The poor bloody infantry are fed up. As Paul Waugh reports, Conservative backbenchers complain that on the question of free school meals during half term they were sent into action without either a clear objective or a proper plan.
The high command should have foreseen there would be a problem and worked out what to do about it.
Instead of which, those Tory MPs who were bold enough to go over the top, generally the younger and less experienced recruits, found themselves exposed to a hail of criticism.
The moral high ground is firmly in the hands of Marcus Rashford, who has 3.7 million followers on Twitter, to whom he declares in his Pinned Tweet: “It’s time we put party politics aside and worked together to find a long-term sustainable solution to child food poverty in the UK.”
The only practical response to such a statement is to agree with it. Rashford must be treated as an ally, not an adversary, and any accidental exchanges of fire with Rashford’s supporters must be replaced by whole-hearted co-operation in the great cause of feeding the nation’s children.
Instead of which, Downing Street failed to see there was a problem, let alone to grip it, and the Chief Whip, Mark Spencer, expressed the hope that Conservative MPs would have a great half term.
Backbenchers feel Downing Street does not take them seriously, and does not realise they can act as a valuable early warning system, exposed as they are to public opinion in their constituencies.
The letter to the Prime Minister on Monday from over 50 Conservative MPs in northern seats, expressing the fear that the Government’s levelling up agenda is being abandoned, is a further sign that normal methods of communication with Downing Street are reckoned to have broken down.
All Prime Ministers find themselves accused, from time to time, of failing to listen to their own backbenchers. One should not imagine that it is unusual for the leader to seem, especially to his or her own troops, to have become cut off in Downing Street, isolated from normal human emotions, unable any more to see how the poll tax will strike ordinary, sensible voters.
But it is a bit early for Boris Johnson to start suffering from this condition. Part of the trouble is that as long as the pandemic rages, he cannot play his natural game, which is to get out and meet people.
A second problem is that he has never taken the House of Commons seriously. He is by no means the only Tory leader of whom this could be said: neither Theresa May nor David Cameron was really a House of Commons person.
But it is still a pity that Johnson has never had the time or the inclination to get to know his fellow parliamentarians better.
Nor, so far as one can see, does anyone else in Downing Street really know them, or possess that awareness of shifts in parliamentary opinion which is the fruit of long experience.
This is, in fact, an inexperienced administration, containing few ministers or advisers who have been around for more than a few years.
Johnson himself, as I noted when writing my account of his early life, likes to learn how to do things by actually doing them. This was how he approached being Mayor of London, and it began to work once he had found immensely knowledgeable people like Sir Simon Milton who could do the bits he was never going to learn how to do.
There is a kind of high-minded commentator who implies that in the right hands, i.e. those of someone as gifted as the commentator, government can be an exact science. This rhetorical device serves to show in an even worse light the errors made by the present incumbent. We could have had perfection, and instead we have to put up with this.
The public is generally more charitable. It recognises that in coping with a crisis like the pandemic, an element of trial and error is unavoidable.
But there comes a point where it expects that lessons will have been learned from the errors. And it is on this capacity to learn from mistakes that the success of Johnson’s prime ministership will depend.