Boris Johnson has never struggled to find a job for himself, nor shown much interest in unemployment as a struggle for other people. He was passing from Eton to Oxford for the industrial strife of the early 1980s. He spent the 1991 recession in Brussels, manufacturing Eurosceptic mythology for the Daily Telegraph. If he thought the Tory governments of that era were callous in their indifference to joblessness, he hid the scruple well.

The prime minister did imply a criticism of old Conservative dogmas earlier this year. The nation’s response to the pandemic proved “that there really is such a thing as society”, he declared 33 years after Margaret Thatcher’s infamous claim to the contrary.

Next door, Rishi Sunak was feeding sacred Tory cows into a policy meat grinder to keep up the supply of cash for businesses threatened by lockdown. It was a bold leap for a Conservative chancellor: the biggest single expansion of state activity into the private sector in living memory, funded by borrowing on a scale normally reserved for war.

Now that the pandemic is in abeyance, Sunak faces a profound dilemma: to withdraw back to something like traditional Tory economic policy, or advance deeper into the uncharted policy landscape.

The Treasury’s current priority is reopening workplaces in the hope that there is enough pent-up consumer demand to revive mothballed businesses. Hence the prime minister’s announcement yesterday that pubs, restaurants and cinemas can reopen (with extra hygiene precautions) from early July. The timetable is driven not by the defeat of Covid-19 but by fear of what happens to the economy if people continue to stay at home. It is a fingers-crossed gamble that a rush of activity will fire up the high street, but not the infection rate.

Johnson did not look triumphant when announcing the changes in parliament. His cagey tone did not match the message of imminent liberation. That dissonance expresses an awkward compromise between the prime minister’s wariness of a disease that nearly took his life and the chancellor’s counsel that lockdown is suffocating millions of livelihoods.

The government’s furlough scheme is subsidising 9.1m jobs. An unknown proportion of that is deferred redundancy – an ominous cloud on the horizon given that payments are due to end in October. The claimant count for work-related benefits was 2.8 million in May, up 126% since the start of lockdown. A crater is opening up under Britain’s workforce.

In April, the economy contracted by 20%, the single biggest monthly fall on record. The shrinkage for the whole year is forecast by the Bank of England to be 14% – double the contraction experienced after the 2008 financial crisis – with unemployment reaching around 9%. That will feel more like those early-80s and early-90s recessions, which some cabinet ministers are old enough to remember but none experienced in office. Sunak was 11 years old in 1991, when another Tory chancellor, Norman Lamont, told parliament that soaring unemployment had been “a price well worth paying” to contain inflation.

The Conservative party has changed its tune since then. There will always be a flint-hearted faction that sees interventions to protect jobs and wages as an affront to natural law. There is also a ready chorus of disbelieving jeers from the left whenever Tory politicians declare themselves compassionate. But it is churlish to deny any evolution in conservative thinking in the 21st century. It is just that the evolved thoughts shrivel as they turn into policy.

David Cameron and George Osborne took a modest leftward shuffle on the minimum wage and industrial strategy, but the movement was hardly visible against the backdrop of austerity. Theresa May came to power pledging to address “burning injustices” and to “rebalance” the economy in favour of neglected towns and regions, but she had no bandwidth for anything other than Brexit.

Johnson might not feel moral urgency to rehabilitate the areas that May had in mind, but he has an electoral imperative to try. His majority is built from the rubble of Labour’s red wall – constituencies that seemed lost to Tories forever, in large part because of the wounds inflicted by mass redundancies in the Thatcher years. Downing Street strategists are aware that the tissue over those scars is tender. They talk about “levelling up”, although it is unclear what that really means.

Some of it is supposed to be achieved by targeted infrastructure spending, which is the kind of state activism that Johnson finds it easy to get behind: grand projects, a legacy on the landscape, with plaques immortalising his name and a precedent in Conservative folklore. After all, Mrs T built the M25 and started the Channel tunnel.

The current prime minister is sensitive to the electoral hazard of a recession but I suspect he and his chancellor are psychologically unprepared for the grim politics of large-scale unemployment. The 2008-9 downturn was severe, but by historical standards the toll on jobs was modest. Inside the Treasury that is seen as vindication of the 30-year journey to flexible labour markets that began with Thatcher’s assault on trade union power.

Gloomy opposition predictions that austerity would generate dole queues reminiscent of the 80s and 90s were not fulfilled, much to Osborne’s gloating satisfaction. There is a social cost from labour market flexibility in low pay and insecure contracts, but that is a slow-burn compared to the shock of unemployment. Crudely speaking, austerity did less political damage to the Tories than Labour expected because a crap job was still better than no job.

But much of the last recovery was fuelled by employment in service sectors hit hard by the pandemic. The release from lockdown might put some bounce into the economy, but there was not much momentum before the virus struck.

There are plans for an interim stimulus package in July, perhaps a VAT cut to prod people back into shops, but the big decisions are deferred until an autumn budget. Downing Street’s primary concern will be insulating the public from a harrowing downturn. The Treasury will be losing sleep over a £300bn deficit. The Tory party will be jealously guarding manifesto pledges not to raise taxes. The automatic reflex, briefed already as one of the chancellor’s options, is more spending cuts.

Sunak has shown agility in this crisis. He has a natural and empathetic style that suits the times better than Johnson’s increasingly stilted theatrics. The more depleted the prime minister looks, the more chatter there is – premature, but not preposterous – about the chancellor one day succeeding him. He is said to be admired by his civil servants as a capable manager and not a fool, which distinguishes him in cabinet. He is liked by voters, but it is easy to be popular while giving out money.

The choices imposed by the coming recession are unfamiliar to the generation of Tories now in power. They have boasted of compassion and claim to have discovered the beneficent potential of the state. Some of that conversion is sincere. But it has never been tested in a jobs drought. The last crisis was no guide. If the Treasury treats it as one, prescribing another austere diet, the effect could be poisonous for British workers and Boris Johnson.

• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist