It’s funny: I’ve done a lot this year (bought a flat, bought a dog, published a book), yet it’s felt like one of the worst I can remember, as if I’m running hard and getting nowhere. Covid’s to blame, but so is the cure. The Conservatives have allowed Britain to become everything they are normally elected to oppose.

If 2020 was the heroic year of the pandemic, a year of “save the NHS” and Operation Moonshot, 2021 was when it sank in that the virus wasn’t going away, it was just going to evolve and the restrictions along with it. No, we are not locked down – yet – but if we do venture out, it’s masks, passports and in some parts of Britain rules so silly that they seem as irrational as avoiding ladders and black cats. The broadcast media is obsessed with case numbers; you can’t ride a train without being lectured by the guards on etiquette. To save the NHS, we turned the entire country into an outpatients ward.

I hate hospitals. Because you go there when you’re sick, obviously, but also because they tend to have a philosophy they impose upon you, of total care, minimum risk and condescension, where professors of great wisdom and parents with six kids are spoken to like children. Where else, and this was a family member’s recent experience, would you be ordered in and kept waiting only to be told, sorry, we haven’t got your results because the consultants missed their meeting – so do you mind waiting another week to find out if you’re going to die? And, despite the inconvenience and worry, you still hear yourself thanking them for all their hard work.

There is no point in complaining. They have all the power. The inability, or refusal, of the Conservative Party in office to reform this institution is symptomatic of the deal with the devil that it did more than a decade ago to get into office, swallowing the basic precepts of Blairism to prove Tories were nice, not nasty, and thus worthy of your vote. This reached its apogee during Covid: ministers now worship the NHS, they will raise taxes to fund it, and they’ve injected it into the lives of the perfectly healthy, creating a regime of therapeutic socialism so intrusive that the Work and Pensions Secretary advised against kissing under the mistletoe. The fear of death, tallied daily, has revived the power of experts at the expense of common sense, or even a healthy sense of the absurd.

We can’t condemn the Tories for expanding the state in the middle of a life-or-death emergency, but Covid and its response has been an indictment of the bureaucracy’s failures (our anti-pandemic plan was for the wrong disease) and lack of adaptation (where are the anti-virals?), while the willingness of society to shut itself down, no questions asked, suggests something collectivist has happened to our culture under the Tories’ watch.

This was also the year that wokery and cancellation seemed at a zenith, and the polls reveal a younger generation that finds some of the fundamentals of British democracy alien. We end 2021 with Labour ahead, which is down to scandal, yes, but also because they really are the party of the NHS (my local hospital, in true-blue Kent, flies a banner with Nye Bevan on it) and this is their territory. As we edge towards higher taxes and soaring prices, it’s starting to look like their economy, too.

“Lockdown would be tougher under Labour,” comes the Tory response. Possibly, though Jeremy Corbyn voted against mandatory vaccinations and passports (I rather like him now he’s no longer a threat to my decadent lifestyle), and while Britain is less restricted than much of Europe, this isn’t because Boris Johnson is calling the shots – it’s because he isn’t.

The PM did not save your Christmas. Backbenchers who revolted and Lord Frost who resigned did, empowering key figures within the Cabinet to take a stand against the triumvirate of Boris, Gove and Hancock/Javid, who seem to have run the country since early 2020. I used to think that the only way to save the Government was to let Boris be Boris, but we’ve had three years now to decipher what that means in practice, and I worry that this is it. Beyond Covid and levelling up (ie “give us all your money”), last year Boris’s passion was for fighting climate change. It’s a worthy cause; Cop26 did mark some profound achievements. But it’s one more addition to the state’s workload, and though voters insist that they care, they might feel differently once the bills pile up.

Any drumbeat compelling us to care, like the constant advice on masks and handwashing, undermines the voluntary instinct to do the right thing. I paraphrase Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, on the ethical quagmire of mandatory vaccines: it transforms medicine from something done for the community to something done to the community.

This year has crystallised for me one of the things that most defines the conservative personality: a hatred of being told what to do. It’s not crude individualism; most conservatives happily juggle loyalties, including family and faith, and carry obligations as comfortably as a tortoise does its shell. But they don’t like being swept up in utopian dreams, or taking orders from people who want to change them to suit their design for life. The themes of lockdown and climate change are conservative: self-sacrifice, conservation. The methods have been anything but. The idea that we must never go back to a pre-2020 normal, that this is a wake-up call to change everything, is frightening.

All human beings have a need for security, and the state provides that, but they also require privacy – some peace from political projects – and freedom to mix, travel, make mistakes and occasionally pull off a crazy plan: in short, to define their future on their terms. Absent any other part of the culture being willing to promote the freedom necessary for us to flourish – even business now seems more interested in equality and diversity than making good products – the case for liberty will have to be made by our nominally Conservative Government.

The PM should avoid further restrictions as far as possible and policy should be reconfigured so that the way we get out of the pandemic puts us on a clear path to a smaller state. If Boris won’t do this, there are other members of the Cabinet who might be willing to try. Another feature of the year was that the PM lost his political stardust. He has turned things around before, but this time it’ll require more than charm to do it. A dash of conservatism is needed.