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You read it here first. The ball that Peter Kellner, the former president of YouGov, started rolling on _TheArticle_ last Monday has now become an avalanche. All the parties are now working

on the assumption that his forecast, founded on a huge constituency survey, of a large Conservative majority is correct. Unless, that is, something changes before December 12. The one thing

that could turn voters against Boris Johnson is the impression that he is too cowardly to face the same grilling that Jeremy Corbyn submitted to at the hands of Andrew Neil. Consequently the

focus of the campaign has shifted to the “Red Wall” of Labour’s mainly northern Leave-voting towns that the Tories must win. They include seats, such as Tony Blair’s former constituency of

Sedgefield or Dennis Skinner’s Bolsover, that have not voted Conservative in living memory. Today Boris Johnson has brought together his travelling companions on the Leave campaign bus three

years ago, including Michael Gove and Gisela Stuart, to appeal to Labour Brexiteers to vote for him — and not Nigel Farage. For in the crumbling Labour heartlands, from North Wales and

Barnsley to Hartlepool and Hull, the Brexit Party is still a force to be reckoned with. Unless Boris and his battlebus brethren can scotch the snake, he might yet find that too few lifelong

Labour voters are ready to make a leap of faith and vote Tory. Power — the real power that only comes with a resounding mandate from the electorate — could yet elude Johnson. Like his

namesake Boris Godunov, this Tsar of all the Tories cannot sleep easy. The threat does not come from pretenders to his throne. Of last summer’s rivals, Sajid Javid is being hugged close but

has yet to be tested as Chancellor; Jeremy Hunt is banished, pending rehabilitation; while Rory Stewart wanders the streets of London, politically homeless. No, the threat to Boris Johnson

can be summed up, in one word: hubris. The temptation now, as he travels the length and breadth of the kingdom, is to anticipate the prize that must seem tantalisingly close and behave as

though he were already master of all he surveys. But the voters are not serfs; it is _he_ who aspires to be _their_ servant. Taking the electorate for granted would be an elementary mistake,

but it has often been made before, by greater men than he. The result is invariably fatal. As he never ceases to remind us, more than thirty years ago Boris Johnson read Greats at Oxford.

(He is less keen to be reminded that he did not take a First.) As the author of a book on ancient Rome, he could do worse than to open one of his dusty old Loeb Classic texts: the _Annals_

of Tacitus. There that greatest of Roman historians wrote: “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.” Words that any British Prime Minister ought to take to heart, but

especially this one. He could start by simplifying the tax code, one of the most bloated in the world. It is not enough to “get Brexit done”: Johnson must demonstrate the tangible benefits

that will flow from no longer having to submit to EU laws and regulations. It so happens that a remarkable manuscript has recently surfaced in Lambeth Palace. It is a 16th century

translation from the Latin of Book 1 of the _Annals _transcribed by an unknown secretary, but with corrections in an almost illegible and hence identifiable hand. It is the hand of the

translation’s royal author: Queen Elizabeth I. This exciting discovery shines a light in our darkness. Here was a Queen of England, perhaps the greatest, who found time amid the cares of

office to devote herself to studying the lessons of the distant past. Even in her supreme trial, when the Spanish Armada was approaching and the Queen made her immortal speech at Tilbury,

her eloquence (politically incorrect as it may be) drew on the rhetoric of antiquity: “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and

of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.” This is the spirit that Boris Johnson, if he is

to earn the right to govern, must summon up in this last fortnight of the campaign. We are still living in a second Elizabethan age and we have need of an Elizabethan renaissance. The last

and noblest of the Tudor monarchs was a paragon of power and intellect. Nobody should be trusted with the former who has not demonstrated the latter. If Boris Johnson is truly a man, he will

submit to the modern equivalent of trial by combat. He should stop shilly-shallying and let himself be interviewed, not only by Nick Robinson, but also by Andrew Neil.