Even if MPs decide they do want Boris Johnson gone – it will be difficult to force him out

Even if a substantial number of Conservative MPs judge that Boris Johnson is more hindrance than help to their cause, and want him gone, it is still actually quite difficult to get him out.

This is both because deposing a prime minister who has won a relatively recent general election with a good majority – and thus an undoubted popular mandate – is a risky business; and because the rules create a Byzantine firework for plotting and gaming the system.

Each potential candidate has to weigh up their chances of actually removing the incumbent and then winning a subsequent election before they might signal their supporters to send the necessary triggering letters to the chair of the backbench 1922 Committee, Sir Graham Brady, even if secrecy is guaranteed. Creating trouble and instability but seeing then Johnson survive a challenge might be the worst of all worlds. He’d have to limp on with diminished authority and standing, the party bitterly divided, and advantaging only the opposition parties.

Such an outcome is in fact exactly what happened the last time the mechanism was triggered, in December 2018, and it most haunt Tory politicians. Having received the then required 48 letters from MPs requesting a vote of confidence in Theresa May (the threshold is 54 now), Brady called a quick poll. Only a simple majority is required to carry on, and May won, by 200 to 117. She was theoretically safe for another year – another calculation in the game – but what little authority she possessed had ebbed away and she’d resigned by the following summer. Indeed, she only won the vote as well as she did because she promised to not to lead them into the next election. (As it happens she capitulated after a threat to use an obscure clause in the Conservative constitution for an extraordinary general meeting of local parties, in the National Conservative Convention, to pass a devastating vote of no confidence in her).

Individual MPs and factions also have to make parallel calculations about the (highly uncertain) end result. They have to be careful what they wish for. So, if you are a clean-break Brexiteer, for example, worried about capitulation on Northern Ireland and despairing of Johnson, if you challenge him and he does go, is it possible that someone “worse” (in your world) and soft on the EU takes over – the former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt, let’s say. Then again, if Johnson is such damaged goods, then the party would lose to Labour next time, an even worse outcome than a Hunt premiership.

Then there’s the system whereby the MPs present the 150,000 members with two candidates. Last time, in 2019, some speculated that Boris Johnson and his campaign manager Gavin Williamson, conspired to make sure Hunt rather than, say, Michael Gove or Sajid Javid ended up going head to head with Johnson, though he was far ahead anyway).

So it’s complicated, this particular exercise in games theory. The basic conclusion, backed by long history is that a leadership election gets triggered when the leader and the party’s standing in the polls has sunk so low that the various factions all or mostly tacitly agree that they’ve got nothing to lose. It was what happened to May during the Brexit stalemates of 2017 to 2019, and before that to Iain Duncan Smith in 2003, John Major in 1995 (though he self-triggered a ballot and survived), Margaret Thatcher in 1989 and 1990, and Edward Heath in 1975.

Whether Johnson has brought them to such a point of hopelessness is a matter of critical judgement. The general election needn’t be held until 23 January 2025 (assuming the 2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act is repealed as excepted), so much can change, and by then the world will, feel much different, Covid more or a memory (perhaps) and the benefits of Brexit feeding through (perhaps). On the other hand, the economy could be in for a long period of slow growth and inflation.

Recent opinion polls, by-elections in Amersham, Old Bexley and Sidcup and North Shropshire and the current opinion polls certainly are not encouraging for Tories in marginal constituencies. The party would be subject to a three-way squeeze: a Labour revival in the heartlands and big cities; the Liberal Democrats making inroads in the suburbs and countryside (where farmers are getting nervous about Brexit trade deals) and the SNP wiping the Tories out once again in Scotland (where Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg look like they’re on a suicide mission to deliver independence) – and all of this aided by tactical voting.

The local elections in May will provide a good national test of sentiment. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Johnson and his party has to get through the next few days first.