Despite the best efforts of his two key advisers to rain on his freedom parade, Boris Johnson had a pretty good day on Monday. At a No 10 press conference, Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance sucked their teeth and indicated they were not entirely happy with the decision to end all English pandemic restrictions, though without saying so explicitly.

Their miserabilism was in marked contrast to the Prime Minister’s demeanour in the Commons just a few hours earlier where, if not quite triumphalist, he was at least bullish about the future, abandoning the ultra-caution that has underpinned official policy for nigh on two years.

The cheers from his own backbenchers will have been music to his ears after a tumultuous few weeks when his premiership seemed under imminent threat over the Downing Street party revelations. To hear David Davis, who just last month publicly demanded his resignation, welcoming the statement must have given him particular satisfaction.

“In the name of God, go,” said Davis, quoting Cromwell. Well, he didn’t and once again the Prime Minister’s detractors are left scratching their heads in grudging admiration at his fortitude, brass neck and sheer good luck.

Anyone who has followed Boris’s somewhat colourful career should not be surprised by this resilience. People who assumed he would crack under the pressure forget that he has spent much of it mired in scandal, both personal and political, that would have flattened many lacking his adamantine self-confidence.

He also took satisfaction from the response of the Opposition to his “living with Covid” statement. For some time now, his critics in the party have been most concerned by some distinctly un-Tory policies, such as increasing taxes to pump more money into an unreformed NHS. Is he really a closet social democrat pretending to be a Conservative or, more accurately, an old school Macmillanite interventionist happy to see the state expand?

On Monday he could contrast Tory liberalism with Labour dirigisme, his instinct for freedom with their fetish for compulsion. At one point he said he was “genuinely surprised” by the approach that the Opposition had taken, but he shouldn’t have been. Throughout the pandemic, Labour always wanted to lock down earlier and for longer. Just look at what is happening in Wales, where Labour’s Mark Drakeford continues to impose restrictions that are utterly unnecessary but make him look and sound important. It reflects a paternalistic instinct bred in the socialist bone.

But there is some myth-making going on here. Before Christmas, Mr Johnson was under pressure from medical advisers to impose tougher controls on family gatherings over the festive period but could not get them through his Cabinet. Ministers questioned modelling suggesting the omicron variant could cause anywhere between 25,000 and 75,000 deaths and effectively killed off Plan C. We forget that 100 Tory MPs even voted against the Plan B measures that only became law with Labour support.

The doom-mongers were demonstrably wrong about what would happen if people were able to mix freely over Christmas and yet cannot bring themselves to admit it now. As Mr Johnson told MPs, the omicron peak has passed with fewer than 10,000 hospitalisations and the link between infection and severe disease has substantially weakened. “We now have sufficient levels of immunity to complete the transition from protecting people with government interventions to relying on vaccines and treatments as our first line of defence,” he said.

In other words, while Covid is still with us – and probably will be forever – there is no longer a public health emergency warranting the imposition of extraordinary state powers. Living with Covid does not mean ignoring it, but coping with it as we do any other endemic respiratory disease. Some of us would have preferred that to have been the case from the outset, but we are where we are and evidently the majority of the country did not share that view, not least because they had been scared witless by government messaging.

But the removal of the final vestiges of state control over our lives is a double-edged sword for Mr Johnson. Arguably, it might ease the immediate pressure on him over the Downing Street lockdown parties as public anger abates, even if a sense of being badly let down remains. It also means the Prime Minister will be governing for the first time without either Brexit or a pandemic to preoccupy him and will need to focus on humdrum domestic policy. Here things are not so rosy. As John Redwood said in the Commons on Monday, while it is great news our freedoms are being restored, will he “vanquish the cost of living crisis so that more people have enough money to enjoy the freedoms?”

The answer to that question will determine his fate. He will face another brouhaha if the police say he broke the law by attending No 10 parties but has said he will carry on regardless. For now, his Tory detractors have sheathed their swords. But the respite, as it always is in his job, is temporary. The tax burden is higher than at any time since the late 1950s with no guarantee it will not rise further, despite protestations from the Prime Minister and Chancellor that they remain visceral low-taxers.

Bill Clinton’s maxim that “it’s the economy, stupid” still applies. A cost-of-living crunch could feed into dire local election results in May – with the possible loss of flagship councils like Wandsworth and Westminster once again spooking Tory MPs into wondering whether Mr Johnson is a liability rather than an asset.

Moreover, what will he offer the country over the next two years that will differentiate him from Sir Keir Starmer and make voters conclude that another Johnsonian administration is in their interests? He now faces a hard domestic slog and may come to look back on Monday as his finest hour, as good as it is going to get.

True, Russian action in Ukraine has created another crisis and afforded him the opportunity to play the sub-Churchillian statesman. But unless something cataclysmic happens it will not involve the UK directly – and if it does then Covid will look like a mere bump in the road of history.