BORIS VOWS: I’LL BASH ON
Cabinet rallies round as PM pledges focus on REAL issues
FOR BORIS 211 AGAINST 148
BORIS Johnson last night vowed to ‘bash on’ and ‘focus on the things people want’, after seeing off a major revolt by his MPs.
On a dramatic day at Westminster, Tory MPs voted by 211 to 148 to say they had confidence in Mr Johnson continuing as Prime Minister.
Dozens of rebel MPs pressed the self-destruct button despite a direct warning from the PM that a ‘no’ vote risked handing the keys of No10 to a Remainer alliance led by Sir Keir Starmer and Nicola Sturgeon.
One loyalist MP last night described the vote as ‘the first day of the civil war’, while a former Cabinet minister said the PM now faced ‘death by a thousand cuts’.
But a defiant Mr Johnson last night insisted the ‘very good result’ would allow the Tory party to come together under his leadership.
Speaking shortly after the result was declared, the PM said it ‘gives the opportunity to put behind us’ Partygate and ‘focus on the stuff the
public actually want us to be talking about’, such as tackling the cost of living crisis.
He added: ‘I think it’s an extremely good, positive, conclusive, decisive result which enables us to move on, to unite and to focus on delivery and that is exactly what we are going to do.’
In a direct appeal to Tory MPs earlier, Mr Johnson insisted: ‘The best is yet to come.’
A senior Tory source said: ‘The boil has been lanced. They started the day thinking they were going to get rid of him and they have made a huge miscalculation.’ Allies of the PM had earlier said he would fight on if he won by just a single vote.
But the winning margin was much narrower than anyone in Downing Street had feared – and leaves the PM facing a major challenge to unify his mutinous party.
Under the Tories’ rules the result means that Mr Johnson cannot be challenged again for another 12 months. However, the 58.8 per cent support is lower than that achieved by Theresa May (63 per cent) in 2018, and she was still forced from office six months later. It is also worse than the results recorded in confidence votes faced by Margaret Thatcher and Sir John Major. On a day of drama:
■ Allies of the PM warned that ‘serially disloyal’ MPs could be suspended from the party if they conhe tinue to agitate against him;
■ Mr Johnson began drawing up plans for a Cabinet reshuffle to help stamp his authority on his mutinous party;
■ The PM hinted that he will bring forward a package of tax cuts before the election, as part of a return to ‘Conservative principles’;
■ Mr Johnson prepared a policy blitz, including Brexit legislation tomorrow and a major housing speech on Thursday;
■ Tory whips were on red alert for possible resignations as early as today;
■ The PM refused to rule out a snap election if the plotters continue to destabilise the Government;
■ A group of major Tory donors who have given the party £37million since Mr Johnson became PM branded the plotters ‘foolish’ and said he had their unwavering support;
■ Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries accused Jeremy Hunt of ‘duplicity’ after he launched a barely disguised leadership bid to destabilise the PM;
■ Mr Johnson faced a revolt from Scottish Tories, with leader Douglas Ross among four MPs calling on him to quit;
■ Trade minister Penny Mordant told voters in her Portsmouth she ‘didn’t choose this prime minister’, amid speculation she could quit to mount a leadership challenge.
Last night’s vote came just hours after Tory shop steward Sir Graham Brady announced that more than 54 MPs had submitted letters of no-confidence in the PM, triggering the need for a formal vote.
After the result, Cabinet minnot isters rallied round the PM. Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi said Mr Johnson had won ‘handsomely’, adding: ‘We have to draw a line under this and focus on delivery.’
Mr Zahawi issued a further warning to rebel MPs to toe the line, warning that divided parties ‘don’t win elections’.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak said: ‘The PM has won the confidence vote and now it’s time to move forward. Tomorrow we get back to work growing the economy and delivering better public services.’
But the rebels have warned they could seek to change the rules to allow another vote if the Tories lose crunch by-elections in Wakefield and Tiverton this month.
Sir Roger Gale last night vowed to continue pushing for the PM to go, saying: ‘I was elected to say what I think and I shall continue to do so.’
Fellow plotter Julian Sturdy added: ‘The scale of the vote against the Prime Minister this evening is clear evidence that he no longer enjoys the full-hearted confidence of the parliamentary party and should consider his position.’
Labour last night stepped up calls for the PM to quit. Sir Keir, who was spotted smirking as he left Parliament, said the Tories were ‘divided, propping up Boris Johnson with no plan to tackle the issues facing you and your family’.
