After triumphantly strutting the world stage at the G7 summit, Boris Johnson was brought back down to earth with a bump yesterday by a little local disturbance.

Whether the Conservative defeat in the Chesham and Amersham by-election is merely an isolated bolt of lightning or a volcanic eruption remains to be seen.

Is this the first sign that Boris's famous Heineken Effect is wearing off?

He may be able to reach the parts other politicians can't, but perhaps this is proof that he can't please all the people at the same time.

Just as the voters of Hartlepool would traditionally have elected a monkey in a red rosette, this middle-class Metro-Land constituency had only ever returned a true blue Tory MP.

In Chesham and Amersham specific local issues undoubtedly loomed large, not least this Government's unpopular loosening of the planning laws.

Suburban voters in the South-East resent ministers' determination to build more housing regardless of the transformative effect on quiet, long-established neighbourhoods.

It's easy to sneer at these people as Nimbys: the Not In My Back Yard brigade.

But in many cases new homes are sprouting up if not literally in their own backyards then certainly in the garden next door.

Substantial family houses are being torn down everywhere, replaced by multiple-occupancy blocks of flats completely out of character with their surroundings.

Betjeman's beloved Metro-Land is being razed to the ground as ruthlessly as the City of London's Square Mile is being turned into a forest of phallic Dubai-style office towers — which may now be utterly redundant as temporary ‘working from home' measures become a permanent way of life, with Government approval.

In Chesham and Amersham, there is also furious opposition to the HS2 railway line, which cuts a swathe not just through the constituency but also tears apart many of Middle England's areas of outstanding natural beauty.

This misguided, hubristic project, in the wrong place at the wrong time, could have been conveniently cancelled, with the Government claiming justifiably that the £100 billion and counting it is costing would be better spent on mitigating the hideously expensive bill for Covid-19.

Either that or if the Tories mean what they say about levelling up, the money could have gone towards a high-speed railway linking the great cities of the North or investing in an overdue upgrade of Britain's often snail-paced internet infrastructure.

But there was never a chance that Boris was going to pull the plug, especially given his boyish enthusiasm for grand projects.

So what, people wonder, ever happened to the ‘conserve' bit of Conservatism?

That's a legitimate question, particularly after the party's humiliation in Chesham and Amersham.

Yes, there were local factors, including a lingering resentment towards Boris over Brexit in a constituency which voted Remain. And there is no longer any fear of Corbynism, which emboldens lifelong Tory supporters to register a protest vote.

But underlying that, there's concrete evidence that older voters in particular are tiring of Boris's cavalier tendency to be ‘economical with the actualite' — in the memorable words of that other famous Tory swordsman, Alan Clark.

They are also beginning to feel taken for granted by the Conservatives, as the party pivots towards its new former Red Wall supporters.

It's instructive that when he was interviewed about the result of the by-election yesterday, the Prime Minister was in Kirklees, North Yorkshire.

During the campaign, he only visited Chesham and Amersham once, despite the fact that it's next door to his own Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency.

By all means reward your new-found friends in the North, Boris, but don't neglect those who have supported the Conservatives through thick and thin.

Labour made that mistake, thinking it could always count on its traditional working class base while concentrating on appealing to the fashionable prejudices of middle-class metropolitan Lefties in cities and university towns.

Look how that turned out.

Labour suffered a crippling defeat of historic proportions at the last General Election, from which it may never recover. Corbyn may have gone, but in most parts of the country Labour is an irrelevance. In Chesham and Amersham, Keir Starmer didn't even register and the party polled just 622 votes, a paltry 1.64 per cent of the total.

So Boris is in no imminent danger of being toppled by Her Majesty's Official Opposition. The Lib Dems' triumph means merely it has returned to its traditional role as a repository of protest votes at by-elections.

But he should heed the alarm bells being sounded in Tory heartlands.

This week's by-election result in the Chilterns should serve as an early warning shot across his bows.

Middle England hasn't fallen out of love with Boris, but the honeymoon is well and truly over. As the revolt by 49 of his own backbenchers over the delay in lifting Covid restrictions, his popularity is more precarious than he might think.

A Conservative Prime Minister with an 80-seat majority shouldn't have to rely on Labour votes to push his legislative measures through the House of Commons.

And here's the rub. Many who voted Tory, even some of his own MPs, are starting to wonder whether Boris is a proper Conservative.

The pandemic has torn up the rule book, but there's every reason to suspect that Johnson's One Nation Conservatism is a thinly disguised version of Tony Blair's Labour Lite.

Boris has always been a libertarian, although libertine might be a better description. So how can he possibly square that with his hyper-cautious, anti-democratic authoritarianism during the pandemic?

As the Tory MP Steve Baker said in reaction to Boris reneging on his promise to lift all Covid restrictions on June 21: ‘If the Conservative Party does not stand for freedom under the rule of law, it stands for nothing.' In which case, right now it stands for nothing.

At the onset of this pandemic, we were all willing to cut the Government some slack, especially after the Prime Minister himself was stricken with the virus.

