The PM’s defences are crumbling – but one thing might still save him

Boris Johnson’s defences are falling, one by one. He hoped that Rishi Sunak’s emergency Budget on Thursday last week would allow him to move on from Sue Gray’s report published the day before. Never in the history of human politics has so much been spent, to so little effect, on media headlines.

The announcement of cash handouts was well received, praised across the spectrum from Labour, who said it was their idea, through the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) in the middle, to Conservative backbenchers who had only days before been agitating for tax cuts. But it was £15bn almost instantly forgotten, because the story of a prime minister clinging to office is more of a human drama.

To be fair to my trade, it is also true that the question of who is prime minister is important, so although a lot of the reporting and commentary may seem like pointless speculation, the outcome does matter and it is worth trying to understand how likely it is that the country will change its leader.

Getting more likely, is the answer. The prime minister is, I am told, resigned to the 54 letters going in to Sir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee, in the next few weeks. If the target isn’t reached this week or next as a result of what William Hague called the slow-burning fuse of the response to the Sue Gray report, it is likely to be after the two by-elections on 23 June. (Hague is interesting, as the Tories’ former leader who devised the party’s current leadership election rules, because he seemed to be commenting on Johnson’s fate as a neutral observer rather than as party loyalist.)

The by-elections are not so significant in themselves. They are both write-offs for the Conservatives. Tiverton and Honiton, in Devon, hardly matters at all. It is now a re-established assumption that the Lib Dems will win seats in safe Tory seats at by-elections, just as they did before the coalition in 2010. The by-election in Wakefield, Yorkshire, is more important because it is a Tory-Labour marginal, and Tory MPs are likely to be more worried about losing seats to the main opposition party. The bigger Labour’s majority, the more they will worry.

But the double by-election matters more as a symbolic focus for Tory discontent. The revolt against the prime minister is not well organised, although there has been some coordination by supporters of Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary and foreign secretary. The letters to Sir Graham are mostly individual acts, but they have been prompted by events such as Johnson receiving a penalty notice for breaking lockdown law, or the publication of the Gray report. The by-elections offer another obvious moment at which Tory MPs might, semi-collectively, take stock.

Rather than trying to predict when the 54 threshold will be reached, let us set out why some of the arguments for Tory MPs to hold back are not as strong as they seem.

One is that MPs are worried that, if a vote of confidence is triggered, Johnson would win it, and would then be safe from another challenge for a year, by which time it would be too close to the next general election to risk trying to change leader again.

All those assumptions are questionable. First, Johnson cannot be sure of winning a vote of confidence. He would have to persuade 179 of his fellow MPs to vote for him. Given that he will vote for himself, that would be 180 of the 359 Conservative MPs, and a majority of one. His hope of winning rests on the assumption that ministers and ministerial aides will support him for fear of losing their jobs. There are about 165 MPs on the “payroll”: 94 ministers, 51 parliamentary private secretaries and about 20 trade envoys and Tory party vice chairs, so if this were true, Johnson would be most of the way to the number he needs.

This is to fail to reckon with the insane optimism of the political mind, though. Ministers and bag carriers are likely to believe that any shake-up is more likely to benefit them than cause them to be cast out into the darkness. I think a surprisingly large number will vote against the prime minister in the privacy of a secret ballot.

Even if he did win the vote of confidence, it would not mean he was safe for a year. The rules say that a leader cannot be challenged twice within 12 months, but the rules can be changed. After Theresa May won her vote of confidence in December 2018, there was talk only a few months later, in spring 2019, of abolishing that rule by a simple majority vote of Tory MPs. It wasn’t necessary because she resigned anyway, but it would have happened if she had tried to stay on after her failure to get her Brexit deal through parliament.

Nor is the argument that the party cannot change leader close to a general election a strong one. The Australian Labor Party changed leader three weeks before the election in 1983, electing Bob Hawke, who won that election and the next three.

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The most compelling argument for Tory MPs to refrain from pressing “send” on their email to Sir Graham is Nick Brown’s Law – borrowed by Labour’s former chief whip from the US – that you cannot beat somebody with nobody. Is it sensible to start the process of getting rid of the leader without a good idea of a credible candidate who would be a better election winner?

Admittedly, William Hague’s rules are designed precisely to allow that outcome: a vote to oust the incumbent before any rival candidate even has to identify themselves (unlike the Labour rules, which require a challenger to be nominated). But any Tory MP putting in their letter ought to be able to say who should be prime minister instead: Sunak, Jeremy Hunt, Liz Truss, Tom Tugendhat, Ben Wallace, Penny Mordaunt, Sajid Javid or Nadhim Zahawi, to take the top eight listed on the betting market.

As the lines of defence around the prime minister crumble, that is the one argument that might just slow down the advance of the guerrilla army that is swarming over the barricades.