The backlash has begun.

Following the Conservative Party’s catastrophic performance in England’s recent local elections, losing more than a thousand council seats, the old allies of ousted premier Boris Johnson have been circling like a particularly insalubrious bunch of vultures above the wounded figure of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

An old chum of Johnson’s, the Brexit-loving business tycoon James Dyson earlier this month launched a scathing attack upon Mr. Sunak’s vacuous policy pledge to make the UK a “science and technology superpower." Indeed, the vacuum king went so far as to accuse the Prime Minister of being responsible for the “scandalous neglect” of Britain’s tech sectors.

It looked like there was a coordinated strategy behind this. On the very same day as Dyson’s turbocharged assault, former Home Secretary Priti Patel blamed Mr. Sunak for the “managed decline” of the Tory party.

Speaking in front of an audience of diehard Johnson loyalists, she berated her treacherous colleagues for bringing down her erstwhile boss, a man she hailed as a “vote-winning political giant."

Their newly formed group, calling itself the Conservative Democratic Organisation, seems determined to resurrect Mr. Johnson’s political prospects, even if it means tearing their own party apart.

Their membership list includes the blond buffoon’s most prominent superfans.

There’s the revenant Victorian aristocrat Jacob Rees-Mogg, a caricature of an outmoded Tory Toff, a languid stick insect of an old Etonian in his trademark pre-war double-breasted suit, utterly outraged by the current government’s recent decision to put the brakes on his plans for a wholesale and indiscriminate bonfire of European laws and regulations.

The same week as Ms. Patel’s speech, Rees-Mogg himself gave a rather unusual speech, one in which he blamed the disaster of his party’s most recent election results upon new voter ID rules which he himself had been responsible for shepherding through parliament during Boris Johnson’s administration.

The “grassroots” elite membership of that so-called “Democratic Organisation” also includes Nadine Dorries, a devoted groupie of the former PM, who has continued to applaud his bombastic bluster even through the days of his greatest public disgrace and to launch her invective against his enemies with all the rational coherence of an eternally loyal but dangerously rabid dog.

Meanwhile, their broken Messiah continues to suffer at the hands of those he and they see as his unfairly vicious and vengeful persecutors.

He appears to them like a contemporary incarnation of Christ on a bike, but one with a rather looser sense of ethics than most religious icons.

Following his bruising interrogation by a parliamentary committee investigating allegations that he’d knowingly misled the House of Commons as to his tendency to party his way through pandemic lockdowns, Mr. Johnson faced further vitriol this month when it was revealed that the taxpayer was continuing to cover his legal costs in his attempts to defend his political reputation and shore up the shreds of his career in public life.

Those costs have now reached nearly a quarter of a million pounds. Mr. Johnson has himself earned millions since being ejected from Downing Street.

He’s also hit the headlines again after an old friend of his was forced to resign from the top job at the BBC when it emerged that he’d helped to arrange a large personal loan for Johnson shortly before the then Prime Minister had appointed him to that role.

It was also recently reported that a criminal investigation had discovered that the overseas business interests of a major Tory donor with access to Mr. Johnson had been involved in international money-laundering activities.

And just last week it was revealed that the UK Cabinet Office had disclosed documentation to the Metropolitan Police in relation to further instances of the former Prime Minister’s Covid-19 safety breaches.

Under these circumstances, it might be difficult to understand why anyone, even his most devout disciples, would consider it possible to put him back into the most exalted position in the British government.

But there are two important factors at play here. The first is that the most ardent Brexiteers are growing increasingly and immediately desperate: they believe that Mr. Sunak and his more moderate allies are even now in the process of watering down Johnson’s ambitions for a hardline Brexit.

The second is that they believe that Sunak’s team cannot win the next general election. They also think that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party may prove similarly incapable of an outright victory and that it might very well be obliged to enter into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, a possibility which Mr. Starmer himself has refused to rule out.

And they know that the price the Lib Dems might demand for such a coalition could be another referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union.

Current opinion poll data suggest that this might very possibly result in Britain’s return to the EU – if, that is, Brussels would be willing to take us back.

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At the same time, Labour proposals for electoral reforms (including reducing the voting age from 18 to 16) have been described by such pro-Brexit newspapers as the Daily Express and the Daily Mail as representing a “sinister” plot to “draft Britain back into the EU”.

That prospect could impact very negatively upon the finances of those friends of Boris Johnson who’ve so far been profiting very nicely from the economic disaster that we call Brexit.

Those friends of course include Mr. Rees-Mogg himself, whose own multi-million-pound international investment fund has done extremely well out of Britain’s departure from the EU.

These financial shenanigans and their cost to the UK’s domestic economy may not have been as overtly or as insanely self-serving as the notorious fiscal experiment of Liz Truss’ short-lived premiership, but their longer-term impacts upon the country’s economic prospects and upon their backers’ business interests are even more extraordinary and outrageous.

And that’s of course why they’re willing to risk everything again to get their greatest advocate back into power, in one crazy last throw of the dice in their callous, opportunistic, and mercenary game.

It wasn’t a good omen for the Tories that Southampton football club – the team supported by Rishi Sunak, native to the town in which he grew up – was this month relegated from English soccer’s premier league. It may not be so long before their highest-profile supporter meets a similar fate.

Indeed, this is a man who was recently condemned by a right-wing colleague for his apparently uncanny ability to enthuse people to move in precisely the wrong direction.

So far, the Prime Minister’s core policy pledges for this year have borne scant fruit. Inflation remains high and economic growth sluggish, while hospital waiting lists are at their highest level ever.

Two weeks ago, one Cabinet member accepted that it would be “difficult” for his boss to deliver on his key promises.

And, with net migration projected to rise to a record high of 700,000 people, his own Home Secretary has publicly called on the Tory leader to get “tougher” on border restrictions and take the economic hit of having fewer lorry drivers, farmhands, and workers in food production.

More moderate members of her party expressed concern that this “outrageous” intervention not only served to undermine the Prime Minister’s authority but in effect represented the premature launch of her own leadership campaign. She appears already to be working under the assumption that Rishi Sunak will be ditched after losing the next election, and is lining herself up to replace him.

One minister told The Guardian newspaper that “being in the cabinet is no longer a collective endeavor but a position to pitch for the next job."

Home Secretary Suella Braverman last year had to quit after having committed a security breach but had been reinstated within a week, following a change of Prime Minister. This month, she prompted further controversy when it was alleged that she’d attempted to use her position to get out of the standard group iteration of a speed awareness course imposed as a penalty for being caught speeding.

It says little for the moral probity of her party that she might still be considered a convincing candidate for its leadership.

Also this month, ex-premier Liz Truss took time out from her empty schedule to make a provocative trip to Taiwan, where she called on her successor to get tough with China, in a self-promoting publicity stunt described by the Conservative chair of parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee as a piece of “Instagram diplomacy”.

Mr. Sunak had been in the crowd at St. Mary’s stadium when his team was knocked out of the first flight of English football, after eleven years at the top.

The Tories have now been in government for thirteen years. With a general election looming in about eighteen months’ time, it looks like they aren’t about to bow out gracefully, but that they’ll end up fighting their political opponents – both outside and within their own party – tooth and claw all the way to the bitter end.

Oblivious to the harm it may do to both party and country, those seeking to promote the interests of Mr. Johnson will doubtless continue to push their petty schemes to precipitate Rishi Sunak’s relegation from frontline politics.

ITV’s deputy political editor recently quoted Jacob Rees-Mogg as admitting it would be “absolutely loony” for the Conservatives to try to depose their leader at this point in the electoral cycle and after the embarrassing turmoil of 2022.

Yet, given the Tories’ increasing predilection for utterly irrational acts, it’s not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility that a bid to launch another chaotic leadership contest may erupt at Westminster sometime in the not-too-distant future.

At the very least, we can reasonably expect more bouts of infighting to inflict further damage upon the ruling party’s hopes of remaining in office, and indeed of maintaining sufficient focus and authority to govern the nation effectively for whatever time they’ve got left.