Also, I'm baffled at the apparently conventional wisdom that Johnson will step down or is somehow an electoral liability. Despite our fervent wishes, his shtick shows no sign of getting old; by some measures he's actually *more* approved of now than he was on the eve of the 2019 election. He's clearly got political capital and goodwill to spend with the EU transition period over and the COVID vaccine underway. Unless his party sees a staggering blow to its standing (remember, Theresa May wasn't given the boot until the devastating 2019 EU election results) I don't see him going anywhere.
Bluntly, if the Tories weren't turfed out of office in 2017 for austerity and Brexit with a weak leader facing an unexpectedly popular insurgent opposition leader, they're pretty likely to survive with a stronger leader facing a dud with those two acrimonious policies put behind them.
The part being missed out here is that Starmer is ahead on the preferred PM question with most of the pollsters, which is often more predictive than the headline polling figures. That didn't happen regularly with any previous leader going back to about 2007. Undoubtedly his image isn't much more developed than 'unthreatening man in a suit', but if it holds - and that's a big if - then that might be enough.
