BORIS JOHNSON seems set to win the unpopularity stakes. He has managed this by his own efforts and with little help from the Right Honourable Sir Keir Starmer, leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, whose own popularity rating has slipped even as the Prime Minister’s plummeted.

The old Cold War joke had it that the biggest political party in Britain was the party of ex-communists — a category that once included a Labour chancellor of the exchequer and today includes the odd Guardian leader writer — and even odder Times columnist.

Today the Party of Defecting Tory Voters, which by all accounts, may allow the election of a Lib Dem in place of the disgraced Tory Owen Paterson, is even more substantial.

Paterson was sacrificed not because his efforts to profit from his corporate sponsors offended, but because he got caught.

One new and active factor in politics is the emergence, as a distinct category, of morally outraged and disaffected Tory voters. This is what threatens to erode seemingly impregnable Tory majorities in the shires.

There is a substantial number of reasonably comfortable people, not exclusively rural and suburban dwellers, who vote Conservative because they conceive of the Tory Party as a party of the conservative values by which they order their lives.

This comforting illusion is periodically dispelled when evidence of Tory sleaze becomes too evident to ignore or suppress. We are at one of those moments.

Modern life disturbs the ordered imagination of such Tory voters. The construction of HS2 through the comfortable shires — those represented in Parliament by Tory MPs sitting on comfortable majorities — is one.

In the abstract, a measure presented as bringing aid and investment to the Midlands and the North appeals, but the real and imagined threat to house prices entailed and the absence of any concrete local amenity means constituents, and thus Tory MPs in the affected areas, have conflicting appeals to their consciences.

Just this May elections to the impregnably Tory Kent County Council saw a Green elected to a constituency covering the rural parts of the parliamentary seat held by the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury Helen Whately, who a few months ago was rarely absent from our TV screens, but is now almost invisible.

The Green Party candidate fought an energetic campaign calling for more funding in schools, free school meals for families on universal credit and better pay for social workers. He campaigned in every village for better bus services with a compelling sideline in climate change and environmental protection.

Even with these efforts he could not have overturned the substantial Tory majority but for the disrepute with which the Tories are regarded. The sitting Tory was (temporarily) suspended for tweeting in support of a prominent fascist. By any reckoning the insurgent Green vote was more or less equally comprised of former Tory and Labour voters.

This is but one example of a trend whereby Tories appear vulnerable to whatever party or candidate seem best placed to displace them.

The latest revelations about the Number 10 violations of lockdown regulations last Christmas have given a new edge to Tory disrepute. Loved ones died lonely deaths and friends and relatives remained unvisited, because the great majority made sacrifices to hold back infections and protect the NHS.

The sense that a privileged governing elite shamelessly violated the rules has become fused in a popular understanding that Tory contempt for the average citizen is the flip side of their corruption and venality.

It is this which threatens to undermine the necessary measures that the government even now hesitates to take to suppress this new and more dangerous Covid variant. Is it not significant that last weekend’s warnings by Britain’s medical officers of health came just hours before Boris Johnson’s emergency announcement and gave him little room to downplay the threat?

The political caste of MPs, state functionaries and the many privileged people who swap political appointments with media roles — who move between government and big business and act as a praetorian guard for the ruling class — is held increasingly in contempt.

The problem for the ruling class is that the credibility — as a government — of the present administration is undermined by the accumulation of crises and scandals.

The issue of the Christmas party, denied to the media by the very Number 10 functionary who presided over the revels, comes on top of the lobbying scandal and Johnson’s own boorish behaviour and serial mendacities over the decoration of Downing Street.

The parliamentary Tory Party is the mechanism whereby any dishonesty, denial or disreputable personal behaviour that threatens the continuity of corporate rule is monitored. And ruling-class alarm about Johnson’s grip on power is refracted through the narrower concerns of Tory MPs.

Having won a critical election, his utility to the imperative that the wealth and power of big business and the banks must not be compromised is itself compromised.

Starmer is coming under some criticism for his failure to press home the attack and call for Johnson’s resignation.

