One of the more unexpected aspects of the prime minister’s performance in recent months is that he seems to find much more success in negotiating with the likes of tricky characters such as Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron than he does with his own backbenchers.
Many of them, he must reflect, owe their seats in the House of Commons to his Herculean efforts to make the Labour Party electable again after the debacle in 2019. There was nothing preordained about the landslide last July, even if the Conservatives did all they could, inadvertently, to ease Labour back into power after a 14-year wait.
