A FEW WEEKS ago the received wisdom in Westminster was that “only Johnson can defeat Johnson.” Now it is that “not even Johnson can defeat Johnson.” The front-runner’s campaign has lurched from one crisis to another—a fiery row with his girlfriend, an ill-thought-out tax break for the rich, a succession of weird interviews—but the race still looks pre-determined. Boris Johnson leads Jeremy Hunt by an apparently unbridgeable margin.

Conservative Party members know very well that they are not electing a saint or a details man. Over the past few weeks even Tory-friendly journalists have called him “epically unreliable”, “all flaw and no character” and a “habitual liar”. But members are convinced that Mr Johnson’s negatives are more than outweighed by his positives. Are they right? Let us examine Mr Johnson’s four great qualities in turn.

The most important is that he is said to be an election winner. He supposedly possesses the magic qualities to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of 10 Downing Street: an “ X factor” that turns him into the centre of attention; a “Brexit factor” that means that he can crush Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party; and an ability to reach beyond the Conservative Party’s core voters. It is true that, in the age of Donald Trump, star power can beat conventional political skills. And in the age of Brexit it is clear that the biggest electoral danger to the Conservative Party comes from the accusation that it is not following “the will of the people”.

But Mr Johnson’s supposed cross-party appeal is less convincing. The Brexit vote has incinerated his ability to woo metropolitan liberals. Today he couldn’t win a vote to become a dog-catcher in London, let alone mayor. His upper-class style limits his ability to appeal to working-class Brexit supporters, while his fondness for donning the jester’s cap puts off thoughtful moderates. He is despised in Scotland. A YouGov poll shows that Mr Hunt leads Mr Johnson among the British public by 41% to 29%. Far from drawing new supporters to the Tories, Mr Johnson may turn out to be like an educated version of Mr Corbyn: a rock star among the party faithful but hated by the other side and distrusted by the public.

His second positive quality, in the eyes of Tory members, is that he can make Brexit happen. The wilder Brexiteers think he can bully the Europeans into submission through force of belief and personality. The more sensible ones believe he can sell a compromise to Parliament. Both are wrong. Even if the EU were minded to help Mr Johnson, it would be constrained by the complicated rules that bind a collection of 27 countries together. And it is not minded to help a man who built his career writing lies that poisoned attitudes towards the EU in Britain and beyond. At home, the parliamentary arithmetic is unforgiving. The Conservatives lack a majority and the Leave and Remain wings of the party are irreconcilable.

Mr Johnson’s third positive is that he is tough: a man who models himself on Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher rather than establishment trimmers and toadies. But this supposed toughness is incompatible with his longing for approval and fear of opprobrium. His habit of making opposite promises to different factions in the party (offering One Nation Toryism to the left and hard Brexit to the right) owes less to strategic cunning than to a craven desire to be liked. His habit of disappearing into blue funks is the product of a thin skin. Most genuine reformers, such as Thatcher in Britain or FDR in America, relish the opposition of their opponents. Mr Johnson is hyper-sensitive to the brickbats of the liberal elite into which he was born, and sulked after the referendum when his neighbours in Islington turned against him.

His supporters reinforce their case with a fourth argument: that Mr Johnson’s downsides can be managed. “Left to himself, he wanders off into scrapes, puns and odium,” says ConservativeHome, a website for the faithful. “Minded and directed, he is more than capable of real achievement.” There can be no doubt that Mr Johnson has a talent for delegation. When he was mayor of London, Simon Milton and then Edward Lister kept things running at City Hall while Mr Johnson functioned as chairman of the board. Sir Edward’s reappearance by his side is encouraging.

But there are limits to how far this model can be applied to a job that has been likened to drinking from a fire-hose. The prime minister personally has to make decisions about an extraordinarily wide range of questions—including matters of national security—that require a close command of detail. What’s more, the Conservative Party is at war with itself over fundamental ideological questions, from the size of the state to Britain’s place in the world. Its various factions will treat the prime minister’s desire to delegate as an opportunity to advance their causes.

The blond leading the bland

What of Mr Johnson’s rival? Mr Hunt is certainly a less entertaining figure. But then the candidates are auditioning for the job of prime minister rather than a place on “Love Island”. Like Mr Johnson, Mr Hunt has pandered to the right of his party by talking up the possibility of a no-deal Brexit. But that is the inevitable result of giving a rump of party members the final say. Mr Hunt possesses lots of conventional strengths: his long career in government, for instance, suggests that he would preside over a well-run and efficient Downing Street operation. And many of his supposed weaknesses are as illusory as Mr Johnson’s supposed strengths. The fact that Mr Hunt held one of the most difficult jobs in British politics, that of health secretary, and faced down a furious strike by doctors, suggests that he is a much tougher figure than his rival.

Johnsonites may yet be proved right that their man has the charisma to change the rules of the political game. But at the very least, the evidence regarding how the rest of the country sees him suggests that Tory members need to think very carefully about their decision. If they land the country with its second dud prime minister in a row, their party may never recover.