This is a strange time for Boris Johnson to spend eight days abroad

Prime ministers spend more time worrying that they are about to be deposed than people think, even if, like Boris Johnson, they pretend not to. Harold Wilson dismissed talk of plots by saying: “I know what is going on: I’m going on.” He was paranoid but some of the time they were indeed out to get him.

That is one reason prime ministers tend not to leave the country for long, because they associate foreign trips with plots against them. This is probably the product of two things.

One is the fall of Margaret Thatcher. She decided to carry on with an international summit meeting in Paris while MPs were voting in the first round of the leadership contest in 1990. She voted for herself by proxy. It is conceivable that if she had stayed in No 10 she would have been better aware of the failings of her campaign team, led by Peter Morrison, a former minister who was her parliamentary private secretary.

When she failed to win outright by just four votes, she gave a TV interview outside the British embassy saying she would contest the second ballot, but was persuaded the next day, when she was back in London, that she could not win.

The other is the African coup theory: there is a list on the internet of 11 African countries where coups were launched against leaders while they were abroad, eight of which succeeded, including Idi Amin’s seizure of power in Uganda when Milton Obote was attending a Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Singapore in 1971.

However, these historical precedents failed to deter Johnson from arranging to leave the UK for eight days, first at a Commonwealth summit in Rwanda, then a G7 meeting in Germany and finally a Nato conference in Spain. Although he was out of the country for 10 days at Christmas 2019, after winning the election, when he stayed in a villa in Mustique, the funding of which was later controversial, I don’t think any prime minister has been away for so long while parliament was sitting in the era of modern jet travel.

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So it was a surprising decision to hold those two by-elections on Thursday. The dates of by-elections are chosen by the party that held the seat, and the prime minister’s travel plans were already in the diary. At the time, it seemed likely that the by-elections would trigger a vote of confidence in Johnson’s leadership – the prime minister could not have known that the vote would be triggered over the jubilee weekend three weeks earlier.

Some of Johnson’s critics among Tory MPs think they tripped the switch too soon, and that if the 54 letter-writers had held off, the by-election defeats would have put the prime minister on a plane home to face a confidence vote on Monday – that he would lose.

I wonder when the prime minister’s next foreign trip is planned?

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator