Disaffected Conservative voters will still vote for their party despite its leader’s loose relationship with the truth, while old Labour voters now feel unshackled from ancient tribal loyalties

A few weeks before this general election campaign got under way, the Conservative Party had already embarked on road testing an election slogan under which Boris Johnson might aim to secure the re-election of his party. It was “Trust The People”. A number of focus groups were reportedly established by the prime minister’s policy strategist, Dominic Cummings, but there can be little doubt that the thinking behind the idea came from Johnson himself.

It was, after all, Randolph Churchill who applied the phrase to the political circumstances of his day in the late-nineteenth century and the resonance will certainly not have been lost on Johnson, the plausible journalist-turned-politician who further embellished his credentials to lead his party when, as Mayor of London, he penned a biography of Randolph’s famous son.

The phrase became famous as a result of a speech that Randolph delivered in Birmingham in 1884 as he embarked on his pursuit of “Tory democracy”, in which he extolled the idea of forming working-men’s clubs to support the Conservative Party organisation. “Yes, trust the people,” he declaimed. “You who are ambitious, and rightly ambitious, of being the guardians of the British constitution, trust the people and they will trust you – and they will follow you and join you in the defence of that constitution against any and every foe.” Well, you can just hear Johnson saying it himself, can’t you?