Last August I annoyed Downing Street by reporting an unguarded conversation that Sir Humphry Wakefield, Dominic Cummings’s father-in-law, had with a visitor to his castle, to whom he confided that the prime minister’s brush with Covid-19 had left him a spent force and he would be gone by the spring. A keen rider, Sir Humphry compared Boris Johnson to a lame horse, saying that once they go in the fetlock they seldom recover.
As a new year starts, he has decided the glue factory can wait. “I find him trotting up sharper than a whistle,” Sir Humphry says. “The recovery is down to a miraculous team of veterinarians, a robust constitution and a world-class trainer, now sadly retired.” If Cummings appreciates the nod, the prime
