Graham Brady gets the first rule of politics; that one must learn how to count. And this morning, he will be applying it – as he recalculates the number of letters that Conservative MPs have written to him expressing no confidence in Boris Johnson.
If he believes they add up to the Prime Minister losing a new ballot, or not winning by a sufficiently comfortable margin, he will surely go to him and tell him so. This is the equivalent of handing a bottle of whisky and a revolver to the condemned man. Johnson will presumably first drink the whisky and then shoot Brady – metaphorically, that is.
In that event, Brady will presumably summon the 1922 Committee’s Executive, which is due to be replaced next week after a set of fresh elections. It will then have to decide whether or not to change the leadership challenge rules in order to ease the path to a new ballot.
If it does, Tory MPs will find themselves voting on their leader’s future for the second time in as many months, assuming the Prime Minister continues to tough it out (or tries to). So how likely is this series of events to happen soon – if at all?
Your guess is as good as mine, but another Minister, Will Quince, has resigned, together with a further Minister, five PPS’s, two trade envoys and a Party Vice-Chair. Further Cabinet resignations today are unlikely, though one never knows; however, further Ministerial resignations are probable – certainly if one counts in PPS’s and trade envoys and Party vice-chairs and what have you.
Johnson must also face PMQs and, if that were not a testing enough Parliamentary event for one day, questioning from the Liaison Committee. It would not be at all surprising were one of these events, if not both, to set off new lines of enquiry about the Prime Minister’s many adventures.
Can Johnson recover his standing with the voters and lead his party to victory at the next general election? Before last month’s confidence ballot, I’d have said that the answer was: possibly. Which is one of the reasons why ConservativeHome didn’t argue when it came that Tory MPs should vote to bring him down.
After it, I wrote that the answer was: probably not. It was very hard to see how he could recover from two in five of his MPs voting against him. For doing so would require him to change: to provide orderly and coherent government in addition to his extraordinary capacity to inspire, rise to the occasion and get big calls right.
Few people find it easy to change and Johnson won’t even pretend to try. So I wrote that it was now up to the Cabinet to tell the Prime Minister that the game was up. Others then emerged to make the same case, including two former Conservative leaders, William Hague and Michael Howard.
Near the end of last month, Oliver Dowden resigned as Party Chairman. He might well have been sacked or moved in the next reshuffle. But it was nonetheless a brave decision since, after all, he has no guarantee of returning to the top table (though for what it’s worth my guess is that he will).
Then yesterday, Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak went within minutes of each other. The former’s resignation letter said plainly that the Government – that’s to say, Johnson – lacks integrity and competence. Again, Javid has no guarantee of ever holding office again.
He has already quit the Government once over what to him was a matter of honour – the proposed sacking of some of his aides. Cynics will claim that Javid was positioning himself for a possible leadership bid by quitting. Realists will reply that by alienating the Prime Minister’s supporters he was setting back rather than rolling forward whatever prospects he might have.
The fomer Health Secretary at least had no major disagreement with Johnson over his departmental responsibilites. The same can’t be said of Rishi Sunak, whose own resignation letter made it clear that disagreement over economic policy was a secondary reason for his departure.
Like Javid, the former Chancellor must prepare himself for the possibility of never holding Ministerial office again. I believe that both will, hope that it will be so, and think both men acted correctly. (Their separate camps insist, by the way, that their resignations weren’t co-ordinated.)
But it may be that no other Cabinet members now follow their and Dowden’s lead. In which case, each Conservative MP must decide for himself or herself what to do next. Last December, I wrote in one of my few successful predictions that “a vote of no confidence in Johnson has suddenly become more likely than not”.
This was because “what will worry [Conservative MPs] most is a growing view that Number Ten can’t stick to anything and doesn’t tell the truth – not so much to voters (which I’m afraid they will take more or less for granted), but to them, whether the matter to hand is Downing Street wallpaper, parties, Afghan dogs, Paterson, “buyer’s remorse” or the football Superleague.”
“A different kind of Prime Minister might be able to offer the usual sort of evasion tactics: reshuffle the Cabinet, change the Number Ten team, relaunch the Government. But Johnson isn’t that kind of conventional politician. His problem isn’t Dan Rosenfield…or the Cabinet, come to that. No: Boris Johnson’s problem is Boris Johnson.”
If Tory MPs believe that everything will now begin to come right; that Nadhim Zahawi will find a way of cutting taxes without incurring interest rate rises (before paying out to teachers the nine per cent rise he’s been calling for); that the Prime Minister will be exonerated by the coming Parliamentary inquiry into whether he lied to the Commons…
…that Keir Starmer will be fined by Durham Police and so blunder into a trap of his own making; that Johnson will now unearth the sense of strategic direction that went absent after he got rid of Dominic Cummings, that there will be no more carelessness with the truth, and that they will hold their seats in 2024 amidst a second big Johnson win, they should sit on their hands.
If they don’t, they have little alternative but to use those hands to seize pen and paper, and drop a line to Brady. Some will despair of the prospect of recovery but balk at writing a letter.
They will feel that they owe Johnson their loyalty. That it’s up to voters to get rid of him at the next election, not the Party leader’s own MPs in a blind panic. That the Prime Minister has no obvious successor – a point buttressed by ConHome’s latest survey. That Johnson and his supporters will return to haunt and curse his successor if he is cast out.
In which case, what’s likely to follow is the fourth iteration of Downing Street’s top team in less than three years; a troubled Party Conference, gridlock over the Northern Ireland Protocol and six months of governmental paralysis as we await the Privileges Committee’s inquiry – all amidst the worst drop in living standards in modern times.
The legend is that it would take Delta Force or the equivalent to prise Johnson out of Number Ten. But I wonder whether if thwarted he might just storm off, leaving no agreed Prime Ministerial successor and a political crisis in his wake.