Priti Patel has suggested Tory plotters against the prime minister risk overshadowing the Queen’s jubilee celebration in the latest intervention from Boris Johnson’s cabinet supporters to try to head off a confidence vote in the prime minister.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, the home secretary urged those pushing for Johnson to resign to “forget it” and warned that writing letters against him was a “sideshow”.
She added: “This weekend is going to be all about the longstanding dedicated service that Her Majesty the Queen has given that nation. Everyone should rally behind that.”
The number of letters submitted by Tory MPs to Sir Graham Brady, chair of the backbench 1922 Committee, is believed to be close to the 54 needed to trigger a confidence vote.
On a visit to the Mall Patel tried to equate rallying behind the prime minister with jubilee celebrations. She said: “Events like this are about celebrating our country, our nation, our values and our monarchy. This is about Her Majesty the Queen – I think that’s where all the focus should be.”
She added: “This isn’t about a parade [of leadership candidates] or a contest of letters. We need to concentrate on doing our jobs. Our job is to deliver on the people’s priorities. They won’t thank the Conservative party for talking about itself at a time when people have anxieties, concerns, apprehensions.”
Johnson is under increasing pressure from Tory MPs to consider his position in the wake of Sue Gray’s report on lockdown parties in Downing Street.
Simon Fell, elected Conservative MP for Barrow and Furness in 2019, was the latest to be reported to have raised concerns and criticised the “corrosive culture and a failure of leadership” that allowed the incidents to happen.
The deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, led the counterattack on Wednesday by insisting that questions around whether Johnson broke the rules for ministers “have been answered”, as he backed the prime minister’s assertion that he did not intend to breach Covid laws.
Raab said he did not believe the prime minister would face a confidence vote next week, as the prospect of a leadership challenge loomed.
Johnson, in an interview with Mumsnet released on Wednesday, was initially told he was considered to be a “habitual liar”. The prime minister replied: “First of all, I don’t agree with the conclusion with the question asked or the premise of the question.”
Told a teacher would have lost their job if they had broken the law and asked why the same did not apply to him, Johnson replied: “If people look at the event in question it felt to me like a work event, I was there for a very short period of time in the Cabinet Office at my desk and, you know, I was very, very surprised and taken aback to get an FPN but of course I paid it.
“I think that on why am I still here, I’m still here because we’ve got huge pressures economically, we’ve got to get on, you know, we’ve got the biggest war in Europe for 80 years, and we’ve got a massive agenda to deliver which I was elected to deliver.
“I’ve thought about all these questions a lot, as you can imagine, and I just cannot see how actually it’d be responsible right now – given everything that is going on simply to abandon … the project which I embarked on.”
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the treasurer of the 1922 Committee, said Conservative MPs needed to consider which “crimes” Johnson had “actually committed” before launching a leadership coup.
So far, more than 25 MPs have publicly called on the prime minister to stand down – although not all of them have said whether they have written to Brady.
The culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, told BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme that efforts to topple the prime minister were being coordinated by “one or two individuals” for reasons of “personal ambition”.
