Conservative party donor, talking to the Financial Times, is bullish that Boris Johnson will get a “vaccine bounce”. This Tory moneybags spoke anonymously. For it sounds in profoundly bad taste to be discussing political advantage when the UK has just passed the sombre milestone of more than 100,000 deaths from the pandemic. Anyone who has lost a loved one will not like to hear that politicians and their backers are conjecturing that the vaccination programme will be a shot in the arm for the prime minister’s popularity. The hard truth is that lots of Tories are privately talking about it. And so are their opponents. Not for the first time, and almost certainly not for the last, Mr Johnson has resisted demands for the establishment of a public inquiry into his government’s handling of the crisis. He had to acknowledge that there would be “a time when we must learn the lessons of what has happened”, but “I do not think that moment is now”. For him, there never will be a good time for a full and independent audit of his government’s frequently disastrous performance. Any public inquiry worthy of the name is most unlikely to agree with his claim that “we truly did everything we could”. Even senior Tories agree that there will have to be some kind of “reckoning”, as one puts it, for why the UK has the highest death toll in Europe and one of the worst mortality rates in the world while simultaneously suffering a more severe economic hit than any other country in the G7 group of prosperous states. Politically speaking, the most dangerous stretch of the crisis for the Tory leader was last autumn when he and his ministers lurched from fiasco to U-turn to farrago in a sequence of calamities so awful that even Johnson loyalists were wondering how much longer he could cling to Number 10. Senior Tories despaired that the government’s performance was so terrible that it would irreparably shatter public faith in their competence. The Spectator published a front cover demanding “Where’s Boris?”, accompanied by a cartoon depicting its former editor alone in an oarless boat on a heaving sea. Other erstwhile cheerleaders in the rightwing press turned on him. It wasn’t hard to find Tory MPs who thought he would not survive long enough in Number 10 to celebrate a second anniversary there. Some growled that he would be “out by Christmas”. Yet there were also those who cautioned that it had often been an error to write off Mr Johnson. His career has been punctuated by several scandals, any one of which would have destroyed many another politician, but which he survived. A month on from Christmas, there he is, still in Downing Street. How do we account for this? Public confidence in the government has been very badly corroded and there were points over the past 10 months when it looked as though it might disintegrate entirely, but it never quite did. Mr Johnson has been cushioned by the substantial segment of the public who have always been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Labour MPs report they often come across voters saying things such as “Boris is doing his best” and “anyone would have struggled”. Some make a case that culpability for the government’s many mistakes is not sticking as indelibly as it ought to because we have a prime minister who is an expert blame-swerver and a leader of the opposition who has been an over-cautious prosecutor of Mr Johnson’s serial failures. Sir Keir Starmer has always had a dilemma, one that he has never fully resolved. Be too calibrated in his criticism of the government and one group of people will complain that he ought to be expressing more anger on the public’s behalf. Furiously lambast the government and another group will accuse the Labour leader of being opportunistic and point-scoring. There’s a significant segment of the country that continues to think everyone should be getting behind the government in this kind of crisis. It is a persisting echo of the “rally to the flag” effect that boosted the prime minister’s ratings at the outset of the pandemic. The Tory leader knows this and exploits it. In response to Sir Keir pressing him on why the UK’s death toll is so appallingly high, the prime minister batted the question aside by asserting: “What the country wants is for us to come together as a parliament and as politicians and to work to keep the virus under control.” One Labour frontbencher tells me: “In our focus groups, the more we attack the government, the more people don’t like it.” The accusation that the government has been too slow to take measures to control the virus resonates with the public because they largely agree. “Anywhere else you attack them, you have people saying, ‘That’s not fair.’” Mr Johnson may also be the undeserving beneficiary of low expectations of government. “There’s a general cynicism about politicians as a class,” comments one veteran of the Labour frontbench. “When we criticise the government, people often respond, ‘You lot wouldn’t have done any better.’” Had we known at the outset of this crisis that the death toll would swell into six figures, many would have assumed that this had to spell doom for the government that presided over such a catastrophe. Yet despite the deaths, despite all the debacles, despite everything, recent polls have put the Conservatives on a rating in the mid to high 30s. That is a decline, but not a collapse, from their vote share at the 2019 election. Past governments have had much worse midterm ratings and gone on to recover and win the subsequent election. The Opinium poll that we publish today has even more encouraging news for the Tories. Their rating has climbed to 41%, a three-point edge over Labour. The poll also provides some supporting evidence for the Tory hope that they will reap a vaccine dividend. The proportion of respondents expressing approval for the way in which the government is deploying doses has climbed to 60%. The vaccination programme offers succour to the public that a conclusion to the crisis is in sight. Or, if not an end, at least the prospect of returning to something more resembling normal life. It is also the one international comparator where Britain has an enviable record rather than a ghastly one. Boris Johnson never passes an opportunity to boast that the UK has “the fastest vaccination programme in Europe”. For once, he makes a brag that is true – at least for the moment. The UK has to date got around 8m jabs into people’s arms, far more than France, where there is intensifying national angst about why its programme is so slow. The ugly dispute between the EU and AstraZeneca about supplies of the company’s vaccine has ministers worried that a continued escalation could result in disruption here. At the same time, that row suits the interests of the Tories because it draws further public attention to the contrast in the pace of inoculation in the UK and the lower levels of delivery among its neighbours. One senior Tory calls Mr Johnson “the cheerful card”. His blustery boosterism has repeatedly been a fatal liability during the crisis. Time and again, he has made promises that couldn’t be fulfilled and brandished predictions about when the virus would be beaten back that were never going to come true. The vaccination programme allows him to sound a bit more plausible when he talks about an escape to freedom thanks to the genius of British science and the excellence of the NHS. There’s suddenly a lot of interest in Tory circles in the work of Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize-winning psychologist and behaviouralist. They are attracted to the professor’s thesis about how people recall difficult periods in their lives: they disproportionately remember, and therefore place the greatest weight, on how a harrowing episode came to an end. The contention is that even a deeply grim crisis can be thought of positively if the conclusion to it is an uplifting one. Tory strategists are calculating that this is a trait of human nature that can be exploited to their party’s benefit. They reckon that a successful vaccination programme will induce voters to forget the government’s contribution to all the distress and death that came before it. The challenge for the Tories’ opponents will be stopping Boris Johnson from getting away with this.