Do the Tories really care about people like us? It’s in part because millions of voters are beginning to doubt the answer to this question that Boris Johnson is in so much trouble.

The Prime Minister’s traumatic fight against the establishment over Brexit turned him into a hero to swathes of the country; two years on, that goodwill has been squandered, and many of his 2019 working class recruits fear that the Tories have reverted to type, a feeling confirmed by the lurid tales of illicit wine-guzzling. But Partygate is merely the last straw after a series of disappointments, the explosive, infuriating symbol of a Government that forgot that its mission was to stand up for a silent majority long ignored by metropolitan Tories and Labour alike.

Buffeted by Covid, irritated by failures on illegal migration and crime, Johnson’s people – in the shires and in the red wall – are in the grip of a vicious, intensifying cost of living crisis that, bizarrely, he is preparing to reinforce with hikes to National Insurance (NI). The traditional argument for voting Tory – that they will make you better off – is no longer credible. For those in SW1 who haven’t noticed, inflation is extremely painful for Middle England. The value of savings is being slashed; wages are falling dramatically in real terms; small businesses are facing higher costs; and there is terror that the money will run out, that bills won’t be paid, that pauperisation looms.

Some of this is due to global forces for which the British authorities cannot be blamed. But voters realise all too well that the Government is about to add to their pain with a tax raid; they also note that the PM has refused to cut VAT on energy bills, despite promising to do so in 2016. It was always absurd to claim, as many Tories did last year, that higher NI “to pay for the NHS” would somehow be popular; it is now clear that the timing is politically suicidal.

It’s not just today’s blow to living standards that voters are worried about. Thanks to Government policy, the future looks equally grim. Will people have to pay a lot more for an electric car? Will they need to pay for a new boiler? Why is Johnson – their man – doing this to them? The Tories promised to tackle the housing crisis, yet the next generation is being priced out ever more quickly.

Middle England will never vote for a party that wants to impoverish them, or that is so careless it doesn’t realise when it is doing so. Johnson, or his successor, will need to act extremely quickly and radically to salvage the situation, tackle the cost of living crisis and begin a genuine push to boost growth, productivity and therefore wages.

The PM has already scrapped most Covid restrictions, a welcome move, but that is the easy part. The next step is to show the public that he is serious about tackling inflation.

The Prime Minister must summon Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, and convey to him the severity of the situation. The insouciant manner in which the Bank has treated the inflationary explosion has been deeply troubling. It has embraced a radical woke agenda and has focused on forcing the City to go green. But what about its core function of keeping inflation low? It is also time for Rishi Sunak to reform the Bank’s mandate. Technocratic groupthink runs riot in Threadneedle Street. The post-1997, Brown/Balls monetary policy framework has failed. Asset price inflation can no longer be ignored, and QE needs to be seen as the weapon of mass destruction that it truly is.

The Government must simultaneously launch a new economic growth strategy. It has its work cut out: the Tories started to lose the plot on this front in the mid-2000s.

Scarred by their apparent inability to land blows on Gordon Brown, David Cameron and George Osborne shifted Left-wards, focusing on “sharing the proceeds of growth” – a message that took economic improvements for granted – and embraced gimmicks such as employee-ownership to appeal to the metropolitan elites. To his credit, Osborne at least retained a belief in balancing the books, though too much of it came from tax increases. Theresa May, by contrast, appeared to consider economic growth as rather distasteful, and adopted calamitous policies such as net zero and the energy price cap.

Rather than repudiating this nonsense, Johnson actually built on it. He has made five cardinal economic errors. The first was to assume that “going green” would quickly mean more growth, thanks to the construction of giga-factories and the rest, rather than – at best – hit the economy first by imposing additional costs. The second was that the only kind of growth that mattered was located in the North. The third was to believe that Brexit wasn’t an economic issue: in reality, Eurosceptics had long advocated massive regulatory and tax changes to cushion the transitionary costs from leaving the single market and customs union, and to reposition the UK as an ultra-competitive powerhouse. Britain has taken the hit from the costs of disentangling ourselves from the European superstate but has done nothing to fight back.

Fourth, he dumped his erstwhile interest in supply-side economics and lower taxes, deciding that the best way forward was to raise them to spend even more on the NHS. Last but not least, we have ended up with a Government that is content to nationalise firms, to hand out myriad subsidies and is considering throwing billions of pounds at a market-defying scheme to stabilise energy prices.

All of this must change. Britain needs a ruthlessly pro-growth, pro-consumer revolution. Crucially, April’s rise in national insurance must be scrapped. This will require an emergency Budget, and Sunak’s cooperation. But that tax rise is symbolic of everything that has gone wrong with Johnson’s premiership and ending it is a necessary condition for a Tory revival. Spending will need to be cut, and borrowing increased. VAT on fuel must also go.

The last time inflation was this high was in 1992, when John Major’s reputation for economic competence was being shredded by the ERM crisis, and sleaze scandals were about to engulf the Tory party. His decision to increase VAT on energy helped finish him off. The similarities with today are eerie. Economics, the cost of living and tax are just as much at the root of the Conservatives’ present crisis as illicit parties. They are either the party of prosperity, or they are nothing. Why do the Tories never learn?