Conservative Party members should have a vote on whether to accept Johnson resignation

In 2019, the Conservative Party was asked to vote for a new leader to replace Theresa May. She resigned because she failed three times to pass her Brexit deal, so her position became untenable. She did her best but, being a politician who campaigned to remain in the European Union, trying to get a Brexit deal through Parliament was always going to be a big ask.

But why was the Remain-backing Mrs May selected as prime minister in the first place, and who put her there? Enter the Conservative parliamentary party, the same crowd who are telling us today that we need a new leader, and that Boris Johnson must go.

Following the resignation of any Tory leader, the process of selecting a replacement encompasses MPS in a secret ballot, jostling among themselves for their various favourite candidates. Eventually, the last two candidates go into a run-off in which Conservative members select a winner. This is what happened between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt in 2019, when Boris won 64 per cent of the vote, a clear victor, and the members’ choice as leader.

However, three years later, the parliamentary party circumvented the members’ votes by constructively changing the leader. In my view, that means they have colluded among themselves to get rid of Boris Johnson without consulting anyone else. Boris’s mandate – not only winning the leadership election but also an 80-seat majority (not to mention the Brexit referendum) – has been completely ignored by a small number of MPS. This is undemocratic and unacceptable to Conservative Party members. It has made them very angry. As am I.

That is why I decided to act and co-sponsor a campaign to add Boris Johnson to a separate ballot before the final run-off for the new party leader. It would be a simple yes/no vote by Conservative members on whether to accept Boris Johnson’s resignation. If the membership accepts his resignation, then so be it, and then they can decide who they want as their new leader in the weeks that follow. But if the membership does not accept his resignation, he remains Prime Minister. The members will have had their say and we can all move on.

The chairman of the 1922 committee, Sir Graham Brady, argues that a Boris ballot is against the rules because a resigning leader cannot stand in the next leadership campaign. But this is disingenuous because members are not asking Boris to stand in the leadership campaign, we want a ballot on whether the membership should accept his resignation. Moreover, this is not a 1922 Committee matter. It is a Conservative Party board matter, and under Article 17 of its constitution the board has the freedom to do what is in the best interest of the Conservative Party and its members.

Sir Graham Brady, as a board member, should know this.

We must not underestimate the sheer indignation among members, who are sending emails in their thousands to the Conservative Party chairman demanding a Boris ballot. It cannot be in the party’s best interests to ignore its members and invalidate their previous votes. If I were either Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak, I would see the leadership at this stage as a poisoned chalice, a pyrrhic victory which could lead to anger and division within the party and leave us in the political wilderness for a generation.

And all because, ultimately, Boris Johnson was removed by around 50 MPS who, through a herd-mentality series of resignations, were able to unseat our Prime Minister at a time of crisis, despite his record of winning millions of votes and without the formal approval of party members. What a shower.

Lord Cruddas is a former treasurer of the Conservative Party