He’d never admit it, but Boris Johnson was all set to lock down the country last December. He was saved by his weakness. He had (again) been terrified by his scientific advisers, who wanted him to move quickly: he called a meeting for Monday December 20 to do the deed. But on the Friday before it, he lost a by-election. The next day Lord Frost resigned from the Government, appalled at its Left-wards drift. Three more Cabinet members said they’d quit if he took Sage’s advice. When the lockdown meeting came, he buckled.

The Prime Minister we see before us now is a very different creature to the one who governed by diktat for the best part of two years. He’s humbly asking Tory MPs what to do, then doing it. It’s humiliating, but it’s greatly improving the quality of the Government. He has broken free from Sage (whose advice on omicron turned out to be bunkum) and didn’t seek its advice before deciding to abolish all remaining Covid restrictions a month early. Warming to his theme, he’s now referring to this as “freedom day”.

Some of his worst ideas are being abandoned. His plans to set up an all-powerful Animal Sentience Committee to judge government policy now look doomed. His anti-obesity strategy – whereby a Conservative government would tell shops what sort of food they could and could not promote – is being shelved.

“That was his personal idea,” says one minister, “so to see it abandoned showed how his personal power has vanished. But it helps him. People resent him less.”

Politically, this is certainly humbling – but it seems to be working insofar as the rebellion is losing steam. Parliament is breaking up for half-term with no immediate threat to his leadership. He has been lucky in his enemies: when Christian Wakeford defected to Labour he revived the Tories’ sense of tribal loyalty. Being attacked by Sir John Major, who has never recovered from the Brexit referendum result, will also have helped him. An attempt to change the rules of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers – to make it easier to depose him – has also failed.

This holds out the prospect – no more than that – of the big-state, bossy Boris giving way to the buccaneering, risk-taking and freedom-loving leader they thought they were getting when they first elected him. So far, it seems he’s prepared to do anything to survive. Even reform the NHS.

There was an interesting moment in the Commons on Tuesday after Sajid Javid broke the news that – in spite of the extra money – the NHS waiting list will surge rather than fall. Conservative MPs were aghast: they had broken their promise not to raise tax but thought they’d (just about) get away with it if the cash fixed the NHS. Now they learn that they’ll fight the next general election having imposed the tax but with waiting lists far higher than they are even now.

So it was a typical Boris bad idea: a tax rise forced through, but with no one working out how little difference the extra cash would make.

From the back benches, Sir Edward Leigh raised a question. If repairing the NHS is not doable, he asked, what happens to those who don’t have a year or two to wait for an operation? If private insurance means you can be treated in weeks, might the cost of this insurance be written off against tax, as it used to be? This idea would once have been dismissed out of hand as the roar of a Tory dinosaur, but the Health Secretary said he’d think about it.

He’ll be doing a lot of thinking – and the result may well be something resembling an NHS reform plan. At a recent Cabinet awayday, the Prime Minister said after months of NHS pom-pom waving he now realises the need to change – and that Javid would be changing the NHS as radically as Michael Gove once reformed schools. So Javid has the green light – although not, as yet, much of an agenda.

The need to reform is now horribly apparent. When the NHS was first promised £12 billion from the National Insurance rise, ministers were told that this should cut waiting lists to 
5.5 million. Unpublished NHS modelling says it could be 11 million. It’s a staggering difference: one Tory MP said that, when he heard the news, he thought this was the moment that the party lost the next general election. To have taxes at a 71-year high and the largest NHS waiting list in history would represent abject political failure.

But if reform starts now, there may be some hope. Patients who wait more than six months, for example, could be subsidised (or covered) if they want to go private. The idea of a patient’s passport, an old Conservative policy, could be dusted down.

Reforming the NHS carries huge political risks. But the current situation – a gargantuan bill and a waiting list that has more people than the population of most European countries – brings guaranteed political disaster. And that’s before factoring in the hour-long ambulance waits and the 500 people a day who wait more than 12 hours to be seen at A&E.

Johnson will have a bit more time now: even those who want him gone talk about the May elections as the next date. “But even that sounds like procrastination,” says one minister. “No one can think of a better idea, so it’s fizzling out.”

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss remain the two favourites to succeed Johnson. Neither is ready to run now, or in the near future. Nor are their allies fomenting rebellion: some of them are actively talking it down, saying that Johnson is likely to survive as he has done before.

The current obsession with the Met’s investigation into Partygate might, paradoxically, help the Prime Minister. If he is not fined, he can claim vindication – and move, straightaway, to focus on his great Covid reopening. If he keeps moving while his enemies are still, there’s every chance of his regaining momentum.

With an approval rating almost as low as John Major’s, the chances of a full Johnsonian recovery look slim. But as one of his loyalists puts it: “The aim is to make it to Valentine’s Day, then May Day, then summer. So far, so good.”