A crisis is never far away with Boris Johnson – and dissent is building

Like a dripping tap, Tory MPs declaring that they can no longer support Boris Johnson as party leader are proving to be a constant and debilitating distraction for the prime minister.

Every time the PM tries to get ahead of events and away from Partygate, if it isn’t some freshly discovered boozy “gathering” then it’s a relatively obscure Conservative MPs grabbing the headlines and keeping the leadership in play. The Brexit anniversary, the trip to Ukraine and now the launch of the "levelling up" plan have all been rudely interrupted by uppity Tory MPs.

On Wednesday former defence minister Tobias Ellwood declared that he has written to the chair of the 1992 Committee, Sir Graham Brady, to ask for a vote of confidence in the party leader. Anthony Mangnall, elected in 2019, and former minister Gary Streeter later followed suit.

It’s fair to add that Ellwood left the government when Johnson became premier, and Ellwood was himself involved in controversy over a “Christmas party” he attended at the Cavalry Club in London, during lockdown (Ellwood has said it was a business meeting). Even so, his letter of no confidence is as good as anyone’s. Some 54 such letters are required to trigger a vote (which the prime minister might well survive).

Thus far, around a dozen letters are known to have been sent, with probably more undeclared or perhaps imminent, waiting for the final Sue Gray report and/or completion of police investigations. Nonetheless more letters are expected to go in soon.

The Ellwood move follows the resignation of Angela Richardson, parliamentary private secretary to Michael Gove, who confessed her “deep disappointment” in a Facebook posting; and another declaration of no confidence, from the MP for Waveney (Lowestoft), Peter Aldous, who says things can’t go on as they are. Earlier publicly declared rebels include Andrew Bridgen, Roger Gale, David Davis and Douglas Ross, leader of the Scottish Tories. Not so long ago Christian Wakeford, MP for Bury South defected to Labour.

One question that arises is whether the drip-drip of announcements is being coordinated, and if so by whom. There are now three former Tory chief whips who’ve publicly expressed dissent – Andrew Mitchell, Mark Harper and Julian Smith, while Steve Baker, effectively chief whip leader of the Eurosceptic “Spartans”, is notably lukewarm about Johnson’s wider agenda. Against them is the official government whips operation, led by chief whip Mark Spencer (who is rumoured to be possibly facing the sack), and a “shadow” whipping operation as part of Operation Save Big Dog, possibly run by the transport secretary Grant Shapps and the loyalist Conor Burns.

There are certainly precedents for stage-managing defections and the like, as a way of trying to destabilise a leader. A wave of ministerial resignations in 2018 – and the threat of more – was enough finally to sink Theresa May’s Brexit deal and her leadership (though she actually won a no conference ballot in December 2018, it did her no good). Something similar happened to Tony Blair in 2006, when pressure from Gordon Brown to force Blair to name a departure date was becoming intense. Tom Watson, then a defence minister, quit the government with a schedule of other junior ministers ready to follow suit until Blair caved in, which he did. Iain Duncan Smith was eventually deposed in 2003 when he challenged his many critics to put up or shut up; John Major survived, albeit weaker, when he actually triggered a leadership election (then confined to MPs) as PM in 1995, when John Redwood put in a respectable showing. Under the Conservative construction, Johnson is unable to repeat Major’s tactic.

In recent years, it was Jeremy Corbyn who faced the most consistent and concerted efforts by his MPs to unseat him – he was after all the choice of the membership and only ever had a few dozen fellow left-wing MPs he could rely on for support. Waves of shadow cabinet resignations and public declarations of no confidence were followed in due course by defections to a new party, the now forgotten Change UK. Confidence votes were lost, a leadership election triggered and splits and rows punctuated Corbyn’s leadership – and yet he survived long enough to fight two general elections. Like Michael Foot before him – who suffered a stage-managed split on the right of the party to form the SDP – the scale of the chaos that ensued probably helped him survive. It was obvious that any alternative leader would have no hope of uniting the party, and in any case the grassroots of the party were solidly behind him, even if the MPs were not.

Getting rid of any party leader, and particularly one who is prime minister, is a necessarily difficult process. Johnson’s support in the Commons is visibly shaky, and his public approval ratings are appalling. Johnson’s power base in the Commons is the “payroll vote” of ministers (plus unpaid parliamentary secretaries) who rely on his patronage – about 100 to 150 MPs.

Ironically, his large majority after the 2019 election means there is a proportionately larger bloc of backbenchers than May faced in 2018 to 2019 – say about 220 for Johnson against about 170 after May lost her majority in 2017. Thus there is a bigger “pool” of potential rebels to draw on, even though the threshold to force a no confidence vote (15 per cent of the MPs) is a little higher now.

Defections, resignations, letters of no confidence, public criticism are all are set to build because Partygate is far from over. There are also many other sources of disquiet – tax hikes, gas bills, inflation, the refugee crisis and the many unfinished bits of Brexit. With Johnson a crisis or a scandal is never far away. Strong and stable it ain’t. Drip, drip, drip, drip.