If Boris Johnson, king of the Brexiteers, slayer of the Red Wall and supposed neo-populist extraordinaire, can’t even cut VAT on fuel, what hope is there for his brand of Toryism? Forget about any kind of recovery after the woes of the past few months: unless he rediscovers his once-fantastic ability to connect with his erstwhile base, 2022 is about to turn into Johnson’s true annus horribilis.

Britain isn’t quite Kazakhstan, where the government has just been toppled by rising gas prices, but with the cost of the basic energy tariff due to increase savagely by April, and taxes shooting up, the cost of living is about to become an explosive priority. Yet Johnson, the most profligate peacetime Tory Prime Minister in history, cannot spare the 0.17 per cent of government receipts that it would cost to scrap VAT on fuel, thus breaking another of his promises to his core electorate.

What happened to his political antennae? He used to have his finger on the pulse of Brexit Britain. Worse, his explanation for refusing to cut VAT – that VAT is a “blunt instrument” that means “also cutting fuel bills for a lot of people who perhaps don’t need the support in quite the direct way that we need to give it” – seems to show his final rejection of Thatcherite ideas on tax and spend, and his total conversion to a Brownite view in which no reduction in taxation is justified unless it is aimed only at the very poor.

I write this with great sorrow: I was starting to hope that Johnson might be poised for a resurgence. Britain’s brave Covid strategy has turned out to be immensely better than that of other European nations, and the PM, as well as the tenacious band of Tory Covid rebels, deserve a great amount of credit. Yes, self-isolation remains a mess, but the decision to ride through omicron without imposing full lockdowns should pay off spectacularly.

In a rational world, this ought to provide the perfect springboard for a full Johnsonian relaunch, based around a revolutionary set of policies to make ordinary people’s lives better, inspired by a combination of Vote Leave and revitalised free-market economics.

Yet this last great opportunity is about to be squandered: like his hero Winston Churchill, Johnson appears intent on winning the war – in Boris’s case, the double conflict of Brexit and Covid – but losing the peace. Inflation is out of control, taxes are being increased to their highest levels since Attlee, real wages are collapsing, migration and crime are not fixed, the schools are a mess, the NHS and social care are a bottomless, dysfunctional pit and yet Johnson seems the picture of insouciance, focusing on radical green policies that will make us even poorer.

He seems stuck in a parallel, Labour-lite universe when it comes to the economy, tax, energy, public spending and the environment. His attitude to VAT cuts on energy is the perfect vignette of all that has gone wrong.

First, there are the broken promises: writing in 2016, Johnson said cutting VAT on fuel would be one of the benefits of Brexit. Second, the related failure to capitalise on leaving the EU is turning into a pathology: the Remainers are winning the propaganda war, focusing on the costs of Brexit (imposed by a vindictive, proto-Trumpian EU) while the Tories are failing to make use of new freedoms quickly enough. In time, it will become obvious that the benefits of leaving the EU will far outweigh the costs, but why does Johnson want to leave it to his successor to deliver these upsides?

Third, his alternative is to retain the socialist price cap and to lend cash to the energy industry, bailing them out to temporarily shield consumers, doing little to speed up the nuclear roll-out, continuing to block fracking and retaining all of the green rules that will, over time, push up prices further. This is madness. This Government has no coherent, pro-capitalist growth strategy; it doesn’t understand market forces or the role of the private sector.

Last but not least, Johnson’s approach to tax is a far cry from what it used to be. In 2019, he portrayed himself as a disciple of Ibn Khaldun, the medieval Arab intellectual and original supply-side economist. The PM paraphrased him perfectly: “If you cut taxes on the olive harvest, or whatever it was in 14th-century Tunisia, actually people grew more olives, and tax yields went up. It doesn’t apply in every case but he is making a valid point.” His newfound addiction to tax increases implies he no longer thinks this way.

We now also discover from the explanation he gave when ruling out VAT cuts that he cares too much about distributional impacts, a Left-wing approach that always favours extra welfare rather than across-the-board tax relief. By the logic of this approach, middle-income people should never receive a tax cut ever again.

This is not just an ideological betrayal, but politically catastrophic. The energy price cap will go up from April 1 from the current record £1,277 to around £2,000, almost twice the £1,042 level seen in late 2020. Guess what, Boris: a Tory voter on £40,000 – well above average and thus “well-off”, according to the Lefty technocrats who apparently have the PM’s ear – hammered by tax rises and inflation won’t thank you for dismissing her concerns so casually. Of course, a VAT cut will only help a little, but it would be a symbolic downpayment.

It is not just those in the bottom decile or quintile of the income distribution that are clamouring for help. Why is this Tory Government, just like May’s and Cameron’s, still obsessed by the Left-wing metrics imposed by Gordon Brown? Who cares if the “rich” also gain from tax cuts? That attitude is one reason why the Tories lost Chesham and Amersham: at this rate they will also lose aspirational Northern voters in their new-build semis and petrol-powered Qashqais.

George Osborne made the same mistake: he appeared to operate in a world – a little like some parts of inner London – where there are only two classes, the very poor (who rely on benefits) and the extremely wealthy (who are insulated from cost of living concerns). Yet the Tory mass-market lies in the middle: suburban Britain, the aspirational working class, the lower middle class, and it is they who fear inflation and tax rises the most.

It still isn’t too late. Johnson should announce that he has changed his mind, and cut VAT on fuel to zero, permanently and immediately. It won’t solve all, or even most of his problems, but it would buy him some time, and show that there still is life left in the old Boris.