The staggering Conservative Party defeat in the North Shropshire by-election cannot be explained away as mere mid-term blues or as the consequence of local difficulties. It was a referendum on Boris Johnson and his premiership, and the result speaks for itself. A seat that has been held by the Tories for nearly 200 years, and that backed Brexit overwhelmingly, rejected the Conservatives by a striking margin.

Much will be written about the causes of this defeat. The by-election only happened in the first place because the previous MP, Owen Paterson, resigned from the Commons after the Government botched its handling of the parliamentary commissioner for standards’ investigation into his behaviour. Allegations of parties held in Downing Street last Christmas will not have helped either, especially given that the public is once again being asked to make sacrifices following the emergence of the omicron variant.

However, much of this might have been forgiven if the Conservatives had given their supporters a reason to vote for them. Yet, having won a historic general election victory only two years ago on a platform of getting Brexit done, the Prime Minister has struggled to outline a proper programme of government ever since. He has courted support through a mix of policies that might be popular individually, such as increasing spending on the NHS, but which, when taken together, amount to an incoherent and expensive mess.

This is not simply a question of the Government drifting away from Conservative orthodoxy on a swathe of issues – from taxation and personal freedoms, to public spending and the environment. After the general election victory in 2019, there was a case for looking afresh at Conservative philosophy and redefining it for an era in which former Labour voters made up a large chunk of the party’s support, although the extent to which Red Wall voters ever wanted massive increases in government spending is almost certainly overplayed. The issue is far more fundamental than that: the Government is giving the public no clear idea of what it stands for, or what people stand to gain from voting Conservative.

The Tories’ popularity has begun to slump alarmingly in the opinion polls, to the extent that they are now well behind Labour – an astonishing situation, given the paucity of the opposition. Mr Johnson may be fortunate in that there will now be a three-week hiatus in active politics during the Christmas recess, but he will be aware that the country faces some serious problems in the New Year that could make his situation a good deal worse.

The economic picture is dreadful. Prices are rising across the board as inflation begins to bite, with the cost of essential purchases such as petrol, food and energy going through the roof. The Bank of England’s efforts to counteract this via higher interest rates will cause further pain in the form of increasing mortgage costs, before inflation can be tamed. Moreover, thanks to the panic over the omicron variant, the country may be heading back into recession. Thousands of businesses in the hospitality sector and beyond will be facing bankruptcy thanks to a sharp drop in customer bookings, a consequence of dread warnings from ministers and their advisers about the rise in Covid cases.

At present, the Government has nothing to say about any of this. The Prime Minister’s recent speech to the CBI, in which he launched into a lengthy aside about the virtues of the cartoon character Peppa Pig, reportedly came up on the doorstep in North Shropshire as an example of a lack of gravity in No 10. It perhaps more accurately showed that, where there ought to be serious policies and thinking about how the Government will handle the economic perils of the moment, there is instead a black hole.

The same might be said about a range of other issues. How does the Government intend to clear the backlog of non-Covid patients who are struggling to access treatment, for example? How does it propose to guarantee that schools reopen in January? How does it expect to pay for its net zero ambitions without driving millions into poverty?

There are currently few satisfactory answers.

Mr Johnson still has a chance to salvage his premiership. Previous prime ministers have bounced back from worse defeats and stayed in power for years to come. If he is to head off the growing unease about his continued leadership, however, he needs to do more than reshuffle his defective Downing Street team or improve the clumsy way the Government communicates with the public. Mr Johnson needs an answer to that central question: “why should I vote Conservative?”

He might start by reconsidering the increase in national insurance contributions that is meant to be coming in next year. At the precise moment that people’s real-terms incomes will be under the most strain due to rising prices, the Government is currently proposing to massively put up taxes on working people. That much of the money is almost certainly going to be wasted, thanks to the failure to tie it to NHS reform, is an added insult to hard-pressed voters.

But the Prime Minister will have to go much further than that. The Christmas recess is an opportunity for him to recast his premiership. He must find a way of regaining the public’s support by pledging to make their lives better, not more difficult, through a re-examination of all his Government’s policies for the post-pandemic world. The public needs to know what the Conservatives will do for them.