‘Do you have confidence in your prime minister?’ The sound of silence is ominous for Boris Johnson

Do you have confidence in your prime minister? Chris Green, the Conservative MP for Bolton West, was asked this question three times in a radio interview yesterday. Each time he took a full five seconds to reply. My research into human conversation suggests that any pause that long constitutes “awkward”.

Especially when each time the answer was not “Yes”. The first time it was: “I’m very concerned about what the prime minister is doing.” The third time Green admitted: “The silence does speak volumes.”

Green is a serial rebel, but that is now true of so many Tory backbenchers that it sometimes feels as if Boris Johnson is a prime minister reaching the end of a long period of office, rather than one who took power just two-and-a-half years ago.

Green has twice stepped down as a parliamentary private secretary, the first rung on the ministerial ladder. He resigned in 2018 in protest at Theresa May’s Brexit policy, and again last year because he didn’t agree with coronavirus restrictions.

But his silence is significant because he is also one of the MPs who said publicly that he had written a letter to Sir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee, asking for a vote of no confidence in May as party leader. That vote was granted in December 2018, when Sir Graham announced that he had received enough letters to require it – from 15 per cent of Tory MPs. May won the secret ballot, but one third of her MPs voted against her, and six months later, after failing three times to get a Brexit deal through the Commons, she announced she would be standing down.

Green switched, along with the majority of his colleagues, to Johnson as the most likely candidate to get Brexit done and get the Conservative Party out of the deep hole in which it seemed stuck.

Johnson succeeded, against the odds, but the gratitude of his party was short lived. Along came the coronavirus, and Johnson’s response to it reopened Tory divisions. Many of the same MPs who had been most in favour of the “clean-break” Brexit, which Johnson delivered, were the same MPs who were most opposed to lockdowns, which Johnson also delivered.

And now Green won’t say he has confidence in Johnson, implying that he might have submitted another letter to Sir Graham. This is a question that is going to be asked repeatedly of Tory MPs, and especially of those who, like Green, plan to vote against the government’s coronavirus rules on Tuesday.

While MPs across the Tory party were unimpressed by the prime minister’s insistence that there was no Christmas party in Downing Street last year, and outraged by the leaked video of Allegra Stratton, Johnson’s former spokesperson, appearing to confirm that there was, they divided into two groups. Supporters of coronavirus restrictions were furious that they had been broken; opponents of them were annoyed that they had been imposed in the first place.

What is remarkable is the number of anti-lockdown Tory MPs who think that the new restrictions were announced in haste as a “diversionary tactic”, as William Wragg, MP for Hazel Grove, put it, to distract from the embarrassment of the Christmas party otherwise known as a “gathering reasonably necessary for the purposes of work”.

Green, too, said it was the “logical conclusion” that the move to Plan B was an “attempt to remove awkward front-page stories about the prime minister’s house parties”.

This strikes me as implausible, not least because I was told, before the leak of the Stratton video, that a press conference announcing new restrictions was planned for Wednesday afternoon. The new rules hadn’t been approved by the cabinet at that stage, but Sage, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, had already met, and there was new evidence about the speed at which the omicron variant was spreading.

It would also be odd for the prime minister to try to kill one bad story (which is still running strongly) by launching another that would weaken his grip on power.

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The Tory rebellion on Tuesday could be huge – one reason I think Johnson is likely to retreat on coronavirus passports – and is a marker of how he has indeed lost the confidence of so many of his MPs, even if not enough of them have got to the letter-writing stage. Those MPs have the luxury of a ready-made alternative prime minister waiting in the wings – Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, although a few of them have had their heads turned by the rival claims of Liz Truss, the low-tax foreign secretary.

But I think they will resist for a little longer the urging of Keir Starmer, who tells The Daily Telegraph today: “The question for all Tory MPs is, are they prepared to endure the next two years of increased degradation of themselves and their party, being put out to defend the indefensible … he’s unfit for office, it isn’t going to change. Or are they going to do something about it?”

After a long pause, I think the answer is: “Not yet.”