Dozens of Conservative MPs are facing as-yet undetermined disciplinary action after Downing Street announced that a chaotic vote on fracking was being treated as a confidence issue.
It was widely reported that Liz Truss’s chief whip, Wendy Morton, and the deputy chief whip, Craig Whittaker, had stepped down after disorderly scenes, with MPs alleging ministers physically pulled some wavering Tories into the voting lobbies.
At the start of business on Thursday the Commons Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, said he had asked the serjeant at arms, who is responsible for order in the chamber, and other officials to investigate the allegations.
The vote, on a Labour motion that would have set in place a future decision on potentially banning fracking in England, had been billed in advance as a confidence motion, meaning Tories who did not back it could be stripped of the party whip and forced to sit as independent MPs.
After a series of MPs said they would rebel nonetheless, including Chris Skidmore, a former minister who heads up Truss’s review into net zero policies, the climate minister, Graham Stuart, told the Commons: “Quite clearly this is not a confidence vote.”
But in yet another apparent policy reverse, a No 10 statement on Thursday morning said Stuart had been incorrectly informed about this and confirmed the whips remained in place.
“The prime minister has full confidence in the chief and deputy chief whip,” the statement said. “Throughout the day, the whips had treated the vote as a confidence motion. The minister at the dispatch box was told, mistakenly, by Downing Street to say that it was not.
“However, Conservative MPs were fully aware that the vote was subject to a three-line whip. The whips will now be speaking to Conservative MPs who failed to support the government. Those without a reasonable excuse for failing to vote with the government can expect proportionate disciplinary action.”
In total, 40 Tory MPs did not vote with the government, although none voted with Labour, meaning the government defeated the Labour motion by 326 votes to 230. Some of these would have had permission to be away, and some seemingly did not have their votes properly recorded. But it leaves open the prospect of a large number of MPs being reprimanded or losing the whip.
Those who did abstain without permission were seemingly in the dark about what happened next.
Siobhan Baillie, a 2019 intake Tory representing Stroud, tweeted: “I abstained on the vote last night, knowing the potential consequences. For those asking whether I am still a Conservative MP – I don’t know but I hope so.”
Downing Street did not respond to questions as to what form the disciplinary action would take.
It came as the prime minister received a far from ringing endorsement from a cabinet minister on Thursday morning. When asked if Truss would lead the Tory party at the next general election, the transport secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, told Times Radio: “At the moment that is the case.”
There is intense pressure from some MPs over claims of intimidation and bullying on a turbulent night in the Commons. Shortly after the vote, the Labour MP Chris Bryant used a point of order to tell the Commons he saw Tory MPs being “physically manhandled” into the government voting lobby. He asked for a formal investigation.
One Tory backbencher told the Guardian it was “the most bullying, screaming and shouting” they had seen in the voting lobbies, with Morton and Whittaker being engaged in a “full-blown shouting match” with MPs.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday, Bryant said he saw up to 20 MPs “surrounding a couple of Conservative MPs who were wavering as to how they should vote”.
He said: “It was very aggressive, very angry, there was a lot of shouting, there was a lot of pointing, gesticulating, there was at least one hand on another MP, and to me that was clear bullying, intimidation.”
Trevelyan told Sky News she had not witnessed this, adding: “I don’t think it’s ever acceptable for any party – and we have seen this happen before, where whips perhaps over-egg their encouragement to get people to vote in the appropriate way – that is never right.”
