The Tory succession has shifted further in Rishi Sunak’s favour

No sooner had I settled down to watch the Strictly final, after writing my pre-Christmas article pointing out that prime ministers tend to last longer than people expect them to, than David Frost, the Brexit minister, resigned from the cabinet.

In the article, I said that speculation about letters from Conservative backbenchers demanding a vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson was premature, and that I didn’t believe that as many as 55 of them really thought that now was a good time to change leaders. By the evening, it seemed that one of Johnson’s closest allies in the Brexit battle had given up on him.

Despite the platitudes of his resignation letter, Lord Frost appeared to have timed his resignation to damage the prime minister, and his disagreement with the government’s policies suggested that he no longer thought Johnson was the right person for the top job.

Even allowing for Johnson’s history of burning through allies who turn on him, this was a remarkable reverse, not least because Lord Frost echoed the very criticisms made of the prime minister by his rebellious backbenchers: they are unhappy about “illiberal” coronavirus restrictions and “socialist” tax rises.

It seemed that we had gone from Brexit triumph to a revolution devouring its own children in just two years. The ingratitude of Tory MPs, many of whom owed their seats to Johnson (and only Johnson, I think, could have forced and won that election in 2019), is shocking. Even so, Johnson’s position does not seem to be under immediate threat. Above all, it remains the wrong time for the party to change leader, probably two and a half years away from the next election. Johnson’s would-be assassins have turned up too soon for most Tory MPs to want to join in the regicide.

Yesterday, however, something happened that moved the prime minister significantly closer to the exit door. An opinion poll by Opimium asked people how they would vote if the Conservative Party had a different leader. It asked: “Please imagine that at the next election Boris Johnson was leader of the Conservative Party and Keir Starmer was the leader of the Labour Party. Who do you think you would vote for?”

This was to provide a baseline against which to compare the effect of different Tory leaders, because the standard voting intention question asks about parties without naming leaders. But in itself, this question contained bad news for Johnson, because the mere mention of his name (and Starmer’s) increased the Labour lead, which was seven percentage points on the standard question, to 12 points.

The real hammer blow for Johnson, though, was what happened when Opinium asked the question with Rishi Sunak’s name instead of his. This had the effect of closing the Labour lead to just three points – and theoretically saving 45 Tory seats.

Opinium also asked how people would vote if Liz Truss or Michael Gove were Tory leader: both of them performed worse than Johnson. This is important because Truss has gained ground among Tory members – who would have the final say in a leadership election – at Sunak’s expense recently. In this month’s Conservative Home survey of party members, she narrowly overtook the chancellor as their preferred candidate to succeed Johnson.

That is interesting – and a bit baffling to non-Tories – but the enthusiasm of party members for the foreign secretary may be tempered by the realisation that she is a vote-loser among the wider electorate compared with Johnson. And the views of party members are not yet as significant as Opinium’s finding that Sunak could save Tory MPs their seats. That does not happen often in politics.

Even though Sunak has been the most popular politician in Britain since the start of the pandemic, which struck within days of his promotion to chancellor, when voters have been presented with a choice between Johnson and him as prime minister, they have stuck with Johnson.

Until now. Redfield and Wilton polls have consistently asked which of Johnson and Sunak would be a better prime minister, and only recently has Sunak taken the lead. Now Opinium has gone one step further, showing how that preference might play out in an actual election. Naturally, purists object to the kind of survey question that asks people to predict how they would behave in an imaginary situation, and it is true that Opinium’s poll is a poor guide to how people would actually vote in an election after the Tories changed leader. The nature of the Tory leadership election campaign would change how people saw the candidates and the party; and if Sunak became prime minister, he would immediately have his own successes and failures that would change how people would vote in a general election.

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But polls of this kind do tell us something about potential leaders, and they influence how MPs behave. In 1990, Tory MPs deposed Margaret Thatcher because opinion polls told them that the poll tax was going to lose them the election they expected in 1991. There were polls that suggested the party would do better under Michael Heseltine, but any leader would have done as long as they got rid of the poll tax.

In 2004 and 2005, the polls suggested that Labour would do better with Gordon Brown as leader than with Tony Blair, but the difference wasn’t great and it looked as if Labour would win anyway, so Blair survived.

Johnson isn’t finished yet. It is significant that he is now a liability to his party, while the chancellor is an asset. But it won’t be decisive until the next general election is closer, and the polls will change. Sunak’s stock may decline when the tax rise starts to bite in April. Truss’s stock may rise – Johnson is desperately trying to build her up as a counterweight to his over-mighty chancellor, most recently giving her Lord Frost’s job of Brexit negotiator. And Johnson himself may bounce back, having fended off demands for more coronavirus restrictions over Christmas.

But if, as the next election approaches, the opinion polls suggest that ditching Johnson and installing Sunak would make the difference between victory and defeat, panicking Tory MPs can be relied on to show their leader the loyalty that is customary in politics.