MPs arrived sore-headed and sleepless into Westminster on Wednesday, many anticipating an imminent vote of no confidence in the prime minister. The opposition were already giddy. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” one Labour MP said. “But my office manager joked: ‘If you don’t go to sleep, Graham Brady won’t come.’”
Some rebel Tories had stayed late at the members-only Carlton Club, suspicious of being spied on amid their plotting. An indignant Nadine Dorries, who was there with her special adviser, said it was only for a long-planned work dinner. Other veteran MPs – no friends of Boris Johnson – had stayed up late too, but in their case to call colleagues to urge caution.
“We must hold our nerve,” one longtime critic of the prime minister said. “There is nothing worse than a wounded prime minister limping on. If these greenhorns trigger it too soon then he will be able to argue – quite rightly – that the inquiry [by the civil servant Sue Gray into Downing Street parties] has not been heard and that he deserves to stay on.”
Another said of those submitting no-confidence letters: “They’re jumping sub judice. It’s impossible to control this.”
For the first time in months, the target of Tory anger on Wednesday morning was not their leader but their newly elected colleagues who convened for the so-called pork pie putsch in Alicia Kearns’s office on Tuesday night. Even those who agreed with their assessment seemed affronted.
“These people are clearly getting a lot of aggro in their inboxes and they don’t know how to handle it [but] lots of those constituents would never vote for them,” one MP said. “They’re like captives who haven’t been properly socialised [during the pandemic]; they think they should all be ministers already.”
Another former minister said: “My letter hasn’t gone in yet but it might after Sue Gray submits. Until then I don’t have a case to put to other colleagues. The last thing any of us want to do is look like an idiot, like Jacob Rees-Mogg did when he waved that letter about Theresa May.”
Some of the anger was aimed at Kearns directly. “It’s all very well for her, she’s got a 20,000 majority,” a fellow 2019-intake MP said. “It’s obviously pissed a lot of people off.”
In Keir Starmer’s office, aides were also jumpy about whether their big reveal – the defecting Tory MP Christian Wakeford – would hold his nerve. Wakeford had met Starmer in his office on Monday night as his fellow MPs also met in secret to plot Johnson’s end.
The defection news dropped as MPs squeezed through the chamber doors into the House of Commons before Boris Johnson’s painful hour of prime minister’s questions. Wakeford was crossing the floor.
“CHRISTIAN?!” MP Anthony Browne messaged in the 2019ers’ WhatsApp group. Before things could deteriorate, Aaron Bell was swift, removing Wakeford from the group.
In the aftermath, after Wakeford sat behind the Labour leader in his union jack face mask, whips said he had become agitated after a difficult conversation on Tuesday night, his Bury South seat under threat from boundary changes. “It would have been a straight fight with Dehenna Davison,” one MP said of the fellow 2019er. “Often this is self-interest at the end of the day.”
Johnson’s allies, including a full-throated Conor Burns, roared in PMQs to give him support. Other 2019 MPs also yelled enthusiastically, Jacob Young slapping his thighs and jabbing fingers at Starmer. May, the most recent leader to understand the pressure Johnson is now under, sat stony-faced. At one point, Johnson was so animated that Rishi Sunak tugged the prime minister’s jacket to get him to sit back down.
But the defection was not the only moment of drama in PMQs. David Davis, standing slowly to savour the moment and sounding at first as if he might defend Johnson instead boomed: “In the name of God, go!” at a blindsided prime minister.
But as with Wakeford, it seemed to have a galvanising effect in the opposite direction to the one intended.
“Cromwell!” one frontbencher snarled at Davis as he left. No colleagues patted him on the back or nodded in approval after he gave his verdict.
Davis told assembled journalists that Johnson’s interview on Tuesday, where he appeared to suggest he did not understand his own rules, had tipped him over the edge. But, he caveated, he himself had not put in a no-confidence letter.
A cabinet minister hurrying past said that Wakeford’s departure had been an unlikely boost to Johnson. “It’s brought us together, if anything.” Asked about Davis, they shrugged: so what? Jonathan Gullis, the 2019 MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, claimed colleagues were now being persuaded to withdraw letters, though he could not name any.
Passing a similar discussion between Tory MPs in the next corridor, a Labour MP shrugged: “Do you think we give a fuck if he goes today or at the next election? The longer the better.”
But two ministers said they were cautious about accepting the spin from whips that Wakeford had saved Johnson. “He’s not out of the woods and he certainly doesn’t have carte blanche from me. It’s a shitshow in there [No 10]. We are heading to losing a lot of good councillors in May.”
Another MP said the last 48 hours had convinced Johnson he needed a proper operation to defend him – a shadow whipping operation led by his old friend Burns. “He really did not take this seriously until Conor said, look boss, do you want me to make some calls? But now they are at least out there, making the argument.”
At the very least, Johnson is at the mercy of his MPs’ demands, many agitating for a cabinet reshuffle and the cancellation of the national insurance rise.
But one senior Tory said the last 12 hours had also given some colleagues pause for thought about the alternatives to Johnson. “Who are we going to put in his place? There is no plan. When we spent 12 months discussing Theresa May’s demise, you don’t do it overnight, there was a strategy and an obvious successor. And it wasn’t because we got a few nasty letters from constituents.”
Another said they were also in despair about any possible successor. “Sunak’s interview yesterday was deranged. Liz [Truss] is clearly a risk. Who is it now?”