Sir Graham announced the vote had been triggered shortly after 8am yesterday. He said had informed the PM the previous day that the threshold to trigger a confidence vote had been passed, despite rebels pledging a ‘truce’ over the Jubilee weekend.
Mr Johnson pushed for the vote to be held immediately, leaving rebel MPs less time to organise against him.
But throughout the day, a string of backbenchers spoke out against his leadership, including longstanding friend Jesse Norman, who said the Government could not afford to ‘squander the next two years adrift’. Mr Johnson hit back with a series of initiatives that had been planned for months by allies who feared the Partygate row would eventually trigger a leadership challenge.
In a letter to Tory MPs, the PM warned that voters ‘will lightly forgive us if, just as they need us to be focusing on them, we appear once again to be focusing on Westminster politics’. And in a direct appeal to MPs at a private meeting in Parliament, Mr Johnson warned that the ragbag of MPs against him had ‘no alternative vision’.
He urged MPs to ‘lift our gaze from our navel’ and start focusing on the needs of the public. And he warned that continued infighting would play into the hands of Labour, adding: ‘They would be an utter disaster in office, forced to erode our precious union by an alliance with the SNP.
‘And the only way we will let that happen is if we were to descend into some pointless fratricidal debate about the future of our party.’ The PM also told MPs that he would return to traditional tax-cutting before the next election.
Former Cabinet minister Lord Frost said: ‘If the PM is to save his premiership and his government he should now take a different course – bring taxes down straight away to tackle the cost of living crisis, take on public service reform, and establish an affordable and reliable energy policy for the long term.’
A string of Cabinet ministers yesterday toured TV studios to insist that the size of the PM’s majority did not matter.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, who helped oust Mrs May, said confidence votes were the ‘routine of politics’. He said a win by one vote would be enough for the PM to carry on, adding: ‘One is enough – that is the rule in a democracy.’
But others fear the size of the rebellion will spark months of further infighting as rebel MPs try to finish off the PM.
Sir Graham confirmed that Mr Johnson should now be entitled to a 12-month ‘period of grace’ in which he cannot be challenged again.
He conceded it was ‘technically’ possible to change the rules to allow further challenges. But an ally of the PM said the 1922 Committee would be ‘looking for a new chairman’ if Sir Graham allowed a rule change to be forced in to deliberately disadvantage Mr Johnson.
Scottish Tory leader Mr Ross, who backed the PM last month, performed a U-turn, saying he would vote against Mr Johnson, having heard ‘loud and clear the anger at the breaking of Covid rules’ and ‘even more so at the statements to Parliament from the Prime Minister on this topic’.
‘The best is yet to come’
‘Labour would be an utter disaster’
FOR four heady days, the nation came together in exuberant celebration of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Ceremony and pageant mixed with wondrous light shows, parades and boisterous street parties to create a cornucopia of festive enjoyment.
The cynics were banished. The sun shone. The whole country was in a buoyant mood, fuelled by a tidal wave of patriotic feeling — and no small amount of alcohol.
Yesterday came the hangover. And what a thumpingly painful one it was.
Many of us awoke to a morning of dank, sullen drizzle. London Underground was paralysed by a spiteful strike, presaging a summer of union-inflicted misery across Britain’s rail network.
Airports were in chaos, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. Russian artillery was pulverising the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. Food and fuel inflation were raging unabated, biting hard into family budgets.
And what were Tory MPs doing to help voters weather this gathering storm of real-world problems? Absolutely nothing.
Instead, they hit the self-destruct button, embarking on an insane civil war.
Boris Johnson won last night’s no-confidence vote, but the result was undeniably disappointing. While 211 Tory MPs backed him, 148 — 41 per cent of the Parliamentary party — did not.
He now has the task of reasserting his authority, and this paper sincerely hopes loyal Conservatives will rally round him in that task.
As the PM said, the vote is over and ‘it’s now time to unite and deliver on the people’s priorities’.
How the voters’ hearts must have sunk. Just 30 months ago they elected Boris by a landslide to deliver Brexit and realise his vision of uniting and levelling up the country.
Within weeks he had delivered on the first part of the bargain, pushing through the withdrawal agreement Remainers had said was impossible.
On the second, he made an energetic start even before Covid struck, announcing new freeports and authorising thousands of Whitehall jobs to be moved northwards.
Yet now, as if in some bleak 21st-century Shakespearean tragedy, his own colleagues — vast numbers of whom would never have been elected without him — are conspiring to bring him down.
