Tories pig sick of PM

Peppa fan Boris covered in mud and facing boot from angry MPS

SHARES in Boris Johnson have been selling fast at the Tory end of the Commons tea room. By the end of the week the PM’S stock among his own MPS resembled a Black Friday frenzy.

It wasn’t only the bumbling madness of the Peppa Pig rant.

After all, it didn’t show Boris – or Johnson, as his increasingly distanced tribe now prefer – was any more off the wall than he’s always been.

Peppa Pig was a fitting metaphor for the trough beyond which so many Tories cannot see.

The avarice of Tory MPS has long been priced in but now sleaze has helped deliver Boris his lowest ever personal poll ratings and given Keir Starmer an impassioned voice.

Dreamland

Imagine what might happen when Keir gets around to defining Labour’s alternative policies for Government.

Tolerance for the PM’S inability to govern has finally been shattered.

The catalyst was not some grievous repudiation of high principle, the sacrifice of national interest or odious defiance of honourable behaviour.

He’s shown enough scorn in all those areas and survived – indulged by his own party as an election winner.

The catalyst was making fools of his own MPS, by ordering them to save the skin of Owen Paterson after he broke the rules on second job lobbying, then ordering an about-turn a day later.

The crack became a fissure, the spotlight falling on one broken promise after another – HS2, social care and most of all, the sacred shibboleth of low taxation. That was the message sent by his CBI speech to business leaders and backbenchers itching for an excuse to pull the rug on a PM they never really trusted.

Not the diverting ramble into a pink utopia of Boris’s Peppa Pig dreamland, but confirmation that it would all be funded by higher taxes.

It’s what’s been at the heart of increasing tensions with Chancellor Rishi Sunak, the self-styled poster boy successor in waiting.

When concern over whether the PM “is OK” or “lost his grip” are stoked by Downing Street sources it’s noted who lives next door.

Boris is a lonely man politically and getting lonelier. He’s never bothered with maintaining bridges with his MPS, sacked traditionalists and alienated the younger MPS with crashing failures on promises to level up the North.

There’s no cast-iron loyal cohort of MPS you could call Johnsonites because there’s no such thing as Johnsonism.

Unlike Margaret Thatcher, Boris has fair weather fans, not fellow ideologues. And not even they could save the hattrick election winner in the end. The quiet revolution is under way. Gaps in the seats at Prime Minister’s question time – when usually it’s standing room only – tell their own story. More MPS insolently abstaining on key votes than openly rebelling reinforce it.

They filled the benches again last week thanks to bullying whips, but in morbid anticipation at what Johnson himself might call a “car crash”.

The most organised cohort of Tory MPS is that plotting his downfall.

It’s not yet a total fire sale but Boris’s licence to drive the Number 10 bus is close to being revoked.