Rebels will be handing No10’s keys to Labour. Do they really hate Boris that much?

Minnows who loathe the PM. Naked personal ambition. And the despairing cry of one loyalist...

ENJOYING the warm, lateevening sunshine in his garden on Monday, one Tory MP’s peace was rudely disturbed when his phone started buzzing. The MP, a former minister with a large Home Counties majority, picked it up and saw messages from three Tory party WhatsApp groups he’s a member of.

They all displayed the same text – a headline from the latest survey on the Conservative Home website which is the bible for the party’s rank-and-file.

In the monthly league table of Cabinet minister approval ratings, Boris Johnson had slumped to last place for only the second time, with a rating of minus 15 per cent.

What had been dubbed the ‘Ukraine bounce’ – Boris’s robust emotional and practical support for the beleaguered nation – that had buoyed the Prime Minister’s standing in recent months seemed to have evaporated. This is the same survey which gave Boris 93 per cent after he won the 2019 general election.

It was perhaps not that surprising given the league table was published after the long-awaited publication of civil servant Sue Gray’s report into Partygate. Then again, Gray’s criticism was more muted than expected. After his apology in the Commons on Wednesday and full-blooded reaction to predictable hysteria from the Labour benches, most Boris watchers had assumed he had escaped largely unscathed.

Not so. MPs returned to their constituencies on Thursday as Parliament went into recess for the Platinum Jubilee and started listening to disgruntled Tory voters, and talking among themselves on social media.

Then that ConservativeHome link dropped on to their phones and the 6pm bulletins were leading with news that three more Tory MPs had sent letters demanding a vote of no confidence in the PM to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the influential 1922 Committee.

No one except Sir Graham knows how many letters have been submitted in total – he’s famously so discreet that even his wife Victoria, his office manager, is kept in the dark. As of last night, 18 MPs are known to have submitted letters while another 16 have openly criticised the PM publicly – although it does not follow that they have also written letters.

Boris’s negative rating is seen as a reflection of the deep unease felt by grassroot Tories. Yes, some object to his behaviour but most are in despair that traditional Tory values – especially tax cutting – have been abandoned.

The country is already buckling under the highest tax burden in more than 70 years – including the hugely unpopular hike in national insurance contributions that is hitting both employees and employers hard as the cost of living crisis tightens its grip.

Then last week the Cabinet imposed a very ‘un-Tory’ windfall tax on energy companies. So what exactly is going on? Is there a Tory plot to replace Boris? If so, who is behind it and is Boris Johnson really in danger?

It has not gone unnoticed that some of the suspected letter writers and Boris’s most outspoken critics were those who backed Jeremy Hunt, runner-up for the Tory leadership in 2019.

AND certainly Hunt, a former health secretary and foreign secretary, seems to be ‘on manoeuvres’ – ostensibly promoting his new book with the catchy title: Zero: Eliminating Preventable Harm and Tragedy in the NHS. In a BBC interview he generated headlines, as he knew he would, by refusing to say whether Boris was an ‘honest man’, claiming instead that ‘talking about personalities is not a helpful thing to do’.

Then there was an interview in The Times magazine, headlined: ‘I don’t rule out a leadership bid.’

Hunt surfaced in the Left-leaning New Statesman shortly afterwards under a headline that had nothing to do with the NHS or his book: ‘Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt and Tory leadership candidate would not rule out running for the top job again.’

A few days later, trade minister Penny Mordaunt became the most senior member of the Government to attack Boris. ‘Rulebreaking and abuse of security staff exposed by a report into the Partygate scandal is shameful,’ she said.

Was it just coincidence that Mordaunt, overlooked for a Cabinet post by Boris after the general election, was one of Hunt’s first backers in the leadership contest?

At the same time, Ludlow MP Philip Dunne, who was Hunt’s campaign manager, entered the fray, saying: ‘I’m sorry to say any benefit of the doubt the PM enjoyed has now been eroded. The PM has yet to prove to me that he is the right person to ensure the return of integrity and due decorum that all our constituents expect from politicians.’

The third challenge at the weekend came from Steve Brine, a former health minister, who is known to have sent a letter to Sir Graham Brady.

‘Rule-makers cannot be law-breakers,’ he said. Surprise, surprise, Brine had also backed Hunt in the leadership contest. Yesterday,

Dame Andrea Leadsom, who ran a brief and disastrous leadership campaign against Theresa May, twisted the knife in Boris further, saying: ‘The conclusion I have drawn from the Sue Gray report is that there have been unacceptable failings of leadership that cannot be tolerated and are the responsibility of the Prime Minister.’

Leadsom, a former Leader of the Commons whom Boris sacked as business secretary in 2020, is expected to run for the top job. In fact, she was overheard in a Cornish pub earlier this year saying that as ‘one of only three dames in the parliamentary party’, she had been advised to ‘sit back and behave’ while Boris’s problems pile up.

Meanwhile, Lord Hague, a former party leader, added to the PM’s difficulties.

‘Boris Johnson is in real trouble,’ he said in a radio interview. ‘The Sue Gray report has been one of those slow-fuse explosions in politics.’ He predicted a confidence vote could come as early as next week.

Much of the fevered leadership discussion among the Tories is being conducted via social media, especially WhatsApp. In all, there are about a dozen Tory WhatsApp groups. One ‘nuclear option’ being canvassed in one group is the proposal that if a confidence vote fails, Boris’s opponents could withdraw support from the Tory parliamentary party in key votes.

‘It would lead to a state of anarchy,’ said a government source last night.

‘The Government would grind to a halt and the rebels would be handing the keys of Downing Street to Labour. Do they hate Boris that much?’

It would seem that many do.

NOW the trickle of letters to the 1922 Committee has turned into something of a stream, it may well precipitate a flood, and there are real fears that Boris could be swept away. If so, he will be partly to blame. In January when the police announced they were investigating Partygate, Boris’s poll ratings crashed. An effective ‘shadow whipping’ operation was formed to bring disgruntled Tories into line. It was made up of Johnson supporters, including Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, Northern Ireland minister Conor Burns and defence minister Leo Docherty. But in recent weeks the group has been inexplicably sidelined and seems to be AWOL at the very moment the PM is in the greatest danger.

‘There are incendiary devices going off all over the party and there are not enough of us to put out the fires,’ said one ally.

‘I now fear the chance of a confidence vote is more likely than not.’

If there is a vote, the magic number for Boris is 180 – that is 50 per cent of Tory MPs, plus one. ‘We’ll take any majority,’ a Boris loyalist told the Mail last night.

But others fear his inner circle is too complacent. They point to the overthrow of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 when her campaign manager Peter Morrison, a backbench MP, had predicted a comfortable win against Michael Heseltine. In the event, she quit after the first round of voting, having won but not with a sufficiently large enough majority, according to Party rules.

Alan Clark, in his famously scabrous political diaries, discovered Morrison asleep in his Commons office after a bibulous lunch on the day of the ballot.

‘My fear is it’s Peter Morrison all over again,’ the Boris loyalist said. ‘Thatcher was dumped by her MPs despite a second landslide majority. Boris has the biggest Tory majority since Thatcher. I’m not sure he knows how serious the problem is.’