followed them over the top. Yes, that dysfunctional Downing Street operation annoyed MPs, but they were mostly quite circumspect about it. When you have an 80-seat majority, who really cares that your staff aren’t very nice to backbenchers? And as usual, promises of a reshuffle just over the horizon worked their magic.

Still, not everything was tranquil. As he swilled the wine in his glass and listened to that talk of a decade in office, Johnson found himself thinking again of a conversation he’d had with Carrie a month earlier. On 4 November, the day after Trump’s narrow re-election victory, she’d asked him flatly: “Do you want to go down in history as that man’s sidekick? You might get your statues, but don’t be surprised if Wilf and his friends want to tear them down when they grow up.”

For all that he enjoyed the applause he got on his weekly visits to the new Tory heartlands, that shook him, because he knew he wouldn’t get the same warmth closer to home: liberal Londoners who’d embraced him as one of their own just a few years earlier had closed their doors to him, and it hurt.

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Stung into action, Johnson startled aides by announcing he would fly the next day to Glasgow to take over the chair of the COP-26 summit that had started earlier that week. He would spend the next week in Scotland ignoring Nicola Sturgeon and SNP protests to give daily updates on Britain’s leadership in what he called the new battle of our times.

Diesel-petrol cars and vans would be banished. Gas boilers would be banned. Green jobs would proliferate. And the real news: Britain would support the development of new geo-engineering solutions: “Huge machines to suck the deadly carbon out of the skies. Oceans seeded with iron to trigger an explosion of carbon-munching algae. Reflective particles in orbit to reflect back the heat of the sun.”

Closing the COP, Johnson reached for his favourite wartime metaphors:

 “To win this battle, we must work together to build an impregnable shield around our climate and that can only be achieved by developing and mass producing airborne sulphate to ward off deadly radiation.

“The more we pull together and share our expertise, the faster our scientists will succeed. The race to build the shield  is not a competition between countries but the most urgent shared endeavour of our lifetimes. We are in this together and together we will prevail.”

The speech led news bulletins around the world.  The intro to the New York Times report called it “a vaultingly ambitious claim to global leadership whose questionable practicality was eclipsed by its brio and stark moral clarity”. The BBC led on the speech for three days running and even the Guardian leader column praised the PM for taking “global heating” seriously.

Not everyone was quite so impressed. In late November, Baker announced that he had been elected chair of the new Climate Research Group of Conservative MPs, said to have more than 40 members. “We don’t deny the science of climate change or the need to act,” he said. “We just want to know why British workers and taxpayers and motorists should have to make the biggest sacrifices when countries like China and India are responsible for 37 times more carbon than us?”

Meanwhile, a leaked paper from the Treasury’s Net Zero Review talked darkly about the loss of low-wage jobs in carbon-intensive industries, “distributional trade-offs” and even new taxes on carbon. Questioned about the paper in the Commons, Sunak failed to deny any of its details, or to confirm that he believed the PM’s “moonshot” plans to re-engineer the planet were practical or affordable. “Those are questions for the First Lord of the Treasury,” he said with a thin smile.

Dom wasn’t helping much either, always going on about how the focus groups showed that even though people say they care about the planet, they care a hell a lot more about jobs, wages, schools and hospitals. And Carrie had started saying she didn’t like the way Dom and Lee stopped talking when she entered the room, and the looks they gave her sometimes. It all made for a less than jolly atmos in Downing Street sometimes. Sooner or later, Johnson thought, something will have to be done about all that.

But settling back into his set, he considered more immediate matters: his glass was at least half full of good red wine and Carrie had gone home early so he could have another helping of cheese. After a year in power, Boris Johnson thought, life could be an awful lot worse.

Hence the drama of the post-election reshuffle, back in February. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid, was told to sack his advisors and make room for a team of Downing Street heavies. Honourably, he refused — and so he was forced out too.

The message was unambiguous: the whole Cabinet, from the Chancellor down, would have to submit to central control — or else. Henceforth, the relationship between Number 10 and every minister, no matter how senior, would be modelled on that between Matthew Corbett and Sooty.

And yet the puppet show has not gone to plan.