But as the months have passed, I can't help wondering whether Boris's close encounter with death addled his brain as well as playing havoc with his respiratory system.

Ever since he emerged from hospital, his outlook on life has changed, in my view for the worse.

Gone is the old devil-may-care attitude, the rogueish twinkle in the eye, the attractive streak of optimism.

He talks about ‘building back better' but these days Boris is no one's idea of Bob the Builder. ‘Yes, we can' has morphed into ‘No, we can't.' Well, not unless The Science says it's OK.

At times, he looks frightened of his own shadow.

He doesn't even sound like a Conservative any more.

The iconoclast who tilted at every windmill now spouts woke gobbledegook about building back in a ‘more gender-friendly and more feminine' fashion.

As I wrote in my column yesterday, on the environment he can give Greta Thunberg a run for her money.

He embraces fashionable millennial fads and even supports the ridiculous spectacle of ‘taking the knee', something he would have once mocked unmercifully.

When I dubbed Boris and Carrie ‘The Markles of Downing Street' I was only half joking.

Does he have any idea how badly this nonsense plays in Middle England, let alone among socially conservative Tory converts along the Red Wall?

If it was just showboating to the political gallery, perhaps it wouldn't matter.

But some of this posturing has been translated into hard policies, which are already backfiring big time.

It doesn't help that he's surrounded by some deeply unimpressive Cabinet colleagues, such as Extinction Rebellion poster boy Grant Shapps and ‘hopeless' Health Secretary Matt Hancock.

Take Shapps's policy of backing Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and carpeting the country with deserted cycle lanes, which have provoked howls of anguish from residents, businesses, motorists and the emergency services.

This is the sort of trendy gimmick you'd expect from anti-car Left-wing Labour councils, not a Conservative government, allegedly committed to freedom of movement.

Same goes for plans to force every home in the country to scrap their perfectly-good gas boilers and spend at least £10,000 on a new, hopelessly inefficient, but ‘green' heat pump.

The Tories used to be the holiday party gown for women jcp of limited government and fiscal responsibility.

Admittedly, Covid has been a game-changer out of necessity. But there is every indication that the ‘new normal' will be here to stay.

Boris Johnson now leads a Big State, Big Spender government, beyond Jeremy Corbyn's wildest dreams.
And the fact that opponents of cutting the amount of money we borrow to give away via the foreign aid budget consider £4 billion to be a mere ‘rounding error' proves just how far from the path of monetary rectitude the modern Conservative Party has strayed.

The Tories used to be the party of free enterprise.

Now they're the party of the public sector, which has been largely unaffected — at least financially — by the pandemic. Meanwhile small and medium businesses, the backbone of Britain in places like Chesham and Amersham, continue to get hammered, despite their best efforts to play by the ever-changing rules.

This has been compounded by the latest insane proposals revealing that in future employers will no longer be able to insist on staff actually having to turn up at the office.

Working from home will become a legally enforceable human right.

Who drew that one up — Lennie McCluskey, from Unite?

Some of us remember Neil Kinnock expressing his horror that in Liverpool under Militant Tendency control, a Labour council — a Lay-berrrr council — was sending taxis round the city handing out redundancy notices.

Who would ever have thought that a Conservative Government — a Conservative Government — would make it illegal to ask people to turn up for work?

Most troubling is the expansion of the State into every nook and cranny of our lives.

Covid has given the standing army of bureaucrats powers to micro-manage behaviour.

The rampant abuses of power by the police and Covid marshals over the past year has been well documented here, everything from measuring pizza slices and arguing about whether a scotch egg constitutes a substantial meal to sending up drones to spy on dog walkers and nicking women drinking contraband cups of coffee in the open air.

They are even laying down ridiculously strict rules for the conduct of wedding receptions.

Not even Oliver Cromwell at his most Puritan banned singing and dancing at weddings.

The last people to do that were the Taliban, who beheaded 17 revellers in Afghanistan.

Yet every weekend the streets of our cities are thronged with young people drinking themselves insensible without sanction and professional footballers and now supporters are free to sing, dance and hug each other with impunity.

Yesterday, police simply gave up when thousands of Scotland fans took over London's West End.

While all this is taking place, the WI and church choirs are threatened with the full force of the law if they breach social distancing. You can just imagine what the ladies who run Conservative Association jumble sales make of it all.

Is this really the way Boris thinks a Conservative government in a liberal democracy should behave?

Disillusion has set in and has a nasty habit of going viral, if you'll pardon the expression.

That disillusion manifested itself at the polls on Thursday.

Bolt of lightning or volcanic eruption? Time will tell. The danger for the Conservatives is that it's a bolt of lightning that heralds a volcanic eruption.

It can't have helped, either, that Boris was seen living it up at the seaside with G7 leaders before banning foreign holidays and extending Covid restrictions for the rest of us by another month.

Strutting the world stage is no substitute for keeping the customers satisfied on the home front, as Tony Blair eventually found out to his cost.

Boris should heed the result in Chesham and Amersham and concentrate on recovering his old sparkle.

He may pride himself on being a Heineken politician, but he should remember that when Heineken loses its fizz, nobody wants to drink it.