After the first of last year’s two Tory leadership elections, I consoled one candidate who had tried and failed with the thought that it would have been a bloody awful time to take over the party. The legacy of deceit and charlatanry left by that legendary “winner” (as he was once called) Boris Johnson, meant defeat was a lucky escape. Poor old Rishi Sunak was less fortunate. Come the second contest – or non-contest – he found himself in charge of a party not only soiled by Johnson’s atrocities but whose reputation for economic competence had been flushed down the sewers by Liz Truss. Why would he want the job? It wasn’t as if he needed the money.

By pursuing entirely un-Conservative economic policies – notably raising taxes – Sunak steadied the ship. Sterling reversed its dive towards parity with the dollar and the euro. The FTSE began a steady climb – helped by Putin’s increasing toothlessness in the war against Ukraine, and the growing consensus that Russia couldn’t win, which in turn saw energy prices – and prices of many other commodities – start to fall. A government propensity to panic and take a catastrophist approach to everything, honed during the pandemic, had caused the Truss administration to promise help with energy bills. This now looks unnecessary, and Sunak has promised to end the subsidies this spring.

Sunak is so incapable of short-termism that serious long-termism doesn’t even appear to be on the radar

In politics as in real life, the point of steadying a ship is to resume the planned voyage and steer safely and calmly into port. Little of that nature has happened. There is no vision. As a former minister said to me, there is an absence of any apparent desire on the part of this administration to do anything remotely Conservative. He cited the inaction over taxation (other than in the wrong direction), the failure to implement border controls or post-Brexit deregulation, or to review the pursuit of net zero in a timeframe that might be possible rather than just a figment of Mrs Boris Johnson’s imagination. He referred also to the crisis in policing, the government’s lukewarm protection of freedom of speech, and the lack of plans to improve Britain’s threadbare defences, despite the wake-up call to the West represented by Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

But the most pressing consideration of all in this winter, which seems one not so much of discontent but of discombobulation, is the National Health Service. Sir Keir Starmer wrote, on 15 January, a remarkable article in the Sunday Telegraph, calling for wholesale reform of the service – which he implored people to consider as such, and not as a “shrine” – and actually conceded that money was being wasted in the NHS. The government’s failure to get a grip on this question is indeed appalling. There’s an abundance of stories about elderly, sick and injured people waiting hours and even days for an ambulance and then being parked on trolleys in hospital corridors, and of the growing invisibility of GPs putting even more pressure on overstretched hospitals. On top of that there is the utter failure to do anything in the four months Sunak has been in office to deal with the problem of social care, which has left an estimated 13,000 people in English hospitals who are deemed fit to be discharged but have nowhere to go. Sunak is so incapable of short-termism that serious long-termism – such as taking action to improve the training and supply of doctors rather than pilfer them from the developing world (which needs them, one imagines, even more than we do) – doesn’t even appear to be on the radar.

Labour now looks as though it is going to win the future of the NHS argument so conclusively that one wonders whether it is actually worth the Conservative Party turning up. Certainly that sentiment already seems to have taken hold of the health secretary, Steve Barclay, who has been remarkably invisible during the NHS crisis over this winter. He has offered no initiatives to solve the problems and is widely considered out of his depth. If Sunak does dare risking reform of the NHS during this parliament, he will have to make the running himself.

In the early weeks of his administration, I thought – once he had used Jeremy Hunt to convince the financial markets that the British government had not gone entirely tonto – that Sunak was playing a cunning game of being deliberately boring. There’d been a bit too much excitement in the preceding months, and what the public wanted was some peace and quiet from the political class. But demoralised grassroots Tories now want a sense of purpose. Local elections are coming in the spring and there has to be a general election by January 2025, and most probably by next autumn. Governments have tried going to the country and seeking re-election based on offering very little and just chugging on as before, and they have lost. It was much what Attlee offered in 1951, and most famously by Baldwin’s “Safety First” campaign of 1929. If Sunak doesn’t show some drive and give a high-profile lead very soon then his party will not just lose the election but risk obliteration. But the idea of providing leadership – having convictions, setting them out, and persuading people they are the right way forward – seems yet to have taken hold in the prime minister’s mind.

The list of necessary but undeveloped policies set out by my ex-ministerial friend is starting to dominate conversations among Conservative parliamentarians and their staff, and the vacuum it indicates is deepening their demoralisation. It’s in such a climate that the unspeakable idea of a return by Boris Johnson has caught on among some. This may have been retarded in recent weeks by the further evidence that has emerged of Johnson’s pitiful mismanagement of his personal finances, having sought an £800,000 line of credit assisted by the man he’d appointed to chair the BBC. When Johnson heaves into view, a stench of dishonesty, sleaze and sharp practice accompanies him, and the word from the rubber-chicken-dinner circuit is that the esteem in which this rogue is held by Tory activists is in decline. Even in the darkest hours of the Truss lunacy, most Conservatives know that if their party wants to fulfil its apparent death wish there is no more certain way of doing so than putting Johnson back in charge. One suspects even he realises this, which is why he didn’t run against Sunak last autumn.

Some Tories are mumbling that disastrous local election results might bring about the end of Sunak; I doubt it. The likelihood is that he will lead his party into the next election, whether or not he has actually come up with any reasons why he and it should be re-elected. His supporters talk of a Budget before Christmas this year, or at the latest spring 2024, that embarks on the tax (and spending) cuts that any serious economic growth will depend upon. Even if that’s possible, there remain two serious difficulties beyond the failure to articulate a vision that may be beyond Sunak’s – or indeed anyone’s – capabilities. The first is the activity of the Reform party, which has mostly operated below the national radar so far, but which is busy organising to attack the Tory party from the right, notably over Net Zero, taxes and poorly controlled borders. Its leader, Richard Tice, is not a household name, but a possible leading activist, Nigel Farage, most certainly is. If Farage does put his shoulder to that wheel, legions of Tory voters could desert to Reform. It is fear of this that motivates the anxiety of many Tories in marginal seats. Reform may not win a single seat but, as with the Referendum party in 1997, it could well ensure that a bearable defeat becomes an unbearable one.

Another lesson of the 1997 election is that many voters are happy to wait years to settle a score with a delinquent government. The delinquency then was Black Wednesday, and voters punished it and all it represented four years later, despite a strong economic recovery. Now it is the depravities of Johnson and the idiocies of Truss. Even if Sunak is saintly in his conduct until the election – and judging by his record he will be – his party still bears the stain of his predecessors’ inadequacies, and voters remain disgruntled. They still wait to send their message, and it will not be a happy one.

Simon Heffer is a historian, columnist for the Telegraph and Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham