Boris Johnson is failing to learn from the Tory prime ministers who came before him

There are drawbacks to being the third Conservative administration in a row but one advantage is that it should come with lessons already learnt, writes Marie Le Conte

Boris Johnson speaks with officers on a constituency visit to Uxbridge police station last week (Getty)

There’s a lot to focus on at the moment, isn’t there? Between Omicron threatening to blow up everyone’s Christmases, Omicron threatening to blow up the Conservative Party and the 24/7 piss up Whitehall was apparently attending while we were in lockdown, it’s hard to know where to look.

Take the – disastrous, self-inflicted, hilarious – North Shropshire by-election; it happened last week yet already feels like it belongs to a different, long dead world. Who even was this “Owen Paterson”?

More seriously, something happened on the day of the results which feels worth coming back to, especially as it immediately got buried under an avalanche of news. Speaking on camera on Friday, Boris Johnson told journalists: “Basically what’s been going wrong… is that in the last few weeks some things have been going very well, but what the people have been hearing… is just a constant litany of stuff about politics and politicians and stuff that isn’t about them and isn’t about the things that we can do to make life better."