The Conservative party has finally found a thought around which it can unite. Those who want Boris Johnson gone and those who are helping him to cling on can agree that the Tories have landed themselves in the worst of all worlds. The regicides mustered sufficient strength in the confidence vote to smash his authority, but they lacked the numbers to evict him. He looks over, but he is not yet out.
Even some of his most devoted supporters groan that it leaves a broken-backed leader in office, but not in power. That may not bother him as much as you might expect. He has always been more interested in being prime minister for the title, rather than doing the job. At a time when Britain faces a daunting array of economic, social and international challenges, it should greatly trouble everyone else that an already desperate and dysfunctional premiership will become even more so.
How did the Conservatives, a party with a reputation for being merciless about dispatching discredited and unpopular leaders, put itself and the country in such a grisly place? Some of the answer is to be found in the character of today’s Tory party. One hundred and forty eight MPs, more than 40% of the parliamentary party, want to fire him, some accompanying their no-confidence votes with savage statements about his unfitness to be in office. The number casting a ballot against him would have been higher, perhaps a majority, if more Tory MPs had been convinced by any of the alternatives. It is quite the indictment of their party, and especially of the cabinet, that 211 Conservative MPs apparently think that they cannot offer the country a better leader than a law-breaking liar.
A man with a less narcissistic personality might conclude that it is unsustainable to carry on in such a weakened position under the threat of another confidence vote in the months to come. But those urging Mr Johnson to voluntarily step aside have clearly not been paying attention. As everyone should know by now, he is not the resigning type. His fingernails will leave scratch marks on the door frame of Number 10 before they drag him out of there.
He also survives, for the moment, because the attempt to remove him was as rudderless and disorganised as the premiership it was trying to terminate. Those Tories who want him out are not united by any burning conviction other than that he has to go. They are animated by disgust with the rampant sleaze and casual law-breaking during his time at Number 10 and fear that the Tories are doomed to defeat if they persist with such a rotten leader. The diffuse nature of the uprising has had some advantages. Johnsonites haven’t been able to plausibly portray them as disgruntled remainers when the regicides include such staunch enthusiasts for Brexit as Steve Baker and David Davis. Nor can the anti-Johnsonites be dismissed as a bunch of embittered has-beens when they include first-term MPs such as Dehenna Davison and Alicia Kearns. Those who tried to vote him out are a patchwork quilt of Tory MPs of many temperaments, vintages and ideological persuasions.
The absence of an organising force was a handicap in planning the move against him. The timing of the confidence vote was terrible. Had they waited a fortnight, there would have been two more bad byelection results to concentrate the minds of havering Tories. It is nailed on that they will lose the red-wall seat of Wakefield to Labour. One Tory MP who has campaigned in the seat reports: “On the basis of the people I spoke to, we are going to be right royally shafted.” It looks pretty certain that the Lib Dems will demolish the huge Tory majority in the West Country constituency of Tiverton and Honiton. A double whammy of byelection defeats will leave more Conservative MPs scared for their seats. Johnson loyalists are expressing relief that the no-confidence ballot happened before, not after, these verdicts from voters.
There’s another factor that saved his skin last week. The Conservative party’s supposed ruthlessness about dispatching busted leaders is a bit of a myth. Only in one case in the past 20 years, the removal of Iain Duncan Smith in 2003, has a failing leader been deposed cleanly with one lethal shot. Theresa May was a dead woman walking from the moment she threw away the Tories’ parliamentary majority with her calamitous 2017 election campaign, but she managed to zombie on at Number 10 for a further two and a bit miserable years before she was finally forced out.
The defenestration of Margaret Thatcher, ejected from Downing Street by her party in 1990 even though she had won them a hat-trick of elections, is most often cited as the starkest example of the Tories’ pitilessness towards unpopular leaders. It is instructive to recall what it took to get her out. Her MPs were alarmed by Mrs Thatcher’s deranged refusal to retreat from the deeply loathed poll tax. The top of her government was torn asunder over European policy. Geoffrey Howe, once the closest of allies, resigned as deputy prime minister and delivered his devastating “conflict of loyalties” speech. That impelled Michael Heseltine to launch a leadership challenge. Even then, Mrs Thatcher won the vote. She was undone because, under the complicated rules of the time, a simple majority wasn’t enough to avoid a second ballot. When she appeared in Downing Street the next day, I was there shouting out questions about whether she was going to resign. She responded: “I shall fight on, I fight to win.” She announced her resignation less than 24 hours later. It was the cabinet who finished her off. The previous night they went in to see her, one by one, to tell her that support was draining away and the gig was up. Some wanted to spare her the humiliation of losing in the next round of voting. She later accused them of “treachery with a smile on its face”. Some ministers didn’t fancy a Heseltine premiership and needed her to step down to release members of the cabinet to compete against him.
The high drama of the fall of the Iron Lady has often drawn comparisons with Shakespearean tragedy. The low antics of the Incorrigible Lad squatting in Number 10 has more in common with a seedy farce. There is another significant difference between then and now. The current cabinet lacks a figure of the stature of a Howe, willing to sacrifice his own place in government for the greater good of his party and country. There’s no one on today’s Tory backbenches with the heft, flair and charisma of a Heseltine, ready to act decisively to topple a leader whose time has expired.
The many mediocrities in the Johnson cabinet, handpicked not for ability but for slavishness, will never tell him to go because they will only keep their jobs for as long as he hangs on to his. There are a few senior ministers who, by resigning and mobilising their supporters, could almost certainly have ended the Johnson premiership last week. “If Sunak or Truss had made a move, that would have been it,” says one senior Tory. There are about 10 leadership campaigns in preparation, but none of the wannabes have the courage to strike. It is Tory folklore that “he who wields the dagger never inherits the crown”. It has become so because Mrs Thatcher’s crown was ultimately taken by John Major, not the dagger-wielding Mr Heseltine. Each of the contenders to succeed Mr Johnson is waiting for someone else to make the first move, a paralysing timidity that is prolonging the agonies of their party with grim consequences for the country. One despairing senior Tory fulminates: “My judgment of the entire cabinet is that they are just too cowardly for the job, they are just too fucking cowardly.”
They have also forgotten an earlier lesson from Mrs Thatcher’s career. Boldness can be rewarding. She seized the top spot in 1975 because she was the only member of Ted Heath’s cabinet to have the guts to challenge him for the leadership. She who wielded the dagger did inherit the crown.
Liz Truss, with her fondness for cavorting about in tanks, poses as a reincarnation of the Iron Lady. Rishi Sunak calls himself one of her disciples. The rest claim that nothing matters more than the national interest. Yet a profoundly unpopular prime minister still clings to the office he has so disgraced because his cabinet is too spineless to do what at least some of them must know needs to be done. Mrs Thatcher had a word to describe such pathetic feebleness. She would call them frit.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
