On Christmas Day, Rishi Sunak marked his 62nd day as prime minister, far surpassing Liz Truss’s time in office. A trifling achievement, by any measure. But after the annus horribilis that was 2022, the Conservatives are not really in a position to turn their noses up at small victories. And the prime minister will, broadly, have achieved what he set out to do when Tory MPs finally crowned him in October: steadied the ship. Westminster politics seems stable, even boring; the markets are no longer running riot; even the polls are starting to narrow, if you squint at them. So far, so good. But the problem with restoring normal service is that normal expectations will soon follow. A grateful nation is not going to hand the Conservative party a historic fifth term merely because it has finally stopped electing chaos spirits to lead it. To win the next election, Sunak needs to give sceptical voters a solid reason to put their cross in the Tory box. It is not yet clear that he or his party are up to it. In fairness to the prime minister, he starts in an extraordinarily difficult position – not least because he inherited much of his cabinet, including his chancellor. Even without the bonfire of the Truss premiership, it is difficult to change course and seize the initiative in the second half of a parliament. Even if he had a new legislative programme, there is neither the time nor the timetable space for one. And he doesn’t have one; there has never been a “Sunakism”. The policy agenda he offered in the summer’s leadership election was rejected by the membership, and then jettisoned in October under the cover of cleaning up after his predecessor. While “not being Truss” will not be enough to win an election, it is pretty much the whole basis on which he finally won the leadership. Tory MPs don’t feel that in choosing him they have had to commit to a programme; there is no tacit acceptance of the need to fight unpopular battles. As a result, the handsome Commons majority Sunak commands on paper is largely illusory. After 12 years in power, the parliamentary party is divided along so many axes that there will probably be sufficient Tory rebels to sink anything of consequence, even if the government had the space to bring it forward. Leadership does matter. Sunak could have adapted to these circumstances, taking Labour up on its offer of support to pass the levelling up and regeneration bill, and building alliances on a case-by-case basis to get important legislation through. But he didn’t. Instead, ministers capitulated to the most shortsighted and self-destructive coalition of Conservative backbenchers in recent memory. The illusion of unity was maintained, but only at the expense of actually governing. The next election is most likely somewhere between 18 months and two years away. That is not a lot of time to get anything done. But it is a very long time to do nothing. Even Tories sympathetic to Sunak sometimes worry that his political judgment has not been tested. Whatever his strengths, he entered No 11 because he would accept terms Sajid Javid would not, and No 10 (at the second time of knocking) because Truss set the public finances on fire. Meanwhile, his Covid support measures, which made him at one point the most popular politician in the country and the prime minister’s heir apparent, were a response to an emergency, and cut across his hawkish fiscal instincts. But even a politician perfectly suited to the moment would struggle with the position he has inherited. After 12 years, the Tories seem intellectually adrift. They have changed horses four times since 2015, and, while at the time those looked like remarkable acts of renewal, the cumulative effect is confusion. While good work has been done on individual policy issues, there is no clear ideological line running from 2010 to now. Many Conservative activists are frustrated that the party, having been in power almost as long as was New Labour, has not transformed the country the way that Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher did. Hence the absurdity of Boris Johnson loyalists founding a new grassroots movement to protest at the capture of the party by “leftwingers”. The specific charge is ridiculous – Sunak is a conventionally rightwing politician by any sane measure – but the frustration speaks to a broader truth about the Tories’ apparent inability to wield power effectively. And while the cabinet would scarcely admit to sharing those feelings, the party’s political messaging tacitly concedes it. Nadhim Zahawi tries to pin the blame for the rail strikes on Labour; backbench MPs describe them as “a vision of Labour’s Britain”; still more make heroic efforts to reclaim the “chaos with Ed Miliband” meme, speculating about how bad things would have been had Cameron not prevailed in 2015. It’s not exactly “It’s morning again in America”, the slogan Ronald Reagan used to secure his landslide second term in 1984. It’s a bad sign when a party, after so long in office, prefers to try to run an oppositional campaign against an imaginary government than on its own record. That leaves two big questions for Sunak. The first is whether he can, against the odds, deliver a fifth term of Conservative government. The second is whether, if he does, he can explain to the nation – and his restive activists – what it’s actually for. If not, even his leadership could yet prove precarious. The basis for his support, like Johnson’s, is transactional. His offer, unlike Johnson’s, is not big-picture thinking and big wins but basic political competence – less Steve Jobs, more John J Ray III, the man installed as CEO of corporate catastrophes such as Enron and FTX to oversee their bankruptcy proceedings. But Ray answers only to the courts and the creditors, not the people who handpicked and cheered on the “visionary” leaders whose messes he has to clean up. The prime minister is not so fortunate. So if he can’t close the gap with Labour – if “red wall” MPs keep giving gloomy quotes about how they all expect to lose their seats – what is to stop his party trying to roll the dice one last time? It sounds ridiculous. It would be ridiculous. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. A year is a long time in local election routs and byelection humiliations. Regicide, once made a habit, may be hard to quit. Johnson’s ultras await the slightest excuse to raise again the ragged standard of their prince over the water. If they do, the rest of the party must hope that by then the cabinet has produced yet another break-glass-in-case-of-emergency candidate who could stop him. There is no stand-out candidate so far. Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome