Conservatives are facing “obliteration” at the general election and a decade in the wilderness unless they dump Boris Johnson as leader, a former major donor to the party has warned.
Financier Michael Tory, who has given the party more than £300,000 since 2010, said he would not make further donations unless Mr Johnson is removed.
His comments come as speculation mounts that a vote of confidence in the prime minister could be announced as early as Monday, with a ballot of Tory MPs in the following days.
The chair of the backbench 1922 Committee, Sir Graham Brady, must call a vote if 54 Tory MPs send him a letter requesting one.
Some 17 MPs have stated publicly that they have submitted letters, but more than 40 have called for Mr Johnson to go. Some believe that Sir Graham already has the necessary 54 letters but is waiting for the Platinum Jubilee weekend to end before announcing it. The PM must win the support of 180 MPs - more than half the 359-strong parliamentary party - to hold onto his job.
Mr Tory told the Sunday Times: “I was a loyal and long-standing donor but can only resume donating if there is an immediate change of leadership.
“And it has to be now, before it’s too late to avoid a richly deserved obliteration at the next election, followed probably by a decade in opposition.”
But transport secretary Grant Shapps said that he did not expect a vote in the coming week, but said he believed Mr Johnson would win it if it came.
Mr Shapps played down the significance of the booing directed at the prime minister by crowds at the Platinum Jubilee thanksgiving service on Friday.
Recalling the jeers faced by George Osborne at the Paralympics in 2012, he told BBC1’s Sunday Morning: “I remember booing going on at the Olympic Games in 2012 and it didn't mean that the election wasn't won in 2015.”
Mr Shapps added: “Politicians by their very nature ... will of course divide opinion. That's what politicians do. That's because we argue about different sides of issues.
“You will always get people who approve and people who disapprove. That's the point of a free and democratic society. It's also the point of having a monarchy, where everyone can join together and support the Queen regardless of their politics. Frankly, I think demonstrates one of the beauties of our system.”
Elections guru Prof Sir John Curtice, of Strathclyde University, said that recent polling showed that around three-quarters of voters – including half of those who voted Conservative in 2019 – believe Mr Johnson lied about lockdown-busting parties at 10 Downing Street.
Prof Curtice was speaking as a poll suggested that Conservatives trail Labour by 20 points in Wakefield ahead of the 23 June by-election which will be seen as a test of Mr Johnson’s popularity in the Red Wall seats in the Midlands and North won by Tories in 2019.
He said that six months on from the first Partygate stories, there was no sign of public anger on the issue abating.
Prof Curtice said that the Conservatives now have to accept that the PM’s efforts to explain and justify what happened in No 10 have failed.
“It is now very, very unlikely that the public are ever going to come to conclusion that what the prime minister did during lockdown with the various gatherings was reasonable, let alone within the law,” he told Times Radio.
“Therefore, the question the party has to face is what it should do about it.”
It was possible that the public may have moved on from Partygate by the time of the election likely to take place in 2024, said Prof Curtice.
But he added: “The alternative, of course, is that actually the brand of the Conservative Party - let alone the popularity of the prime minister - has been so severely damaged by this that we are now talking about whether or not he will have credibility on other issues, given the public don’t believe him on this one. Therefore, they might come to conclusion he should be replaced.”
Prof Curtice said: “The interesting thing here is I think it’s the first time that we’ve had a situation where the prime minister’s personal actions and ethics are being questioned. We don’t really have a historical precedent for where it will go.
“Around a half of Conservative voters think he wasn’t telling the truth, but it’s not as many as half of Conservative voters think he should resign. It is somewhere between a quarter and two fifths.
“Undoubtedly there are voters out there who say he delivered Brexit, he got the calls right on Covid, he’s dealing with the cost-of-living crisis, we shouldn’t get rid of the prime minister during Ukraine - all those considerations are there.
“The problem is - at the moment at least - there is at least a minority of people who voted for the Conservative Party who say ‘This is a deal breaker for me, and therefore I am not willing to vote for the Conservatives again, so long as Boris Johnson is leader’.
“If you lose a quarter of the people who voted for you last time, then you’re in trouble.
“Actually, at the moment if you look at the level of support for the Conservatives amongst Leave voters, it looks as though the party has lost the support of around one in three of those people who voted for Boris Johnson over Brexit back in 2019. That’s an awful lot of territory to regain amongst the people who were essential to delivering Boris Johnson his super-majority in 2019.”
