The player missing from the drama so far is the electorate – the people of North Shropshire can now send a loud, clear message
Are we there yet? Are we at the end of the Boris Johnson odyssey? It’s an impatient question, given it was only two years ago this very weekend that Johnson was celebrating a victory that brought an 80-seat majority and excited talk of a 10-year reign in No 10.
An impatient question but one hardly confined to excitable Westminster journalists. The prime minister’s own colleagues are asking it of each other and themselves, prompted by the serial revelations of a torrid week. “Cummings was bad, but this is off the scale,” one minister tells me, reflecting the widely shared view that Dominic Cummings’ lockdown jaunt to Barnard Castle has been outdone by the video of sniggering Johnson aides implicitly admitting that they had been partying in Downing Street while the rest of the country faced a bleak, often lonely Christmas; that they had been knocking back the booze while many were denied the right to give so much as a consoling touch to a dying loved one.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
