ARE we seeing some buyers’ remorse from the gang who backed Boris Johnson? You know the feeling. It’s a sunny day, you are feeling good and buy a big bright bold patterned “holiday shirt.” But now the sky is greyer and you are thinking: “Does this look a bit loud? Do these crazy colours actually make me look like a bit of a... clown?”

You can see that worry is troubling some of the politicos who put their shoulders behind getting Johnson elected.

For the Conservatives, they gambled on Johnson. They are, I think, nervous about this gamble, but will still throw more money on the table behind it.

When we talk about Tory leadership, the context is the Conservative Party are the ruling class’s favoured party of power: the rich and powerful can work with and through other parties, but they prefer to do it with the Conservatives.

Britain’s ruling class shifted from the landed aristocracy, to the factory owners and now to the City. With each shift, the Conservative Party shifted in response. But its basic function — to protect the established order and persuade the mass of people to support the position of the richest — remains.

There are complicated shifts in the ideology and policies underpinning these aims, but let’s keep it simple: the Tories are the favoured party of the ruling class. They are there to persuade the population, not be persuaded by it.

In turn, the party power structures — the big money donors, top MPs and lords — try to shape the rank and file Tory membership, not be shaped by them.

For years, Johnson has been popular with the members, but distrusted by Tory power brokers.

I vividly remember going to Tory conferences in 2014 and 2015, when Johnson was greeted by a kind of middle-aged Beatlemania. Inside the Conference “Security Zone,” Johnson was mobbed by the well-heeled crowds, his “Johnson-tastic” meetings were huge.

The party rank-and-file showed nothing like this love for Cameron, who got polite smiles and waves, not mobs: Cameron won power back for the Tory Party, but members disliked the small compromises he forced on them to get elected after the long New Labour years.

To become Tory leader, an MP must be first selected by his fellow MPs then voted on by party members. For years it has been clear Johnson would win any members’ vote — which is why MPs made sure he didn’t face one. The members love for Johnson was matched by the power brokers distrust of him: the Tory elite think of Johnson as unreliable and untrustworthy, entertaining — but dangerous.

Yet here he is, Prime Minister. The Tories were very worried that the long, hard years of austerity burned away consent for further deregulation, privatisation and cuts. Some on the right and among the rich saw Brexit as a way to rejuvenate British free-market capitalism, with an added dose of nationalism, but other big money and big political interests saw it as a destabilising gamble.

All of them were pretty shocked by the rise of Corbyn, especially when he took their majority in 2017. They agonised about how to meet the challenge.

Theresa May experimented with mixing traditional Tory themes and new “social” approaches — declaring austerity to be “over,” making noises about meeting social “burning injustices,” while trying to negotiate Brexit between Tory factions. But none of it bit.

So in a gamble, the top Tories threw their weight behind the formerly mistrusted Johnson. He in turn was happy to throw his weight behind Brexit and into an election campaign stuffed with sharp practice and disinformation.

Unfettered by even the vestigial worries and principles of his fellow Tories, Johnson was willing to cut through inter-party debates over Brexit by sacking other MPs and approach an election with crude stunts and crass lies.

Johnson was a high-stakes gamble for the Tories. But Britain’s broader elite really did get a bit peculiar over Corbyn’s challenge: Corbyn may only have been offering what in Europe look like fairly standard left polices, but in Britain our media and political classes are used to a much narrower range of politics, as defined by Thatcherism and New Labour.

If Johnson was a bit of a last ditch for the Tories, the editors and top reporters (and a clutch of former Labour MPs) were ready to jump in that ditch with him to keep Corbyn out.

A host of supposedly “liberal” pundits backed Johnson over the more “dangerous” Corbyn — and some of these are now obviously feeling the does-this-shirt-make-me-look-like-a-clown remorse.

The high-stakes gamble paid off, but the victory is clearly making some Johnson-backers nervous: they wanted him to do a smash-bang job in the election — they didn’t expect he’d have to deal with a situation as difficult as the Covid-19 crisis.

Staunch Tory publications like the Telegraph and Mail are worrying about government “competence” and ready to put the boot into the likes of Gavin Williamson, as well as directing lesser blows at Johnson himself.

Do Tory worries help us? It is a little bit of light in the darkness. But their weakness is not the same as our strength.

Keir Starmer clearly thinks he can exploit this buyers’ remorse by appearing like a nice sober grey suit-and-tie combo to replace the embarrassing loud shirt. However, while the Starmer strategy of claiming “competence” but offering few different policies does appeal to some of the right-ish newspaper editors and pundits, I’m less convinced about the popular appeal of bland technocracy in an age of polarisation.

After all, when Johnson sacked “sensible centrist” Tory MPs the public response was a shrug. Even if it does work, it makes an argument for the Tories replacing Johnson somewhere before an election rather than Starmer replacing Johnson in an election.

Finally, should it work, this could lead to a very right-wing Labour government. We can’t forget that the Blair-Brown governments, which in some ways promised more reforms than Starmer seems inclined to, also set Atos on disabled people, put Serco in charge of so much of the public sector, while getting G4S to build private prisons for asylum-seekers.

Tory nerves about Johnson are real, but we still have an uphill job building a challenge from the left.