Boris Johnson’s glum face at the Queen’s jubilee pageant on Sunday said it all. With his face at times in his hands, he did not appear to be fully concentrating on the parade.
Just hours earlier, Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 Committee, had rung the prime minister to tell him that the threshold of more than 54 letters expressing lost confidence in him had been reached.
Johnson sat with his wife, Carrie, metres away from his political rival, Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer, and was most likely ruminating on the best way to tackle the situation. At that point, he had not told his inner circle about the news.
“He actually took the call just as he was heading off to the pageant so he didn’t have the time to communicate it to even his closest advisers until after it was done. He sat there smiling at the performances for a couple of hours, wondering what to do and then he rang a few of us to go round last night and get on with it,” one of his closest associates said.
Having been in denial for weeks, last Friday was the day it seemed to have dawned on the prime minister that he was in some serious political trouble.
Arriving for the jubilee service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey he was booed by crowds of flag-waving royalists. “He will have absolutely hated that but it’s what he needed to hear,” said one of his Tory critics.
The Mail on Sunday reported that Johnson was previously so tetchy about being booed in an east London restaurant where his son, Theo, worked that he “flicked his finger” in a rude gesture at the public hecklers. Those who know Johnson well say he cannot bear the idea of being disliked, and has been reluctant to believe the polls and focus groups showing his standing with the public has plummeted.
Ministers were still insisting all weekend that it was unlikely Johnson would face a vote of confidence, but the string of Tory MPs coming out against him last week, the grim Sunday headlines and frosty public reception told a different story.
After the news was delivered by Brady, the prime minister – like Theresa May before him – opted for a swift vote to give rebel Tories little time to organise against him. At the same time, it offered his own whips not long to prepare the case in his favour.
He called his closest advisers around him on Sunday night, including Australian strategist Lynton Crosby, his chief of staff, Steve Barclay, and his comms chief, Guto Harri, to game-plan the vote, and they came away determined to seem as confident as possible. Instead of getting the PM to furiously ring round MPs offering them incentives to back him, the view was that this would make him seem desperate and on his last legs as prime minister.
Aiming to retain his sense of statesmanship, he instead wrote to colleagues setting out his case, orchestrated a letter of 23 big name donors backing him, and got Barclay to write a piece for ConservativeHome urging colleagues not to “waste” the remainder of the parliament with a row over the leadership.
Those who have seen Johnson in the last few days claim he was not in a bad mood on Monday. He insisted on continuing with a call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in the morning and a meeting with the Estonian prime minister in Downing Street in the afternoon.
And another Tory insider close to the prime minister insisted he was “very upbeat and confident: it’s part of his personality”, adding: “He genuinely has superhuman powers of resilience and is a very experienced politician so is very mentally strong.”
However, Johnson was frowning as he went into the 1922 Committee meeting at 4pm on Monday, where he needed to give the performance of his life. Supporters there described his as being in “serious mode”, but Tory rebels said he sounded unrepentant and the “same old Boris”.
A senior party source said the prime minister was “focused” and “pumped more than anything else”.
But it is another matter whether Johnson has really understood why so many of his colleagues turned against him, and put his premiership in such peril.
