There is an overpowering fin-de-regime stench emanating from Downing Street that can no longer be ignored. Why do all governments end up taking their voters for fools? Why do they feel that they have the right to break the rules that the rest of us must follow? That senior advisers chose to party at a time when the rest of the country was in a traumatic Christmas lockdown betrays an appalling lack of judgment, but it is their shocking sense of superiority, the sneering elitism and the subsequent lies that are most angering voters.

I feel sorry for Allegra Stratton, who is taking the rap for others’ failings, but she did the right thing in resigning. Yet it won’t be enough: the Government’s incompetence and moral failings are a toxic combination that have cut through. The Partygate video featuring officials joking about wine and cheese was an almost perfect encapsulation of everything the public hates about the political class, and will be devastating for the Government, especially as it comes at the very moment Boris Johnson is proposing to impose new restrictions on our freedoms.

This is why the timing of this scandal is so problematic for the Prime Minister. He stands accused of using the latest announcement to divert attention from the scandal, but the reality is that senior officials are terrified at the prospect of the NHS collapsing. Sage’s apparatchiks are now claiming that up to 1,000 people could be hospitalised a day by the end of the month in England alone.

The decision to reimpose restrictions is a potentially catastrophic moment for the Prime Minister, one that will infuriate all sides of the debate. The lockdowners will say that the Government should already have shut everything down, but the sceptics will be even more incandescent. Almost two years into this crisis, we now have mass vaccinations, better treatments and antivirals, and yet the NHS may still not be able to cope. Why didn’t the Government do more to avoid falling into this trap? Will this go on forever? Weren’t lockdowns meant to be a last resort? And given that the Government is bereft of moral authority, how many will comply with its new restrictions?

Johnson suffers from three critical challenges as he seeks to recover from the nightmare of Partygate and to navigate the trauma of omicron. He doesn’t have any allies and isn’t really a Westminster creature. Until now, this didn’t matter: the PM’s genius is that he bypassed conventional routes to power. He is an outsider, a Presidential-style figure who brilliantly captured the parliamentary party for his own ends.

His fame originates from his charisma, his time as mayor of London and then his plunge into the culture wars with Vote Leave; by contrast, his more traditional parliamentary and ministerial careers were lacklustre and would never, on their own, have led him to No 10. It took Theresa May’s implosion before he was propelled to power, and then only because reluctant Tory MPs realised that he enjoyed an almost supernatural popularity with the public. His unique selling point was that he was the only Tory to be able to deliver a greater share of the vote even than Tony Blair managed in 1997. He was electoral gold, and the party backed him in 2019 in one final roll of the dice to stave off oblivion.

But his power is at once deep and shallow: he became PM because of his rapport with millions of voters, and this gave him carte blanche to run the Government as he liked, but his unquestioned authority over his MPs relied on his continued popularity.

All of this is being shattered: a snap poll has 54 per cent saying the Prime Minister should resign, including 33 per cent of 2019 Conservatives, and his and the Tories’ popularity have been sliding for months. Conditions will become even harder if he loses the North Shropshire by-election, as many now believe likely. In recent months, it was privately argued that Johnson was just three negative polls away from a crisis. This analysis was spot-on: with Labour now in the lead, his party is looking for an excuse to rise up and he is desperately sacrificing his closest advisers to buy time.

This takes us to his second challenge: he has disappointed all ideological sides in his party, so none are coming to his rescue. With the exception of Northern Ireland, he has delivered a clean Brexit, so the Eurosceptics no longer need him. Lockdowners and lockdown-sceptics both feel let down, and are about to become a lot more angry. The Thatcherites are furious at his tax rises, profligacy and failure to deregulate. They knew he was a Heseltinian, but thought that he would also look after their ideological interests. The Red Wallers are equally unhappy. They realise there is no real “levelling-up” strategy that might work, and are especially terrified at sliding poll ratings that threaten their seats.

Most tellingly, even party loyalists and ministers are refusing to risk their reputation to defend the Government. MPs have learnt their lesson: time and again, Johnson backtracks on unpopular decisions. Why should a minister risk being monstered defending the indefensible if the Government is simply going to change its mind a few hours later?

Finally, there is the PM’s lack of organisation and his dysfunctional court. He triumphed in 2019 because he empowered a few key advisers, not least Dominic Cummings and Lord Frost, but No 10 soon descended into catastrophic infighting. Cummings’ faction was destroyed, but wasn’t replaced by any meaningful alternative. A chaotic form of creative destruction was replaced by a vacuum, practical as well as philosophical. The centre has been adrift for months, unable or unwilling to grip the NHS, vaccines or antivirals. Woke civil servants are running riot. Why did nobody advise Johnson better about Owen Paterson? Why did nobody grip the Afghan debacle? On top of all this, the Prime Minister’s team is facing extreme scrutiny for partygate. An already broken organisation could be rendered unfit for business just as the country enters another crucial Covid phase. This is an appalling state of affairs: the country cannot be left rudderless.

It is not too late for Johnson: many prime ministers have bounced back from far worse. But for the first time, his grip on power is starting to look shaky, and his MPs are openly discussing a post-Johnson future. He needs to act decisively to stop the rot, and to rebuild No 10 before the country is again engulfed in a traumatic Covid crisis.