Party’s not over yet for PM despite Tories turning on him
There’s no need to find a smoking gun which implicates the Prime Minister... The facts are already out there, and people are making up their own minds about them
I’D love to know what Boris Johnson’s supporters think Sue Gray is going to say in her report. Their response to criticism of the Prime Minster, and Boris’ own response, is to say they need to wait and see the results of her inquiry into Downing Street parties.
It’s widely thought that her report won’t include much in the way of direct criticism of the Prime Minister. It just won’t be that sort of inquiry.
She’s simply setting out to establish the facts of what happened, not to cast blame.
And the theory is that Mr Johnson’s supporters will be able to point to this and say that the inquiry has failed to criticise him.
But this affair has surely reached a point where that’s not going to help.
There’s no need to find a smoking gun which implicates the Prime Minister. We know that he attended a Downing Street garden party at a time when this was against lockdown rules.
We know his excuses – first his claim in the House of Commons that he thought it was a work event, and secondly his claim in a TV interview that nobody told him it was against the rules.
The facts are already out there, and people are making up their own minds about them.
The verdict of many voters appears to be damning.
Certainly, polls suggest that the Prime Minister’s popularity has plummeted, and that the Conservatives are very unlikely to win another election with him as leader (which is not to say, of course, that they are guaranteed to win with a different leader).
There’s no need for a smoking gun to prove he did it.
The only way the inquiry could make a difference is if it went in the other direction and explicitly stated that the Prime Minister was not to blame – for example, by confirming that aides told him the party was a work event, or that it did not breach lockdown regulations.
Having said all this, it remains to be seen whether Mr Johnson really
will be sacked by his own MPs.
When they say they need to wait for the report, what many of them mean, of course, is that they don’t want to see him leave office and they’re hoping that this whole thing will blow over if they wait a bit.
It’s not so much that anyone imagines voters will forget about the affair (although memories might fade a little bit if the next general election doesn’t take place until 2024).
But the furore at Westminster might die down.
Angry Tory MPs who are considering sending letters to the 1922 Committee calling for a vote of no confidence might change their minds once the fuss dies down a little bit.
It’s often said the Conservative Party is ruthless when it comes to removing poorly-performing leaders. But perhaps this ruthlessness has been exaggerated slightly.
There was indeed a no confidence vote in Theresa May, when she was
Prime Minister – but she won it. A majority of Conservative MPs voted for her to stay.
She eventually resigned after repeatedly failing to secure a majority in Parliament for any sort of Brexit deal.
Admittedly, by this point her own MPs probably had decided that her time was up.
Tory MPs effectively bullied Iain Duncan Smith into resigning as leader, while they were in opposition, in 2003. But Mr Duncan Smith, without wanting to be too cruel, was objectively terrible at the job. He was leading the party to oblivion.
The prime example of Tory ruthlessness is often said to be the removal of Margaret Thatcher in
1990, after she led the party to three election victories. Rows over Europe, and her introduction of the poll tax, convinced many Conservative MPs they needed a new leader.
It showed that Conservatives were
unwilling to back a leader who had become, in their eyes, an electoral liability, no matter what she had done for them in the past.
But it has perhaps given the party a reputation for sacking leaders that it doesn’t quite deserve.
Removing a sitting prime minister is a big deal. It’s a lot easier for an MP to tell a journalist in private that they are considering submitting a letter than it is to actually do it.
And it’s far from certain that a new leader would solve the Conservative Party’s problems.
It’s easy to forget (because Boris Johnson’s government doesn’t come across as a continuation of previous regimes) that the Tories have been in power for almost 12 years, albeit initially as part of a Coalition with the Lib Dems.
Labour had 13 years in power, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and by the end the party appeared tired and directionless.
Most Labour supporters would find it easy to talk about what the party achieved while in office. By 2010, when Labour finally lost power, it seemed to have no idea what it wanted to do next.
What does Boris Johnson want to do next, if he stays in office? We’ve left the EU, and the PM understandably seems to want to move on from Covid.
The virus hasn’t gone away – perhaps it never will – but it can’t dominate the work of government forever.
His answer appears to be ‘levelling up’, but it’s significant that Mr Johnson’s long-awaited levelling up white paper, setting out his plans, still hasn’t appeared.
Apparently it’s now due in early February. But the fact that it’s taken this long – he’s been Prime Minister since July 2019 – suggests that he’s struggled to work out what the phrase really means in practice.