The vaccine boost is wearing off – exposing Boris Johnson’s flaws

Boris Johnson has complained to officials and advisers that Britain’s head start in the vaccine race is being “wasted”, I am told. He is worried that the British pride in being first and fastest is being diluted as the rest of Europe catches up, and that his popularity is ebbing as a result.

The latest figures from Spain show that a larger share of its population has now been double-vaccinated than in the UK, and that Italy and Germany are not far behind. Instead of our early advantage allowing us to get ahead in the economic recovery, we seem to be in the middle of the pack, and the confusion over travel has us tripping over our laces.

Voters rarely give politicians credit for anything, and when they do, it doesn’t tend to last. But the prime minister must have been surprised that the sharpest pang of disillusionment came from the Conservative Party.

His opinion poll ratings among the general electorate have subsided gently to the usual mildly negative, while it was a survey of Tory members that delivered the sharpest corrective, an 18 per cent swing from satisfied to dissatisfied that left him the fourth most unpopular member of the cabinet (after Gavin Williamson, Amanda Milling and Robert Jenrick). That must sting.

And although I have written before about how Johnson’s attempt to dodge isolation after coming into contact with the Covid-positive health secretary may have been the trigger for the decline, there is obviously a lot else going on.

For Tory members, the failure to stop the small boats coming across the Channel (another record yesterday: 482 people in one day) will have cut through. Priti Patel, the home secretary, suffered a 10 per cent swing against her in that Con Home poll, although that still left her well ahead of the prime minister.

For the electorate as a whole, as well as for the Tory party, though, it is probably the waning of vaccine immunity against bad news that is doing for Johnson’s popularity. Instead of exciting updates about how far ahead of other large countries we are in vaccinating people, the headlines are crowded out with stories of government incompetence (the media’s default setting).

The policies on travel restrictions have pleased no one. A large proportion of the public want to see Britain closed to the world altogether and think it is reckless to open up. Most of the rest do want to travel but have been confused and irritated by apparently illogical rules and changes to them.

In particular, closing down travel to and from France three weeks ago seems to have been a mistake caused by thinking the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean is part of mainland France, which is only being put right this weekend, without explanation.

Things are so bad for the prime minister that he has failed to identify himself with Team GB’s stunning performance in the Tokyo Olympics. If you don’t count China and the US, because they are too big, and Japan, which has the host-nation advantage, Team GB is top of the medals table – and yet the only politician I’ve seen gaining any credit for it is John Major, who years ago put all that lottery money into a ruthless attempt to win medals in sports no one had heard of.

Instead, Johnson is in Scotland engaged in defensive politics, trying to contain the Scottish National Party’s threat to break up the country, and being photographed with police officers in an attempt to head off Keir Starmer’s new slogan, that the Tories are “soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime”.

The significance of the poll of Tory members is that it is a reminder of the shallowness of Johnson’s roots in the party. This is a party that turned to him in desperation when it had run out of other ideas and Brexit was stuck in parliament, not because he stood for anything beyond “getting Brexit done”.

It was less than a year ago that there was talk among Tory MPs of writing letters to Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 Committee, to demand a vote of no confidence in Johnson’s leadership. At the time, Labour and the Conservatives were level in the opinion polls and the majority of voters thought that Johnson was handling the pandemic badly. Then came the vaccines.

Now the vaccines have been delivered, Johnson will suffer again from the normal wear and tear of governing. Further slippage in the opinion polls will make the Tory backbench letter-writers take up their pens again. The talk of a leadership challenge last November was premature, but it always is – until it isn’t.