Prime Ministers are usually the very last to realise their time is up. Thatcher, Blair and May were all forced out by long-running coups. Major and Brown were despatched by electorates. David Cameron is alone in recent times for reading the political runes and getting out ahead of the inevitable firing squad.
None of this should surprise us. Prime ministers are supremely competitive beings and imbued with a grossly over-inflated sense of their own immortality. Which is why they make it to prime minister and we don’t.
So what of the current incumbent? Is the fat lady about to sing again for Boris Johnson?
Westminster is feverous today. Ask any 10 Tory MPs, and they will give you 10 different answers. What all agree on though is there is a huge abyss between where Johnson is now and safety. One Cabinet minister who is among the most loyal to Johnson even describes his task over the next weeks as “threading a needle in a hurricane”.
Such is the anger at him, especially among the very large 2019 intake of Tory MPs, he has to get pretty much everything right now.
And the downsides against Johnson remain huge. After months of ostrich-like head in the sand denials, the PM’s public utterances are getting no better. Yesterday’s “how was I supposed to know the rules that I set” was breathtakingly inept. He is also now visibly panicking, shovelling out red meat new policy to try to please Tory backbenchers as fast as he can cook it up, the latest being today’s announcement on ending Plan B Covid restrictions a week earlier than planned.
Cabinet Office mandarin Sue Gray may also yet unearth a killer fact in her report we don’t know. And what more is Dominic Cummings holding back in his blood feud with the PM? Yet it is Johnson’s notoriously unfaithful relationship with the truth that his allies see as his greatest risk. Purposely misleading either Parliament or Sue Gray would undoubtedly be terminal for him.
Yet despite all the negatives, more experienced Johnson allies around the Cabinet table are telling him he can — albeit very uncomfortably — ride this one out. Several I’ve spoken to are more optimistic than they were during the white hot fury of last week.
They argue that Gray is unlikely to pin anything fresh on Johnson personally. Contrary to Boris’s fun-loving image, he actually isn’t that keen on a party. A loner by heart, he much prefers disappearing back to his study to keep on working, or going back up to the flat to shout at the TV news with Carrie.
They make three other strong arguments. The first is, there isn’t just no agreed successor, but none of the serious contenders is credible at the moment. One senior minister tells me that even the frontrunner Rishi Sunak, who is not a risk-taker by nature, has intimated to Cabinet colleagues that he’s “not ready” for the job yet.
The second, the Johnson loyalists argue, is that it actually takes an awful lot to reach the bar of 54 Tory MPs needed to force a confidence vote in the Tory leader. “Have you ever tried regicide? It’s actually really hard. It just feels grubby,” says one veteran Tory plotter.
Third, even if the wonderfully named Pork Pie Plotters do force a vote, they then have to win it, or he’s safe for a whole year. That means a regicide army of 180 Tory MPs at a minimum.
Some in the Cabinet are also now beginning to think Johnson’s most powerful ally of all is outside of Westminster: one Vladimir Putin. I understand senior Cabinet ministers held a Cobra meeting on Monday about Ukraine, and are now quietly holding them regularly. The intelligence suggests Russia is indeed on the brink of an invasion.
No western country could dream of changing their leader, no matter what they’ve done, while a land war in Europe is raging.
Partygate is far from over, and the next seven days will be the most dangerous politically that Johnson has ever faced. The honest truth is nobody knows if he will survive them, so don’t listen to anybody who tries to tell you otherwise.
I won’t call it either, beyond giving him 50/50 to survive the month. It’s a bad place to be though, if your only surety lies in the hands of an aggrandising Russian tyrant.
In other news...
Maybe the BBC could do with a trim
A blood-curdling warning from BBC Director General Tim Davie yesterday. There will be “less service and less [sic] programmes” if the licence fee goes.
Is this really the end of civilisation as we know it? Or might it be better if the BBC wasn’t quite as big and do as much? The Beeb has a 32 per cent share of all TV that is watched, and a thumping great 50.9 per cent share of all radio listening.
I gently point out that the Competition and Markets Authority define a monopoly as any firm with more than 25 per cent of its industry’s sales.
Blair finally accepts he’s not very loved
Tony Blair famously didn’t know how to use a mobile phone until the day he left Downing Street. After interviewing him this week, I can testify that Labour’s longest serving prime minister is still no tech wizard.
The start of our virtual conversation was delayed as he battled to work out why his Zoom camera didn’t work. Some minutes later, newly knighted Sir Tony (“I’m perfectly happy with Tony as a matter of fact”) finally alighted on the cloth that wife Cherie had hung over the desktop’s camera.
He can also still pull off a powerful argument. Sir Tony’s clarity of message on the need to expand the use of Covid passports to push up vaccination rates contrasts with Sir Keir Starmer’s daily Covid fence-sitting.
But I was struck by what had changed about the man, left, famed in office for chasing every single vote. When I brought up the 1.2 million-signature petition calling for his knighthood to be annulled, he wasn’t upset. Just resigned.
“There will always be people who detest me, for various reasons,” he sighed. “This is just what happens.” Perhaps happiness in politics is finally accepting you can’t please all of the people all of the time.
Tom Newton Dunn is a presenter on Times Radio
What do you think the future holds for Boris Johnson? Let us know in the comments below.
