Boris Johnson beware – even leaders who survive a confidence vote are left wounded

The result of the confidence vote relating to Boris Johnson seems to place the prime minister in the critically wounded category, with 211 voting to back the prime minister and 148 voting against him staying on.

A formal mandate under the rules, but hardly sufficient to draw a line under matters and allow the party and country to “move on” and free the government to “get on with the job” (to recycle a few of the current clichés).

History suggests that a leader thus wounded never survives a confidence vote for that long, even if the vote is won. In the case of the Tories (Labour has a rather different system), Sir Iain Duncan Smith has the unwelcome distinction of being the only leader to lose a vote, in 2003, by 90 to 75 (the parliamentary party was denuded by the general election defeats of 1997 and 2001). But the ones who’ve won are scarcely luckier.

The last and only time (until now) that there was a vote of confidence in a serving Conservative prime minister was under Theresa May, in December 2018. Similar arguments to the present ones, about “now is not the time” and exacerbating divisions, were deployed by No 10, targeted at anti-May plotters. The embattled premier did win the vote, then as now rapidly organised, by 200 to 117, better than Johnson, and it was proudly declared by her aides to be a triumph in the circumstances and against the background of the bitter divisions over Brexit. They rejoiced.

However, her chief of staff at the time, Gavin Barwell, later revealed this in his memoir: “The instinct to celebrate was a natural one. After all, she had secured more votes than in the final round of the leadership election in 2016 and the victory gave her a measure of security. But as she acknowledged in her statement, a significant number of her colleagues had voted against her, and she had been pressured into ruling out leading the party into the next election. We’d had a lucky escape because her opponents had got their timing wrong, but it was clear there was a very significant opposition to her Brexit compromise.”

And so it proved, and a string of historic Commons defeats led to her resignation within months, even though the no-confidence vote was supposed to keep her in place for a year.

Looking further back, there were no party votes of confidence, so a leadership election had to be triggered to gauge the mood of the party. This arrangement led to some unusual moves. In 1995, for example, John Major resigned as leader of the party – but not as prime minister – in order to stand again and silence his grumbling critics. The “put up or shut up” leadership election.

For whatever reason, he failed to get one member of his cabinet onside, John Redwood, who resigned and stood against Major. Redwood stood on a Thatcherite platform and argued that “no change means no chance”. Major won easily on the face of things – 218 to 89 – but there were a further 10 abstentions and 12 spoilt papers, making it 218 for Major, with 111 colleagues withholding their backing. He limped on for another couple of years before going down to the worst Tory defeat since 1832 at the hands of Tony Blair.

Even Margaret Thatcher, 10 years into her premiership and after three successive general election wins, was badly wounded by what looked to be a tokenistic protest against her in 1989. A “stalking horse” candidate was put up against her, and he managed to gain just 33 votes to her 314. Sir Anthony Meyer, a pro-European “wet”, was derided as a “stalking donkey” (sportingly, that was the title of his slim volume of memoirs).

What Meyer did achieve was to puncture the Iron Lady’s invulnerable reputation, tempt another 27 Tory MPs to abstain, thus revealing a wider dissenting cohort numbering 60 rebels, and prepare the way for the more serious leadership challenge by Michael Heseltine that did lead to her fall from power.

Thatcher won the first round of that leadership election, but not by a large enough margin to be able to stay in the contest. In that case, her cabinet really pushed her out by arguing that she’d lose the second-round vote and let Heseltine in. The line was that she should therefore step aside and allow someone such as her chancellor, Major, to preserve her legacy. She called it, famously, “treachery with a smile on its face”.

So Johnson has survived, but not for long if the state of the economy is against him (as with Thatcher in the recession of 1990) and not if the opposition parties are riding high in the polls (as with Major in 1995): momentum is absent for him.

What then, after the possible by-election disasters later this month? The cabinet may have to intervene at some point, and/or the officers of the backbench 1922 Committee, to indicate that if he presses on he risks humiliation and a chaotic exit (arguably a fitting end) – even if he is theoretically safe for 12 months, which would take him to the safety of the immediate run-up to the next general election (which of course will be at a time of his own choosing).

Johnson might even threaten to call a general election, using the new wide and personal powers in the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act. That could plunge party, parliament, the Queen and the Supreme Court into a fresh constitutional crisis. Johnson might calculate that only by threatening such a Gotterdammerung ending to his premiership would his enemies be repelled. The crisis has only just begun.