This, I think, is misplaced. Nothing in this week’s debates would be more certain to rally Tory support for the Prime Minister than anything resembling a confidence vote.

For once Starmer’s passivity has a purpose.

Labour’s weakness arises not just from a leadership unwilling to offer a radical challenge but from the demoralisation that the diktat of the revived Labour right has imposed.

The most substantial threat to Johnson comes from his own side.

So long as most Tory MPs thought he was their best chance to win an election he was reasonably safe, especially in the absence of a parliamentary opposition in tune with popular opinion, able to shape the narrative and willing and able to mobilise both its own members or the masses against the government.

Thus, for the moment, this is still a parliamentary game.

Tory Party managers in Parliament proved canny enough to structure the debates about the new coronavirus suppression measures in order to disperse opposition in a series of fragmented votes.

Even so the majorities in favour of the government’s measures are a personal defeat for Johnson.

An unprecedented revolt by Tory Covid sceptics and abstentions meant the measures could only pass with opposition votes. The serious nature of the Covid threat provides cover for the administration which knows that — however disruptive these people are in Tory ranks — fear of infection means the measures have massive support as evidenced by the queues at vaccination centres.

It is precisely because most people understand the threat that the sense that the government is using the omicron crisis to deflect attention from its own shortcomings is so damaging to Johnson.

The last time the rural tranquillity of Shropshire was disrupted by anything resembling a successful challenge to the establishment was in 1832 when a Whig, John Cotes, was elected to Parliament.

In the 2017 general election Owen Paterson won convincingly with an energetic Corbynista, Graeme Currie, winning a creditable 17,287 votes for Labour and the Lib Dem on a very thin 2,948 votes. Even in 2019 Labour still held on to 10,457 votes while the Lib Dem won less than half that.

The media chatter today is that the Lib Dem is close to toppling the Tory.

Critical minds immediately ask the question: why is Labour not the lightning rod for opposition to the government?

To ask the question is to answer it.

Labour’s recent showing in this constituency rested on an effective campaign to remind electors that it was the Lib Dems who sustained David Cameron’s austerity regime as well as encumbering their graduate daughters and sons to a lifetime of student debt.

A vote for the Lib Dems is a wasted vote, not because it is unlikely to result in a Lib Dem government — the only way Lib Dems can get into government is as the Tories’ reliable little helpers — but because it represents nothing substantial in the way of an alternative to the Tories.

The vagaries of Britain’s absurdly unrepresentative first-past-the-post election system has induced a deluded state of mind in some people who conclude that a “progressive alliance” is the way to remove the Tories from office.

This abstract notion of “tactical” voting assumes that people are responsive to instruction about how to vote. Its most recent advocate, Tony Blair, is clear that this is essentially a mechanism for a Labour-Lib Dem coalition.

The problem with the idea that an arrangement between these two parties is the key to a progressive government lies not only in our recent experience of the Lib Dems’ “reactionary alliance” with the Tories, but in the fact that after 13 years of Tory government 44 per cent of Lib Dem voters thought that the Lib Dems should do a deal with the Tories and only 33 per cent favoured a deal with Labour.

Co-operation to beat the Tories is only possible on a principled basis in which Labour is able to compel agreement around transformative policies.

The present deal between Plaid Cymru and Welsh Labour centres on a rational approach to present conditions. It works in a manner quite different to any arrangement that puts Labour in hock to the Lib Dems. There is a very substantial accord between Plaid’s policies and Welsh Labour’s low-key but insistent drive to create clear red water between it and Westminster Labour.

Labour might benefit from a limited agreement with the Greens if only because the Greens have no other realistic allies at national level.

Beyond any of this speculation there stands one unassailable truth.

Labour cannot challenge for office simply by mobilising its remaining loyal voters, or even by galvanising the millions of its voters abandoned by New Labour. Only by motivating the many more millions of mostly working-class people who don’t see a real benefit in casting a ballot can it win an election.

This is impossible on any programme which might appeal to the Lib Dems or over which they have a veto.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.