Early in 2019, a few months after he resigned as Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson and I had lunch in a family-run Italian restaurant close to the old Spectator offices in Bloomsbury.
I arrived a bit early and was shown to a table perhaps 20 paces from the door. Ten minutes later Boris bounced into view, slightly flushed from his cycle ride but exuberant as ever.
That extraordinary star quality was immediately apparent. At almost every table between us, diners stood wanting to shake his hand, slap him on the back or pose for selfies — all of which he happily played along with.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson visiting Huddersfield Train Station, West Yorkshire, as he answers questions regarding HS2 Leeds link
Despite the short distance between us, it took him a good five minutes to cover it. The whole place, previously rather quiet, was buzzing with excitement.
When we ordered, he asked whether the sea bass was fresh or had been frozen. The waiter was momentarily nonplussed.
A minute later, the owner came over. He said the fish on the menu had indeed been frozen, but added that he had bought two fresh bass that morning, for himself and his wife.
‘One of them, I will cook for you myself,’ he said. Boris worried slightly about what the poor man’s wife was going to eat but managed to overcome his reservations. ‘Superb!’ he said.
Over the next couple of hours, we covered a lot of ground; his exasperation with the hung Parliament, Theresa May’s weakness, the Brexit quagmire.
He hadn’t yet launched his leadership bid, but Mrs May was obviously in his sights and he was anticipating going into the next election as leader.
It was equally clear that to win a decent Commons majority, Boris would have to persuade millions of traditional Labour voters that he was their man.
The Brexit rift meant most of inner-London was dead to him but the Eurosceptic constituencies behind the northern Red Wall offered huge potential.
These places had voted Labour by reflex — for generations in some cases — but with Jeremy Corbyn and a largely metropolitan clique now in charge, the dial was shifting.
Although the HS2 project has been scaled down, some £96billion will still be spent on the new Integrated Rail Plan, overhauling Inter-City links across the North and Midlands. This is a colossal amount of money and should not be sneered at
They saw the Corbynistas as ‘loony Left’ obsessed with issues of identity, unpatriotic and out of touch with the everyday concerns of ordinary families.
However, the question was, could they bring themselves to vote Tory, the party their parents and grandparents had dismissed, in Nye Bevan’s notorious words, as ‘lower than vermin’.
Of course, we now know the answer. I can’t remember whether Boris was already talking about ‘levelling up’ but there was no doubting his enthusiasm for what he saw as his one- nation mission.
Or, I believe, his sincerity. That lunch came back to me this week, as a series of blunders, U-turns and policy shifts saw the Prime Minister’s credibility seriously undermined — especially it seems among Red Wall supporters.
The torrent of sleaze allegations which followed the Owen Paterson debacle, the second jobs farrago, an apparently unstoppable flood of cross-Channel migrants and now the axing of the promised high-speed rail link between Manchester and Leeds, as well as the eastern leg of HS2 all enraged his new MPs in the North.
There is much talk of a party schism between older MPs of the Tory shires and the mainly younger 2019 Red Wall intake, especially over second jobs.
While many of the former have become used to supplementing their MPs’ pay with outside earnings, the latter mostly believe taking their Commons salary means they should devote all their time to the job in hand.
Other divisions are also opening up, especially over economic and fiscal policy.
The new intake are generally more tolerant of higher spending, even if that means higher taxes. This is, of course, anathema to traditional Conservatives.
So the legacy of the 2019 landslide is a Parliamentary party which, while strong in numbers, is dangerously divided in outlook and purpose.
Unless Boris can square this circle his prospects in 2024 could be grim.
Sir Keir Starmer may be dull, uninspiring and another member of the North London gang. But he is not Jeremy Corbyn — and that is a huge asset.
If the Tories descend into internecine warfare, it is by no means impossible that the Labour leader could win and form a government.
Jill Mortimer won the Hartlepool by-election earlier this year, becoming the first Tory MP elected by the constituency since it was created in 1974
So yes, the PM must carry through his promise of uniting and levelling up the country.
But he must also do the same for his party. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I have known and liked Boris Johnson for nearly 30 years, from the time we both worked on The Daily Telegraph.
I don’t claim any special relationship, but we played a bit of tennis and cricket as well as working together back in those days and our paths have crossed a few times since.
God knows, he has his flaws. Rackety doesn’t begin to describe aspects of his private life. He has a habit of thinking everything can be distilled into a joke, and he occasionally speaks before fully engaging his brain.
But he has the alchemic ability to make people forgive his foibles, through his great charm, wit and intelligence.
Voters have factored in his faults and have taken to him, warts and all. Up to now.
There are those who will never forgive him for Brexit and want to see him destroyed. Just listen to the BBC if you need proof.
But for all the noise they make, the Boris-haters are not in the majority.
They caricature him as a buffoon. They are wrong.
Boris Johnson on a visit to the Network Rail Queens Road Compound in Manchester last month
Although he projects a blustering, Woosterish persona, those who dismiss him as a fool make a serious misjudgment. However, he is no longer a journalist, whose column is written one week and generally forgotten by the next.
He is in charge now and has to behave accordingly.
I am also, by the way, a Red Waller — by breeding at least. Who knew we would ever become so fashionable? Born and brought up in a working class Middlesbrough family, I had no real concept of any other class until I left home.
My father served his time at Dorman Long steelworks, where the Sydney Harbour Bridge and countless other great structures of Empire were built.
After the war (he joined the Fleet Air Arm soon after his 18th birthday in 1943), he worked at Smith’s Dock and latterly in the vast petrochemical plant at ICI Wilton.
He was briefly an official in the Amalgamated Engineering
