Time is running out for the Conservative Party: the epidemic of rule-breaking, broken promises and generalised incompetence and carelessness are trashing not just the PM’s reputation but that of all Tories.

Without drastic, urgent action, the party will be sucked into the kind of death spiral that sunk John Major’s government in the mid 1990s, and a Left-wing coalition led by Sir Keir Starmer and supported by the SNP, Welsh nationalists, Greens and other rabble-rousers may seize power in 2023 or 2024. Such an outcome would be calamitous, and result in a vicious class and cultural war from which the country would never recover.

There are now just two viable options if the party is to bounce back. The first is for Boris Johnson to remain in office, attempt to fix the immediate damage caused by Partygate, and then recant his worst policies and delegate huge amounts of power to a David Frost-like CEO in No 10. We would need the old Boris back: he would have to ditch the National Insurance increase, embrace a freeze on public spending and accept major shifts to his green agenda. There would need to be a clear-out of the Cabinet as well as advisers, with all the neo-socialists, green fanatics and pro-woke crowd exiting immediately.

Every policy would need to be judged on whether it makes Brexit Britain more competitive, and/or by how it improves the lives, and addresses the fears, of culturally conservative and aspirational Britain. The aim would be to ruthlessly target the 43.6 per cent of the electorate who voted Tory in 2019, but by following the broadly conservative approach these voters expected, rather than the weird blend of reheated neo-Brownite social democracy and green paternalism that was unleashed upon them instead.

Crucially, the about-turn I’m describing is not about lobbing a few shreds of “red meat” to a starving base, penning random “Right-wing” tweets announcing a policy that unravels within hours, or even replacing a few figures in No 10 or Whitehall. No, only a total reset will do.

The second option, regrettably, would be for Johnson to step down and be replaced by somebody who follows an improved version of the 2019 strategy. This individual would need to grip a machinery of state recaptured by the Blob – and even more so now civil servants have been tasked with potentially terminating the careers of elected politicians. He or she would then need to impose, at great speed, an agenda that fuses pro-capitalist reforms while appealing to suburban cultural conservatives with a tough agenda on crime, human rights, wokery, Brexit and much else besides.

Reverting to a Cameron-Osborne, Southern hoodie-and-husky-hugging approach would be calamitous, delivering even less than it did in 2010 or 2015: the metropolitan elites have shifted to the Left because of Brexit, the woke revolution and other factors, and in any case, Cameron was only successful when he briefly tacked “Right-wards”, taking on the SNP and promising a referendum.

All other options for the Tories are a guaranteed disaster. Indeed, a failure to seize the moment risks jeopardising the PM’s two historic achievements: Brexit, and the political realignment which returned the Tories to levels of support last seen in the 1980s, giving them a mandate to reverse the UK’s decline.

On Brexit, the job is a quarter done. We’ve left that dreadful, amoral technocratic entity de jure, although Northern Ireland remains unresolved. But de facto the only significant changes have involved immigration and foreign policy. Yet the former is being ruined by a shocking inability to control illegal arrivals from France, and the latter, a hugely significant and laudable gain delivered by Liz Truss, doesn’t affect normal people’s lives sufficiently.

Yes, Truss has signed trade deals, but – through no fault of her own – she has been prevented from being as liberal as she could have been. All the other tweaks to the acquis communautaire post-Brexit could have been delivered by Labour. It would be extremely easy to rejoin the single market tomorrow given how little true divergence has taken place.

Brexit can only deliver its potential if it is accompanied by a series of radical reforms. Yet for all of Johnson’s boosterism, the structure of the state remains unchanged; the antiquated nature of the civil service untackled; the tax system has become ever less pro-enterprise and pro-growth; Britain is a worse place to do business than it was five or 10 or 20 years ago; there is more regulation, rather than less; freeports have been adulterated beyond recognition; the planning system is a joke; the universities are a mess and the schools in decline; and the NHS is imploding as a result of systemic institutional failure, absurd gigantism and lethally misplaced incentives.

This is madness. We need revolutionary shifts in a range of areas, from the precautionary principle to tax to reporting rules to the regulation of financial services: in each case, the UK needs to be the best place in Europe (and hopefully, the world) to hire, set up or expand a business, erect a new factory or recruit scientists. Unless all of this happens, the establishment drumbeat that Brexit has been a failure will grow ever louder, there will be hundreds of academic papers seeking to “prove” this “lack of success”, and by the late 2020s a Labour government will feel sufficiently emboldened to sign back up to myriad European initiatives. The Tories must diverge so much that this becomes impossible.

The Great Realignment is the other one of Johnson’s achievements that must be salvaged from the ruins of Partygate: the creation of a new coalition for the 2020s and beyond, consisting of Brexiteers, Thatcherites, blue collar workers, suburbanites, the aspirational lower middle classes (including a growing number of ethnic minorities) and wealthier Southern shire-dwellers. That coalition, at its widest, is stronger than the urban/woke/Scottish nationalist alliance that Labour can deliver. The 2019 election saw people – especially in the North – who should previously have been Tories because of their lifestyle, interests and beliefs finally make the jump. This coalition is now in crisis, and must urgently be rebuilt.

It can sometimes make sense to play for time in the hope that something turns up. This nightmare is different. The Conservative Party must urgently stop this catastrophic drift, or face the prospect of complete ruination.