Try as one might, it would be hard to come up with a more shamelessly bogus argument in support of Boris Johnson keeping his job than the one at which Priti Patel clutched on the eve of the platinum jubilee last week. Conservative MPs who are discontented with the prime minister’s leadership should stop their plotting because they risked overshadowing the celebrations of the Queen’s 70 years on the throne, the home secretary told the Daily Mail. All the focus should be on the jubilee and on the monarch, she insisted.
As counterfeit arguments go, this takes a lot of beating. Not only was the jubilee being opportunistically invoked as the latest in an ever lengthening line of other things – the Covid pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, the local elections, the Scotland Yard investigation, the Gray report, the cost of living crisis, the upcoming byelections – that supposedly made it necessary and patriotic for Mr Johnson to retain his post. It was also particularly shameless to invoke the Queen so selectively. When the Queen was asked to prorogue parliament illegally, or Downing Street partied on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral, or Mr Johnson tried to trash the good relations so carefully built with Ireland by the Queen’s visit, it is hard to recall Ms Patel, or any other cabinet minister, leaping up to urge a different course of action for the Queen’s sake.
It has come to something when the barrel is being so obviously and noisily scraped as this. But then the truth is that Mr Johnson’s attempt to cling on to power is now a day-by-day, even an hour-by-hour, battle for survival. Evidence of his unpopularity, and the damage that it does to Tory prospects, is proliferating, not just in the opinion polls or the drip-drip of Conservative MPs’ letters of no confidence, but even on the flag-waving streets of the capital. The boos and jeers that accompanied Mr Johnson’s arrival at St Paul’s Cathedral for the jubilee thanksgiving service on Friday will have annoyed Ms Patel, but they were another very public and very humiliating sign of how dire his situation now is.
With the jubilee now successfully concluded, Tory MPs return to Westminster on Monday to confront reality once again. They will find Mr Johnson’s position still threatened, as the numbers of backbenchers (and maybe some ministers) demanding a vote of confidence grow. Predicting MPs’ next moves is hazardous; they are all weighing many factors and they have different audiences to please. They must balance their own instincts, their careers, the polls, and the mood of their activists and voters. But it seems clear that things are likely to get worse before they get better. The threshold for a confidence vote – 54 MPs – may be reached as soon as this week.
The MPs must also face up to some important tactical issues. The first and most immediate is whether to hold off until after the 23 June byelections in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton. If both are lost, the chances of ousting Mr Johnson may increase, but this could become just another excuse for delay.
The second issue is whether a damaged prime minister who scrapes through a confidence vote, as Mr Johnson may, but who is determined to carry on, which he is, might prove to be the worst of all worlds for the party. The third is whether, in the event of Mr Johnson losing the confidence vote, the party could unite behind any of the likely leadership candidates and win a general election.
None of these is simple to answer. Yet the underlying realities will not go away. These are that Mr Johnson has lost his authority to govern and that the country needs a new government to tackle its myriad difficulties. From the point of view of the Tory party’s opponents, the longer all this continues the better. From the Tory perspective, it is surely time for its MPs to put up or shut up.
