Everyone has found pandemic restrictions frustrating. Few see them on the spectrum of state coercion tending inevitably towards the Gulag. But the hysterical minority is overly represented in the Conservative party. As a result, the language of political emancipation is misapplied to something that would, in a more rational setting, be discussed in terms of clinical outcome. With so many people vaccinated and so many businesses craving customers, it makes sense to adjust the risk calculus, but for Tory MPs to speak of a “freedom day” is pantomime. They mean freedom from the face mask, asserting their own right to no longer care about Covid infections, while making it sound like freedom from the disease itself. This is the same reflex that wanted to celebrate Brexit with an “independence day” on the grounds that EU membership equated to colonisation by a foreign power. It is the familiar revving of ideological engines, racing through the rhetorical gears from metaphor to hyperbole to paranoid delusion and fantasies of joining the resistance in people whose only political struggle has been for selection to a safe Tory seat. Boris Johnson is, as ever, torn between the need to associate himself with happy feelings of liberation and fear of taking responsibility for the consequences of a policy unmoored to evidence. The prime minister’s public statements are often an exercise in self-persuasion. He only knows what he believes by trying it out on an audience. When he cautions against getting “demob happy” he is reminding himself that he cannot get Covid done, as he claimed he could with Brexit, although he is obviously bored with the pandemic plotline in the story he wants told about his leadership. The next volume has chapter headings without meaningful contents. Britain will “build back better” and “level up”, bridging inequalities with infrastructure and jobs in low-carbon industries. There is a lot of blank space to be filled and technical policy is not Johnson’s genre. Also, the whole thing has to pass through the editorial process of the Treasury’s three-year spending review in the autumn. The cabinet battle for finite resources will be the story of the autumn as departments put pressure on the chancellor, either by leaking tales of the dire consequences of underfunding or briefing that support has been promised as a way to make it so. Johnson’s aversion to difficult choices and face-to-face confrontation will make him an absent arbitrator, spreading confusion where he should be dictating priorities. It is possible that a coherent model for post-pandemic government will emerge from that tussle, but not likely. Instead, “levelling up” will continue to be a euphemism for pork-barrel politics, with funds that are nominally earmarked for the neediest towns deployed in constituencies where Tory MPs must repay the former Labour voters who switched sides. There is nothing subtle about this process. The transactional character of the Conservative electoral offer has been explicit in recent local council and byelection contests. The message put out in Hartlepool and, less successfully, Batley and Spen, is that it pays to send a Tory MP to Westminster because that is where all the money is kept. That resonates with people who associate the physical degradation and social decay in their towns not with Johnson’s Conservatives but with decades of local Labour incumbency. Sometimes the charge of complacency and neglect is earned, but it is perverse that Keir Starmer’s party should feel the backlash for council cuts made inevitable by George Osborne’s austerity budgets. There is something of the mafia protection racket about this dynamic. The Tories break things up and then saunter around the vandalised site, full of feigned sympathy and slippery charm steeped in menace, announcing that the way to avoid such distress in the future is to pay tribute to the Johnson syndicate. It is an effective system as long as the promise of protection is made good. That imperative sets Downing Street strategy more than any ideological conviction. It also carries the risk of neglecting places that have been voting Conservative for much longer and with a different conception of what they get in return for that allegiance. When the safe seat of Chesham and Amersham was lost to the Liberal Democrats, party managers were quick to attribute the swing to specific grievances – planning reform and the HS2 rail line. But in private, Tory MPs admit that a wider malaise was involved. Lifelong supporters of the party, many of whom voted remain in 2016 but had no hesitation in preferring Johnson and Theresa May to Jeremy Corbyn as candidates for prime minister, are uneasy about the aggressive and mercenary style of the government. This is not (or not exclusively) resentment of fiscal transfers from affluent southern Tory heartlands to newly captured territories in the north. It is an accumulation of unease at the character of an administration that evokes the Wildean cynic who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is the constant hum of petty sleaze, cronyism and a supercilious way with power that makes it hard for liberal-minded Tories to glean any civic pride from association with the ruling party. That effect should not be overstated. Johnson is still a unique performer: part raconteur, part escapologist, talking his way out of troubles that would sink other leaders. But a consequence of that shtick is the growing gap between heroic language and grubby practice. It is the duality inherent in any failing ideological project that must keep cranking the rhetoric of abstract ideals higher to cover the stoop to ever shabbier methods. The support it generates is widely spread, but maybe also shallow; a popular consumer choice, lacking the connective tissue of shared and consistent beliefs. The Tories are impatient to cry freedom from Covid, just as they were impatient to declare independence from Brussels, believing that they have been held back, with much pent-up governing to do. In reality, getting Brexit done, then riding out the pandemic has spared them the embarrassment of the empty page where the point of Boris Johnson has yet to be written. Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist