Will anti-May Tory MPs ever put the boot in?

Only hours before Theresa May’s keynote Conference speech last Wednesday, a backbench Tory MP announced he’d submitted a letter of ‘no confidence’ in the Prime Minister.

At a private dinner the night before, one former minister told me he had lost patience with the PM and was also going to submit a letter. Everywhere you went in Birmingham — the main conference hall, fringe meetings, receptions — the air was buzzing with similar gossip.

Under Tory Party rules, if 48 MPs — 15 per cent of the Parliamentary party — submit letters to the chairman of the 1922 committee, Sir Graham Brady, they trigger a debate of no confidence. So how reliable are claims of a ‘growing dossier’ against the PM?

Brady, the soul of discretion, never talks about the leadership election process, but he has now given a mischievous hint of what’s really going on.

Speaking at a conference event held by think-tank the Centre for Social Justice, he suggested that the ‘difference between what colleagues say they might have done and what they have done can be considerable’.

Brady added that he was well aware of various Tory MPs ‘saying they had sent in letters which they hadn’t . . . or that they’ve withdrawn letters that they had never sent in the first place’.

There is, it seems, no imminent threat to Mrs May, whom Brady, the MP for Altrincham and Sale West, meets regularly. How well does he get on with her?

‘David Cameron used to kick off his shoes and put his feet on the table. Theresa doesn’t do that.’ Enough said.