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Last month, the chief puppeteer — Dominic Cummings — lost the battle for Downing Street. While he’d eliminated all resistance in the Cabinet room, he hadn’t accounted for the upstairs flat. Big mistake.

And then there’s the Prime Minister himself — who these days looks like a ghost at his own feast. All leaders fade away eventually, but the pace of events has accelerated his career trajectory. To sink from conquering hero to yesterday’s man in a space of a year is going some.

Finally, and most tellingly, there are the puppets. The supposedly synchronised Cabinet is all over the place. Their individual performances range from stellar to abysmal. So, as it turns out, who you appoint to the top jobs still matters, no matter how centralised your style of government. Eight examples prove the point:

1. Rishi Sunak

Two years ago, Rishi Sunak was the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Local Government — just about the most junior of junior ministers. Now, he’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and the favourite to succeed his boss. There was never any doubting his potential, but he owes his meteoric rise to Boris Johnson’s model of government.

It’s an age-old trick: ensure loyalty by promoting those who haven’t earned it. Appointees are indebted to their patrons; and the principle of ‘easy come, easy go’ means it’s straightforward to dispense with them. Look down the list of Secretaries of State and you’ll find one example after another.

With Sunak, however, the cipher turned out to be a star. Which is just as well, given events. As a competent manager and reassuring communicator, he’s implemented crisis socialism without freaking out the markets, the public or his own party.

We’ve also seen some hints of creativity. He’ll need more, though, because you can’t recover from an unprecedented crisis without new ideas. His proposal for a National Infrastructure Bank is a key test. If it can raise and lend money like a real bank (instead of just being glorified government fund), we might just be able to ‘build back better’.

2. Dominic Raab

The idea of a politician ‘rising without trace’ has become a cliché, but it’s a fitting description of Raab’s CV. As Foreign Secretary (and, before that, Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union), Brexit should have been the making or breaking of him. But Brexit policy consists of two kinds of decision — the really big ones made by the Prime Minister and the excruciatingly fine detail handled by the negotiating team. There’s nothing much in between for the Cabinet minister.

The fact is that Raab is in the wrong job — appointed to the FCO not for what he can do, but for what he represents (i.e. the Eurosceptic Right of his party). For the Cabinet’s tough guy it’s a mismatch — like putting Chuck Norris in charge of a Swiss finishing school. Raab needs a big spending department to run; and though that would technically be a demotion, it would be the best thing that could happen to him.

3. Priti Patel

The Home Secretary was also appointed to make a point. A hardliner on both Brexit and immigration, her elevation from the backbenches to one of the great offices of state was a clear signal of the government’s intention to get Brexit done and control our borders.

Of course, she was only on the backbenches because she’d resigned from the Cabinet in 2017 after unauthorised meetings with the Israeli government came to light. Few people expected her to return to office so soon, or indeed at all; but salvaging a capsized career is another way in which Downing Street can ensure the loyalty of its appointees.

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Since her return, Patel has again fallen foul of the ministerial code — this time in regard to bullying allegations. Despite the official enquiry into the matter, she escaped unscathed. Two things protected her: first, the self-defeating nastiness of the Left — which loves to target women and people of colour who dare to have the ‘wrong’ opinions; and, second, the fact that Patel, despite her obvious limitations, is stubbornly pushing forward on the immigration reforms that were promised in the Conservative manifesto.

Of course, it’s one thing to tighten border control in theory, another to maintain it in practice. As with all Home Secretaries, Patel’s fate ultimately depends on upholding the law as it stands.

4. Matt Hancock

The Secretary of State for Health gives every impression of being another rapid riser. In fact, he had five years in junior ministerial roles before making it to Cabinet — which is an eternity these days. This year, he’s had to draw on every scrap of his experience.

It’s unclear how Hancock will be judged by history (and the inevitable public enquiries) — because the record is so mixed. Will he be remembered for the various test-and-trace fiascos or the triumphs of vaccine policy? How does one balance the failure to protect our care homes from Covid with the fact that the NHS has not been overwhelmed by the greatest challenge in its history?

