Boris Johnson quite rightly received a flood of goodwill after his brush with death from Covid-19 last month.

But after a bumpy couple of weeks since he returned to work at no 10, could we now be seeing the tide of opinion turn against the PM and his government?

Scrutiny of the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis and its slowness to take action has been turbocharged since Keir Starmer succeeded Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. The QC and former director of public prosecutions’ forensic style of questioning has caught the PM out on several occasions in parliament over the past fortnight.

And with the UK overtaking Italy in terms of coronavirus-linked deaths and our economy staring into the abyss, our 1970s tag as “the sick man of Europe” has been very much revived, according to recent damning headlines from across the globe.

It’s not just Starmer and the press. The UK’s devolved parliaments are also increasingly outspoken about Johnson’s percieved fumbling over the crisis.

There was dismay this week after the PM’s attempt to ease the lockdown on Sunday raised more questions than answers. Scotland, Ireland and Wales refused to follow England’s lead on messaging or measures, leaving further confusion and complexity.

Johnson has also faced criticism from the food sector over his plan to impose a 14-day quarantine on everyone arriving in the UK – a proposal that could significantly impact growers and processors.

And while the government grapples with the effects of the pandemic and the often fierce criticism of how it has been handled, it is also taking fire from a number of different sources over the other topic that has defined our era: Brexit.

The PM famously told Northern Irish business leaders last autumn that there would be no checks or extra paperwork for those shipping goods over the Irish Sea as a result of his Brexit divorce deal with the EU.

But as The Guardian reported yesterday (and The Grocer suggested on several occasions last year), there will, in fact be border control posts in three ports: Belfast, Warrenpoint and Larne – potentially adding more cost and complexity for those looking to do business in Northern Ireland.

The government must take a stand on food security – or the US will do it for us

If that wasn’t enough to dent the government’s shaky popularity, things erupted into full-blown rebellion on virtual Tory benches yesterday, when a number of high-profile Conservatives voted for an amendment to the government’s Agriculture Bill by Efra Committee chair Neil Parish.

That amendment to ban imports of low standard food was eventually defeated by 328 votes to 277 (despite Chancellor Rishi Sunak accidentally voting in its favour), and the bill later passed its third and final reading without the additional measures that many food and farming bodies called for to safeguard UK standards in law.

Parish is normally a staunch supporter of the government, but he could not hide his disappointment last night, tweeting of his grave concerns “about the direction of travel” of government policy towards a drop in standards. That followed warnings in the house that the UK and its food sector was being “led down the garden path, we really are”.

George Eustice appeared on Radio 4’s Farming Today yesterday to defend the government’s stance by stressing he could not enshrine food standard protections in law because it would cause “potential problems with some of the existing continuity trade agreements”.

But with international trade secretary Liz Truss reportedly urging a liberalisation of standards in order to secure a trade deal with the US, potentially opening the door to lower-quality food imports, it seems battle lines have been drawn over food standards.

This battle could potentially create faultlines in the Tories’ big majority in the weeks and months to come, and further dent goodwill between the government and the food sector after a sometimes bumpy relationship during the coronavirus crisis.

With food and farming bodies in combative mood over the need to protect our standards after Brexit, this is an argument that’s set to plague the government for some time yet.

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