It seems to be an unwritten rule of the Prime Ministers Club that a former one will not directly call for the resignation of the present one. Theresa May has mercilessly skewered Boris Johnson in the Commons over partygate, but she has refrained from telling him to walk. Sir John Major delivered a powerful speech on Thursday in which he listed all the reasons why Mr Johnson is unfit to remain in office. He “broke lockdown laws”, makes “brazen excuses”, sends his ministers out to “defend the indefensible” and asks the public “to believe the unbelievable”. “Our reputation is being shredded,” declared Sir John and made the vital argument: “Deliberate lies to parliament have been fatal to political careers and must always be so.” This was punchy, pungent and potent. And it was all true. Sir John sounded like he was building up to a clarion call to Conservative MPs to remove Mr Johnson, but then his trumpet went mute.
As for David Cameron, we have not heard a peep from him about partygate. In his case, this is probably wise. After the Greensill affair, he is not best placed to get up on his hind trotters to give a lecture on the importance of integrity in public life.
Eager to wound, but unwilling to strike, Sir John and Mrs May reflect the state of the party they once led. It is simultaneously infuriated and paralysed by a scandal that is also a crisis. It is easy to find Tory MPs who are seething about their leader and increasingly hard to find ones who think that Mr Johnson will lead them into the next general election. But it is also hard to find Tories who speak with any conviction about when he will be evicted from Number 10 and easy to find MPs full of excuses for not taking action just yet. This leaves the Tory party and with it the government, marooned in no man’s land.
Purely as a matter of self-interest, Tories have clear incentives to dispatch Mr Johnson without delay. His poll ratings are plumbing depths from which leaders almost never recover. The polls also suggest that public fury is dragging his party down with him. “It’s definitely contaminating the wider Tory brand and that’s what’s got so many of us worried,” remarks one Conservative MP.
Waiting to see if the polls are verified by a heavy defeat at the May local elections “puts our councillors in the executioner’s tumbril”, as another MP puts it. Key party bankrollers are snapping shut their cheque books. One Tory reports being at a recent dinner with four major and longstanding donors, all of whom were “in despair”. The prime minister is solely focused on trying to save his own skin. He always governed from one week to the next. Now he governs from one day to the next. Government policy is not being designed with a regard to the national interest, or even being shaped around what might be popular with voters. Those involved with “Operation Save Big Dog” admit that the only people who matter to Mr Johnson at the moment are Conservative MPs. Decision-making is entirely driven by his need to appease this Tory faction and placate that Tory groupuscule. Putting it about that there will be a big reshuffle in the summer is a crude ruse to seduce the more gullible careerist parliamentarians. Explaining the inertia of his colleagues, one Tory MP says: “Some are thinking he’s promised me that I’ll be Minister for Paperclips, so why don’t I give him one last chance to make me Minister for Paperclips?”
Other Tory backbenchers relish having the prime minister in a prostrate position and desperate to please them. Yet this is not sustainable because different gangs of backbench hostage-takers are demanding conflicting things from Number 10. The more slabs of “red meat” he flings in the direction of ravenous rightwingers, the more he aggravates moderate Tories. One Conservative MP reports: “The phrase you hear a lot of in the tearoom is ‘we can’t go on like this’.” So I asked him whether he had submitted a letter calling for a confidence vote. He confessed that he hadn’t, before arguing that it was too early to move. He was choosing to go on like this.
A relatively small number have put in letters and announced it to the world. Others have secretly lodged a missive with Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee. Then there is the substantial group who want Mr Johnson gone, but are hesitant about acting. There are even cases of Tory MPs who have publicly called for the prime minister’s resignation, but not yet written a letter. They privately say that they are holding back until they are more confident that they can cleanly eject him from Number 10. While it only takes 54 Tory MPs to compel a confidence vote, there is a larger and more important figure. That is 181, the minimum number of votes against him needed to ensure his defenestration. “One of the worst outcomes is that we get a confidence vote and he narrowly survives it,” says one senior Tory. “If he wins by just one vote, he will stay. Anyone else would walk, but he will stay.”
The majority of Tory MPs are neither dedicated to his removal nor committed to his survival as of today. “Never forget, most of my colleagues are sheep,” remarks one veteran backbencher. The mob sways this way and that, depending on the movement of the polls, news events, the contents of their inboxes and postbags, the media and what activists and fellow MPs are saying to them. Some who have not declared a position say they will spend the 10-day parliamentary recess, which began on Thursday, sampling opinion among constituents and local party members, which is one way of ducking their responsibility to make a decision. Number 10 has just confirmed that Mr Johnson is one of around 50 denizens of Downing Street to receive an investigatory questionnaire from the police.
Many Tory MPs justify their vacillation by saying that they are waiting on the detectives and the publication of the unexpurgated version of Sue Gray’s report. Another shocking revelation before then might finally be the trigger for the sheep to stampede against the Tory leader. Cynic that he is, he will be thinking that he has a chance of riding out this scandal because something will turn up to his advantage or his MPs will eventually get bored with partygate.
While Tory MPs dither, the behaviour of the prime minister and his understrappers becomes more shameless. Some of his supporters are contending that if he does not get a fine from the police, he will have been exonerated and can carry on in office, as if the many false denials to parliament are of no consequence.
Around the time that Dame Cressida Dick was announcing her departure from Scotland Yard, someone close to the prime minister made the outrageous claim that the Met ought to give Mr Johnson a free pass over lockdown-busting. A “senior ally” of the prime minister contended that the police have “a degree of discretion” and implied that they should let him off because you can’t have the “Metropolitan police deciding who the prime minister is”. It is no part of the Met’s remit to consider the political consequences, one way or another. The job of the police is to apply the law without fear or favour and maintain the principle, so often forgotten at Mr Johnson’s Number 10, that no one is above it.
“If he gets a ticket from the Met, the game is up,” says one Conservative MP whose view is representative of many others. Yet some around Mr Johnson are pushing the line that he is entitled to carry on as prime minister even if he is fined for breaching the restrictions that he imposed on the rest of the country.
The Conservative party will pay a penalty for its prevarication – indeed, it already is paying. The longer this goes on, the more this looks like a lawless government that thinks rules are for everyone else and the deeper the reputational damage sustained by the Tories. “A month ago, this was hurting only Boris,” says one former cabinet minister. “Now, it is hurting the whole government. The more they put up ministers to make a defence of him, the more it damages all of us.”
So I asked this senior Tory whether he had put in a confidence letter and discovered he was another who hadn’t done so yet. The government will remain trapped in this nightmare no man’s land, and the country with it, until Tory MPs cease equivocating and a critical mass of them decide to bring things to a head.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
