What does it take for a ministerial resignation to be accepted these days?

Now we know that Gavin Williamson offered to resign, the question shifts from the education secretary’s sense of responsibility to the prime minister’s. Why didn’t Boris Johnson gratefully accept the offer?

Part of the explanation, I think, is jaw-jutting stubbornness. Johnson and the team around him, particularly Dominic Cummings, his chief adviser, believe that they should not be pushed around by a media hoo-ha. When Cummings himself was under pressure to quit, over his flexible interpretation of the lockdown rules, Johnson told his inner circle that he was not going to allow journalists to decide who would work for him.

In a sense, he has been vindicated by the opinion polls. The furore over Cummings’s Durham trip did not shift public opinion as much as I thought it would – although I maintain that it has done lasting damage to Johnson’s reputation, and to his authority whenever he has to ask the nation to make sacrifices.

Yesterday’s polls suggested the A-levels fiasco might be different. YouGov put the Conservative lead over Labour at just two points, with Keir Starmer taking a four-point lead over Johnson when people were asked who would be the better prime minister. ComRes had put the Tories five points ahead in an earlier poll carried out before the U-turn – and had also put Johnson 13 points ahead of Starmer on the “best prime minister” question.

Another poll by YouGov, on Monday (carried out before the U-turn was announced at 4pm), found that twice as many thought Williamson should resign (40 per cent) as thought he should stay on (21 per cent), although there were still a lot of people who didn’t know (39 per cent), and there are probably large numbers who would say that any minister should resign at any given time.

Johnson and most of the people around him gained their experience of how politics works when Tony Blair was prime minister. They will have observed how he was pushed into sacking ministers who were important to him – Peter Mandelson (twice), David Blunkett and Charles Clarke – and how he appeared, later, to regret it. They will have concluded that giving in to a media storm not only makes a prime minister look weak, but makes him actually weak, by depriving him of allies. The lesson they will have learned was that, however painful it seems at the time, the storm will blow over, and a prime minister who sticks it out will emerge stronger.

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The U-turn means that Williamson has ended up adopting the position that the media and the opposition were calling for, which leaves them only with the charge of incompetence. That is bad, but it is not necessarily a sacking offence.

By weathering the storm, Johnson has also put himself in a position where he can move Williamson in a wider reshuffle – one is due in 12 days’ time, when the foreign office and department for international development are merged on 1 September – which may help him look as though he is in control of events, rather than at the mercy of them.