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Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is a big job at the best of times. But in 2020 it grew too big for any one incumbent. A Government that understood the importance of ministers would have carved out special Covid-related roles at Cabinet level (a test-and-trace minister, for instance) — leaving the Health Secretary to focus exclusively on the core issues.

Churchill’s wartime Cabinet was reshaped around the demands of the war effort — and something similar should have happened in this war too.

5. Michael Gove

Michael Gove is by far the most experienced member of the Cabinet. Apart from a brief period of exile following the Brexit referendum, he’s been a senior figure since 2010 — serving three Prime Ministers.

Paradoxically, he’s survived for so long by embracing unpopularity. He’s the political equivalent of a sin-eater: the outcasts who were once paid to take on the sins of others through the consumption of a ritual meal. Of late, these meals have been substantial — with Gove sent out to defend the Government through its imperfect improvisations of lockdown policy.

Allied to his knowledge of the inner workings of the Whitehall machine, Gove has become indispensable. And yet his talents could be better deployed. He is, at heart, a radical — willing to pursue reform in the face of entrenched opposition. As soon as the Covid crisis is over, he should be put in charge of solving another problem that’s been left unsolved for the last decade or more: housing.

6. Robert Jenrick

This would be a good point at which to examine the record of the latest Secretary of State who hasn’t solved the housing crisis. Robert Jenrick is the sixth Cabinet minister in this role since 2010. Some have been real talents, others not so much, and none has been left in post long enough to sort out Britain’s single greatest structural problem.

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Indeed, none has been allowed to state the obvious, which is that rampant house price inflation is a bad thing. If the Conservatives want to rescue Generation Rent and revive their vision of a property-owning democracy, then house prices must fall relative to wages.

A generic placeman such as Jenrick is incapable of true reform. His atrocious planning white paper maintains the fiction that the planning system is to blame for the housing crisis — instead of the land bankers. If Boris is serious about building back better then he needs to set Gove loose on the vested interests standing in the way.

7. Gavin Williamson

Oh dear, what can one say? Any politician capable of a media performance like this one has no business being a minister, let alone a Cabinet minister.

In any case, Williamson is unlikely to survive the next reshuffle — not after the results debacle earlier this year. He wasn’t to blame for the closure of schools during lockdown and the cancellation of exams. However, he did oversee the grade allocation algorithm that caused such upset and fury.

His department made the classic mistake of targeting one objective — i.e. the prevention of grade inflation — without considering the wider ramifications. In particular, the downward adjustment of grades based on the past performance not only of the pupil but also the school could not have been more contrary to the principle of levelling up. If you want to succeed as a government’s minister, then best not to drive a coach-and-horses through its domestic agenda.

Robert Jenrick’s housing target algorithm is a similar fiasco — and a further lesson in the foolishness of entrusting policy to mindless robots.

8. Liz Truss

Liz Truss isn’t exactly my kind of conservative. Her infamous tribute to a generation of “#Uber-riding #Airbnb-ing #Deliveroo-eating #freedomfighters” didn’t just make me cringe, but evoked a soul-crushing void.

But, fair’s fair, she’s done a decent job as Secretary of State for International Trade. It’s still early days, but to rebuild a long-abandoned function of sovereign government (i.e. trade diplomacy) is a painstaking task that she’s diligently got on with.

It remains to be seen what purpose this new capacity will be put to — especially when it comes to the looming trade deal with America. The fate of the British countryside hangs in the balance and I hope that Truss makes a stand for the things that matter more than the bottom line. You wouldn’t want to feed chlorine chicken to those Deliveroo-eating freedom fighters, would you Liz?

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Nevertheless, she’s had a good year. While she bombed at DEFRA and as Lord Chancellor, she’s undoubtedly found her niche. Which goes to show that getting the right people into Cabinet is only half the struggle. The other half is getting them into the right positions.

Perhaps Downing Street should stop appointing people to roles that they haven’t actually asked for. Instead they should invite applications from candidates who actually want to do each job. They’d thus be able to prepare for the position, think about what they want to do with it and then present their case to the appropriate decision-makers.

I know, it’s a crazy idea — but it seems to work for well-run organisations.