Boris Johnson has been told by a former minister and senior Tory MP to “in the name of God, go” as he lost one of his newest MPs in a dramatic defection to Labour minutes before Prime Minister’s Questions began (PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)In France they’re calling it ‘le complot de la tourte de porc’, in Germany it’s been coined ‘der schweinefleisch-pasteten-putsch’, but in Westminster, the ‘Pork Pie Plot’ is being taken seriously.
As northern Tory MPs, from traditional Labour heartlands, elected in 2019’s landslide election turn against Boris Johnson, the PM is on the brink of a leadership challenge. More than 20 Red Wall MPs met at a secret lunch yesterday — MP for Melton, Alicia Kearns is said to be a key figure and so it’s been dubbed the “pork pie plot” — to discuss no-confidence letters needed to trigger a vote against the ailing PM. To Johnson’s enemies, it sounds delicious; to his supporters, it’s hard to stomach. One furious minister told the Times “most of them are a load of f***ing nobodies”.
That talk is the real red meat the Tories’ Red Wall 2019ers are sinking their teeth into. Some MPs, with wafer thin majorities to think of, think they’re fighting for their political lives. Others, who never expected to get into power in the first place, are happy to put principle before careerism.
In a furtive process, 54 secret letters must be handed to Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the Conservatives’ 1922 committee, to trigger a no-confidence vote. Word in Westminster is that Brady has between seven and 10, with more to follow.
What’s clear is that a feisty mob who helped flip Labour strongholds Tory Blue believe their loyalty is to their people above party — and the North feels that the ‘Big Dog’ needs to be put down. They’re called the "grey wolves" by some allies of the Prime Minister because “they were not socialised in Parliament during the pandemic”, according to Sky News.
Meet the rebels with a new cause.
Alicia Kearns
A ruthlessly ambitious newbie, Kearns, 34, was booted as a parliamentary private secretary last year and has been on the warpath ever since. In PMQs, says the Times’s sketchwriter Quentin Letts, the former civil servant “bounces up and down as though on a trampoline, such is her desire to ask a career-improving question”. In reality, the MP for Rutland and Melton is a moderate “One Nation” Tory, a relentless champion for LGBT rights and a terrorism expert who told people to “open up your second homes to refugees” as Britain yanked its troops out of Afghanistan.
She’s also a member of the China Research Group, which was set up in 2020 by Tory China hawks concerned about Beijing’s influence over the UK. A former Amnesty International activist, Kearns has now moved to the village of Langham, Rutland, from London with her husband, son and baby daughter, and fosters rescue cats. She is a fan of Thatcherite poster-girl Liz Truss, but Westminster whispers say she fancies a tilt at the top herself.
Dehenna Davison
When self-styled "nothing like a Tory" Davison was elected MP for former Labour-stronghold Bishop Auckland, she was just 25. Her millennial office is stuffed with Marvel figurines, Taylor Swift posters and a Harry Potter sign reading “Diagon Alley”. The face of Boris’s Babies also appeared on Channel 4 programme Bride and Prejudice with estranged husband John Fareham, a Tory councillor 35 years her senior.
In October, though, Davison came out as bisexual in an interview on GB News – the channel on which she hosts alongside Nigel Farage. She’s been named as a plot ringleader, despite her close friendship with Boris Johnson’s wife Carrie, branding themselves the ‘Tory Girl Squad’. No 10 is furious. Davison cites Liz Truss as a role model and co-chairs the Free Market Forum, a group of MPs and peers who aim to encourage “free market thinking”. She’s had to vehemently distance herself from English Defence League and Britain First activists she was pictured with at a Brexit party in 2016.
Christian Wakeford
A ‘Red Wall Assassin’ or ‘Red Wall Traitor’, depending on whether you read the Daily Mail online or in print, Bury South MP Wakeford, 37, today defected from the Conservatives to Labour, telling Boris Johnson that “you and the Conservative Party as a whole have shown themselves incapable of offering the leadership and government this country deserves” (words echoed by Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs, word for word, an hour later).
The former insurance broker says he’s been flirting with defecting for months, but Partygate pushed him over the edge. Last year, he approached Owen Paterson and called him a “c***” after the Government instructed MPs to vote to change parliamentary lobbying rules. He explained to Times Radio: “It’s been a mixture of quite a lot of anger and codeine. I clearly have a broken ankle at the moment. It’s not the best mix.” Before he won his Bury South seat in 2019, he was an insurance broker. Clearly, he’s concluded the PM is a risk not worth covering for.
Mark Logan
“Let’s not beat around the bush,” tweeted Bolton North-East’s Conservative MP and former diplomat Mark Logan, 37, on Monday. “I, my constituents, this country, expect more”. The Owen Paterson sleaze scandal is said to have turned his head. Logan abstained on the vote to reform lobbying laws. The decision by Boris Johnson to try to save Paterson’s skin and prevent him being suspended has been seen by many as the turning point of his premiership.
When he’s not rebelling, he’s a vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on China, a group of MPs formed after the handover of Hong Kong to engage with China. “Politically British and culturally an Ulster or Irishman”, he was born in County Antrim, in Northern Ireland. A fluent Mandarin speaker, he has worked across the globe, including 10 years in China, and also for the Foreign Office.
Lee Anderson
Anderson, 55, became the butt of jokes nationwide after vowing not to watch England’s Three Lions at Euro 2020 last summer to protest the national team taking the knee. The Ashfield MP and “massive England supporter” said “I don’t like the taking the knee business” because it is associated with the Black Lives Matter political movement. Labour launched a petition to keep him away from matches as Gareth Southgate’s team reached the final. “Sulky Tory MP Lee Anderson hasn’t been cheering England’s heroes like the rest of us because he doesn’t like their simple act of anti-racism,” the petition said. “As Anderson was born in 1967, we think maybe he’s been the jinx all along.”
But the opposition is cheering Anderson on now: the son of a coal miner, a miner for 12 years himself and a member of Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers, he has strong words for Johnson: “Personally, I would not back anyone who has knowingly done wrong.”
Antony Higginbotham
The Burnley MP, 32, who has a tiny majority of 1,352 to worry about, said on Facebook this week: “I am as angry and disappointed as you are.” He’s quite used to mixing it up. He won a head-to-head final against Warrington South MP Andy Carter in the hotly-contested cocktail mixing competition at the Conservative Party Conference last year (to be fair, the lid came lose on Carter’s cocktail shaker, drenching him with his cream soda-flavoured gin drink). The openly gay representative attended a state school in Lancashire and later worked in the NHS before being elected.
