And with one bound he was free. In fact let’s make that two. A pair of whopping by-election wins in seats the Tories held at the last general election with five-figure majorities have brought to a close a torrid fortnight for Labour leader Keir Starmer.

His U-turn on green policy can now safely gather dust, or perhaps moss, in the public mind. The Rochdale anti-Semitism row is more serious. But Starmer reached the right position in the end and unless the Conservatives can exploit it by performing strongly in the Rochdale by-election at the end of the month (spoiler alert: they won’t) it will come to be seen as a containable difficulty.

The brutal truth is that Sunak and his party now do not own a single significant political issue

Worse still for Rishi Sunak’s Tories was the buoyant performance of the Reform party – double figure vote shares in both Wellingborough and Kingswood. That’s twice as big a percentage as they have ever scored before in a parliamentary by-election. And it wasn’t Labour supporters that they were converting.

A cloud on the Conservative horizon that was once no bigger than the proverbial man’s hand coming up from the sea is looming very much larger. Reform is now firmly in a political sweet spot – for them, success is breeding success and their brand awareness is soaring just as deeply disenchanted former Tory voters are looking around for a new political outlet. And all this with the electoral ace that is Nigel Farage still up its sleeve.

The brutal truth is that Sunak and his party now do not own a single significant political issue. In the eyes of many traditionally Tory-leaning voters, they don’t even appear preferable to Labour on anything important. They have failed on all the traditional vote-winning concerns: on the economy and taxation, the state of the NHS, the criminal justice system.

Most of all of course they have failed, wilfully, on immigration of both the legal and illegal varieties. And this is not just down to Sunak, but down to his predecessors too. The socially and culturally conservative electorate – including many former Labour voters – demanded much lower immigration from them and that they stop the boats. Instead they arranged for much higher immigration and have offered half a decade’s worth of ‘dog ate my homework’ excuses for failing to deport those who have gate-crashed into Britain.

Almost nobody expects Sunak to remedy this. In fact he was installed by liberal-leaning Conservative MPs precisely to ensure a ‘business as usual’ approach to government and then made that explicit via a cabinet reshuffle that brought back David Cameron and dispensed with Suella Braverman.

As the slow learners of the Tory establishment must now realise, the much-derided Mrs Braverman was the only senior Tory to have built up sufficient credibility on desiring immigration control to combat the appeal of Reform and Farage. The fact that the rather faster learning Robert Jenrick chose to follow her out of the government rather than remain in Sunak’s tent was very telling.

Will there be a substantial new attempt by the Tory right to oust Sunak and find a new prime minister to give the party a fighting chance at the general election? Probably not. Too much of the electorate now appreciates that what it wants is not on offer from this cohort of Conservative MPs. It is the MPs, and especially the 106-strong ‘One Nation’ block of establishment centrists, who need to be changed, not merely the leader.

That is beyond the scope of any plotters inside the party. But as we shall see soon enough, it is most certainly not beyond the scope of the great British public at a general election.