It is as undemocratic as it is treacherous.
Perhaps the most contemptible aspect of this self-indulgent putsch is that the plotters have no credible idea of what will come next.
For their party, it may well be a long spell in the political wilderness. We know from long experience that voters will not elect a party at war with itself.
This rebellion has been sparked by a disparate band of backbenchers, many of whom wouldn’t normally give each other the time of day, let alone agree on policy matters. They are united only by the desire to defenestrate their leader.
They are ministerial has-beens, attention seekers, terminal lightweights and, inevitably, a clique of embittered Remainers who will never forgive Boris for honouring the referendum result they tried so desperately to reverse.
Chief among this latter group is Jeremy Hunt, who had a distinctly underwhelming record as Health Secretary and was later sacked by Mr Johnson as Foreign Secretary.
Mr Hunt is out for revenge. He has the brass neck to say he didn’t really want to have a leadership debate. But as the Mail reveals today, he has been preparing for this moment for more than a year, hoping to seize the Tory crown for himself.
He is even said to be lining up a ghost Cabinet, including the likes of Andrew ‘Plebgate’ Mitchell and Tobias Ellwood, who last week called for the UK to rejoin the single market.
In his statement yesterday, Mr Hunt urged fellow MPs to vote for change. His idea of change is taking the party back to the future — with all the ghastly rancour that would entail.
He voted Remain in the referendum, supported a second public vote on the terms of our EU exit and was a cheerleader for Theresa May’s chimera of a withdrawal deal. Indeed, Tory critics call him ‘Theresa May in trousers — without the charisma’.
When will he and his fellow travellers realise the Brexit battle is over and that they lost?
They are like the Japanese soldiers fighting on in the jungle years after armistice has been declared.
Neither the party nor the country wants a return to that exhausting war of attrition.
And if Mr Hunt truly believes he could win an election by promising to turn back the clock, he is seriously delusional. As no-nonsense Johnson loyalist Nadine Dorries told him yesterday: ‘You’ve been wrong about almost everything. You are wrong again now.’
Neither is there any other obvious successor — certainly not one in Mr Johnson’s league as a vote winner. There are talented and energetic ministers, such as Liz Truss and Nadhim Zahawi. But they are untested at the highest level.
With so many of the plotters, the motive is personal rather than political. Mr Johnson was never part of the Westminster establishment and has few natural allies in the bubble.
But having ridden on his coat-tails when it suited them, to turn on him with such alacrity now, at this moment of national and international crisis, is simply shameful.
The attacks on him by the mainstream broadcast media — BBC, Sky, Channel 4, ITN — have also been vicious and unrelenting. Even Jeremy Corbyn was given a fairer shake.
Partygate was a heaven-sent opportunity for these sanctimonious hacks to join Labour in a pious feeding frenzy. True, the Downing Street parties shouldn’t have happened but, from some of the TV coverage, you’d think he’d led a drunken conga through a care home.
By contrast, Beergate hypocrite Sir Keir Starmer has been dissembling like mad for weeks about his own rule-breaking party in Durham with barely a breath of criticism from the Boris-haters.
The animus towards Mr Johnson is out of all proportion. Just look at his record in government, most of which has been spent battling a global pandemic.
Apart from getting Brexit done, he presided over a world-beating vaccine miracle and kept the UK economy intact through the worst health crisis in a century.
Unemployment is at a record low and, though sluggish, Britain’s growth rate is the highest in the G7. Just imagine where we would have been had Mr Corbyn and John McDonnell won in 2019. Bankrupt — and still in lockdown.
On Ukraine, too, Boris has stood firm against Russian aggression when France and Germany preached appeasement. As a freedom-loving country, we should be proud of his resolve.
But the really chilling consequence of this tawdry plot is that it plays not just into the hands of Labour but also the Lib Dems, Scottish Nationalists and Greens.
If the Tories implode, these minor parties would form a nightmare coalition guaranteed to bring the country to its knees. The break-up of the United Kingdom, obeisance to wokery, punitive taxes, all manner of green madness and very likely votes for 16-year-olds would be on the cards.
There would also be a move towards proportional representation, consigning this country to the quagmire of coalition politics in perpetuity.
The Tories have a little over two years to prove themselves worthy of another term in government. They can do that only if they stop navel-gazing and get on with the job of improving the lives of their constituents.
If it continues, this circular firing squad can have only one result. A Tory bloodbath which propels Sir Keir and his wrecking-crew coalition into government.