It is a truth universally acknowledged that a politician in great difficulty must be in want of a distraction. In the case of Boris Johnson, the spotlight is intense to the point of agony.

On the ropes since PartyGate and the Met’s intervention, his attempt to focus press attention on Keir Starmer by casually throwing out his Jimmy Savile line has backfired. Having studiously, if not ostentatiously, ignored the lies poured on Jeremy Corbyn during his tenure at the top of the Labour Party, establishment commentators (soft) left, right, and centre have decided this is not on and rallied to Starmer’s defence.

And so Johnson’s attempt at deflection has boomeranged back to his disadvantage. Snap polling by ComRes found sixty-eight percent of the public thought Johnson should apologise to Starmer for his comments, and sixty-nine percent thought there was a direct link between what he said and the mob of conspiracy theorists who ambushed Starmer outside Parliament on Monday.

It’s best to keep all this in mind when approaching Boris Johnson’s new hires for Number 10 and the mini-reshuffle of his Cabinet. On Sunday, the appointment of Steve Barclay as Downing Street Chief of Staff raised an eyebrow or two. Giving this job to a sitting member of the Cabinet, never mind an MP, is certainly irregular. It’s had Tories lamenting about the impossible workload. ‘Won’t someone think about the constituents?’ bewailed an unnamed former minister. It also gave the hapless Tories sent out to defend Johnson something to talk about, and redirected a few more column inches past the Prime Minister’s menagerie of woe.

Then Monday, another Downing Street hire. Had Starmer not faced ‘colourful scenes’, chances are the lead story on the evening bulletins would have been the light-hearted commentary Guto Harri, Johnson’s new chief spinner, supplied on the occasion of his appointment. After greeting the Prime Minister with a salute and announcing he was ‘reporting for duty’, Harri mused that Johnson is ‘not a total clown’ and in fact ‘a very likeable character’, before letting the press know they spontaneously broke into an I Will Survive duet. Such heartwarming jolly japes, crowded out by the blowback from Johnson’s earlier faux faux pas.

Tuesday was mini-reshuffle time. The most eye-catching appointment was the elevation of Jacob Rees-Mogg from Leader of the House to the Cabinet. ‘Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency’ isn’t the most aristocratic of titles, but it’s a job role as ridiculous as its office holder. It’s not terribly likely this appointment will outlive his premiership.

But Rees-Mogg has his purpose. During the 2019 general election campaign, he was very quickly hidden away until after polls closed following musings that the victims of the Grenfell fire lacked common sense. Johnson’s ‘gaffes’ are carefully calibrated, but a lifetime of privilege and indulgence is yet to endow Rees-Mogg with a filter, guaranteeing further stupidities in the future. Undoubtedly, ‘Brexit success’ will mean more sabre-rattling over the Northern Irish protocol and antagonising liberal/remainer opinion—exactly what Johnson needs to take the heat off, and a gambit that has worked well with Nadine Dorries and her ability to generate excited media chatter.

Continuing this theme, as the Mirror notes, the new housing minister was taken on with trolling opportunities in mind. Landlord Stuart Andrew was promoted, and it quickly transpired that he, along with fellow Tories, had voted down measures in 2016 that would have made landlords responsible for ensuring their rentals were fit for human habitation. Interestingly, Andrew also has form for opposing 70,000 new builds around Leeds—ostensibly due to environmentalist concerns for the Green Belt. This must be the case, considering his Green credentials extend to voting against subsidies for low carbon electricity generation and measures to prevent climate change, and a supportive attitude to fracking.

And in a move contrived to make Chief Whip a meat shield for Johnson, Mark Harper has been installed as the Leader of the House. Under investigation or allegedly telling fellow Tory MP Nusrat Ghani that she was sacked from her ministerial job because her ‘Muslimness was raised as an issue‘, Harper farcically presides over standards in the Commons.

The last of Johnson’s noteworthy appointments is replacing Harper with Christopher Heaton-Harris. The Chief Whip’s role has an element of dark glamour—for Westminster watchers—about it. They not only get to know the secrets of their backbenches, but are wont to deploy them as blackmail material when the government finds itself in a tight spot: a practice that has carried on for centuries, and which Vice Chair of the 1922 Committee, William Wragg, has taken up with the police.

Heaton-Harris looks the part, having briefly achieved public prominence in 2017 for a series of letters he wrote to university vice chancellors asking them to name lecturers and course syllabuses that taught Brexit. This was read as a ham-fisted effort at intimidating institutions that Tories regard as a bastion of remainism and ‘wokeness’. He affects the arrogance associated with the new role, but his obvious lack of familiarity with tact and subtlety are sure to generate more commentary in due course.

This is what the government now is. The traditional party of British business, the originator, overseer, and protector of the lopsided asset economy is almost entirely a ventilator for keeping the Prime Minister’s career alive. The property interests, the City, the coalition of support who do well from Conservative rule won’t mind too much. Paralysis in government means business as usual for them—hence no urgent pressure from them to see Johnson dumped and replaced, which gives him the latitude to run his government like a circus.

Promoting a bunch of colourful henchmen just begging for stories to be written on them is transparently an effort at deflection, ensuring the invitation to spectacle allows Johnson to recuperate in the shadows. Until enough Tory MPs feel the heat and make their move, the clown car will continue trundling on.