Alex Phillips: Is Boris Johnson the man to steer the good ship Britain through today’s tsunami streaked seas?

An autocracy tempered by regicide.

That’s how William Hague described the Conservative Party, and considering the past two Prime Ministers, it’s hard to disagree.

The Tories seem to have a habit of playing their party leaders like a game of chess. No sooner has a new Prime Minister been anointed that the game of succession begins.

The manoeuvres, the plotting, the leaks and the splits, the whispers and backbench backroom deals, the Whatsapp groups, the publicity stunts, the late night texts to journalists and clandestine gatherings in Westminster dining rooms.

Since the Tories came back into power, every Premiership has ended in an early resignation, the stake through the heart of resident of Number Ten always being Brexit, that backbench headache that just wouldn’t go away, threatening to schism the party with every passing political generation.

Until along came an analgesic in the form of Boris; promising to get Brexit done in front of party faithfuls applauding like seals, his sycophantic backbenchers finally getting their antihero on the throne, the voice of the grassroots represented once again, saving for them their precarious seats.

Here comes the time to insert the record scratch.

Because history has a funny way of repeating itself.

For all of Boris’s Brexit bluster, along came Covid, an unprecedented challenge that would divide the nation and pull at the fabric of the self-titled broad church of the Conservative Party, all over again.

The party whose fault line is Freedom itself. From bleating about jettisoning the shackles of Brussels, the True Blue Libertarians now clamour for freedom from SAGE.

Somehow the party of thrift and personal responsibility has transmogrified into a Government able to lock people up, force vaccines into veins and go on a spending spree that would make Louis XIV queasy.

Yet getting the bad news delivered by a bobbing blond bonce with electric shock hair, woven with waggish warm wit, made the public far more forgiving perhaps of the pain being inflicted upon them.

So over and over again the cycle of reassurance, the dithering and denial, the very public reticence disguising private resolve, the 5pm conferences and 4am flights home, trapped us in a governance of bipolar madness, one week pandering to Covid sceptics to assuaging science zealots the next.

Over and over again, in true British style, we obeyed, with little more than a sigh and a grumble.

That was until we realised that some animals are more equal than others, and bon viveur Boris had been presiding over secret soirees and chummy cheese nights, and a rollercoaster of botched decisions, leaks and peccadillos soon followed coaxing out a gentle flurry of resignations and piquing political plotting.

Scandals that in normal times would have seen far less result in consequences far greater.

So, as Nadine Dories appears to have been unceremoniously dumped from the Whatsapp group of Tory rebels.

The oven ready Brexit deal gets rapidly de-Frosted to be subsumed under the auspices of Remain voting in Liz we Truss, as Dishy Rishi has fallen suspiciously silent, commanded perhaps to squirrel himself away in the bowels of Number 11 having become too delectable as a potential successor.

As the infamous 1922 Committee once again furtively count their missives from disgruntled Tory Zed listers waiting to reach the threshold for a vote of No Confidence.

Will we be seeing yet another Premicide from behind a lectern at the nation’s most famous address?

Or can Boy Wonder Boris, the greased piglet, Bojo the human trampoline add yet another life onto his catlike survivor’s tally?

Is this really the man to steer the good ship Britain through today’s Tsunami streaked seas?

We really need to talk about leadership.