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Early in May last year I had dinner with a Cabinet Minister, who was extolling the political brilliance of his Prime Minister, confidently pronouncing he would reign for 10 years. The Tories had won the Hartlepool by-election by a landslide. The Red Wall had turned blue, and the Tory party was newly shaped by Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson. More sagely, another senior Tory present noted that if Johnson did remain that long, the fallout would ensure the Tories would be in the wilderness for years, because the party would have been so strongly bent to the character of their leader it would need time to re-form. The former prediction has been averted; the latter might still come true.