And so the PM lives to fight another day. While the contents of Sue Gray’s report are mortifying, it does not seem to have wielded a mortal blow. Its headline finding that there were “failures of leadership and judgement by No 10” is, at least to those not fluent in bureaucratese, blandly reproachful. Gray’s extensive focus on No 10’s “excessive” drinking culture feels like a rap on the knuckles from HR. Her appeal for “significant learning to be drawn” is hardly the kind of call for action that might tempt Tories into full-blown insurrection. Nor did it provide particularly good fodder for Keir Starmer, whose takedown dripped with sanctimonious disdain more than statesmanly contempt.

Still, developments haven’t stopped the PM’s arch critics making a meal out of scraps. Boris Johnson’s badly pitched performance in the Commons has been keenly unpicked. Unsatiated by the Gray report, some seem keen to whip up Partygate into a courtroom drama, savouring every twist of a Met Police investigation that still has far to go. In truth, unless the police report reveals evidence that Boris Johnson has lied or misled Parliament about whether he knowingly broke the rules, Boris Johnson may well be off the hook – at least for now.

Nevertheless, the PM is far from out of the woods. Those desperately seeking some smoking gun are overlooking that we have already had the big bombshell – that the PM secretly did not believe in the lockdown that he championed. The political consequences of this revelation should not be downplayed by Johnson’s supporters. It is potential dynamite because it preys on an underlying fear of the electorate: that the Tories are fake.

New Labour faced a fatal reckoning for arrogantly attempting to foist its world view on the public while brooking no dissent. Johnson’s Government has been caught out going one further – foisting a world view in which it did not even believe. The whiff of phoniness hangs over a PM once celebrated for his freshness.

True, the Tory party’s slight recovery in some polls and signs of a backlash against the media’s Partygate hysterics hint that voters have not quite decisively ditched the PM. The party also may yet stick with him, given the lack of a compelling candidate to replace him. This on balance is probably the least bad option. Still, the price they pay is that the whole party’s credibility now risks being tarnished by the scandal. The default view of those swing voters who were still happy to give the party the benefit of the doubt will be suspicion.

This combined with the looming cost of living crisis is a recipe for disaster. The risk is that, if the economy turns into the defining issue of the next election, the seed of doubt – that the Tories aren’t quite genuine – will come back to haunt the party. That it will far outshadow Johnson’s boosterish Brexit grandstanding and culture war theatre as voters come to regard their choice as between reluctant converts to welfarism on the Right and the real deal on the Left.

This captures the big problem with Johnson’s politics. The choice forming is not between conservatism and radicalism or capitalism and socialism, but between slippery populism and Leftist zealotry. In their desperation, the Red Wall may opt for Keir Starmer’s Labour, on account of the fact at least he seems to believe in something. The Tory shires may in turn swing behind a protest party like Reform or the Lib Dems.

Unless the Tories regain some authenticity, their annihilation threatens to be not just decisive but historic. It almost feels like we have been here before, with a party clinging nakedly to power, abandoning everything it believes in as the political centre of gravity shifts. In the 1970s, Jim Callaghan ditched his cherished goal of full employment in favour of targeting inflation, before being crushed by Thatcherism. Today Boris Johnson, as he accepts high spending and the explosion of the Covid regulatory state, risks being crushed by post-pandemic neo-socialism.

The latter may be fronted by an unassuming face in the form of Keir Starmer. Yet it is a dangerous “total state” ideology that seeks to dominate every aspect of life, as well as politically distort the market through ‘‘woke capitalism’’. It is also intoxicated by a sense of its own historic inevitability: that an ageing society means an unstoppable trend towards ever greater health spending. That supercatastrophic risks, from pandemics to climate change, demand a permanent emergency footing and draconian policies to match. As radical as it is, this new ideology has become a reasonably cohesive elite-driven movement prevalent in academia and promoted by the media.

The question now is whether the Tories can reconnect with voters to stop the tsunami coming. I believe that they can, but only if the PM stops peddling outlandish solutions and forms a heroic conservative front against such political extremism.

What the Remain commentariat have missed in all their hand-wringing about left-behind towns and populist neo-fascism is that what unites Wiltshire with Wolverhampton is their trenchant scepticism of radical Utopianism. Brexit, often wrongly labelled a fanatical project, was propelled by ordinary distrust of EU expansionism. The Red Wall dumped Labour in horror first at Blairitie neoliberalism and then Corbynite Leftism. It is repulsed by the woke evangelism that still infects it under Starmer.

This is the one insight that might yet save the Prime Minister and win him another majority. Should he survive the coming weeks, his politics needs to now revolve around a clear distinction between the sane conservatism and liberal-Left extremism. Rather than applying sticking plasters to an energy crisis aggravated by Net Zero idealism, he should seek to sensibly diversify our energy options. Instead of encouraging a cult of the NHS, he should insist that reforms must be a condition of further funding.

If the party’s Right stick with Boris Johnson, they should nudge him in this direction. They would do well to pitch themselves as the pioneers of a new Tory sceptic movement rather than the last noble defenders of Thatcherism. The Tories face a difficult road ahead. But a commitment to conservatism might just save them.