Johnson losing friends fast

A silent majority of MPs won’t hesitate to oust the embattled prime minister if they think his survival will cost them their seats, says

Tory MPs, fearful of the bloodletting a leadership contest would bring, may decide to stay their hand.

BORIS JOHNSON’S fiercest critics and most ardent supporters tend to agree on one thing: the usual rules of political gravity don’t apply to him.

That’s why it is these two ends of the Tory spectrum that are much more likely to think he’ll survive the No 10 party scandal than those MPs who don’t have a particularly strong opinion of him – they’re just waiting nervously to see what happens next.

The scenario where Johnson survives is fairly simple. The Gray report into parties held inside Downing St during Covid restrictions is an anticlimax, refusing to say whether he should resign or opine on whether he broke the rules (Sue Gray’s remit is more to establish the facts than to pass judgment).

If this happens, Johnson’s supporters would argue that he has apologised, changes have been made to Downing St, and that those most responsible will now leave their jobs, and so it is time to move on.

In a preview of this argument, a minister told me last week that it’s ‘‘hardly Watergate’’, and that a 25-minute visit to a party does not meet the bar for removing a leader from office for wrongdoing.

Tory MPs, fearful of the bloodletting a leadership contest would bring, may decide to stay their hand until local elections in May. In the meantime, other issues begin to dominate politics – cost of living, energy prices – and when the May elections come, the result can be spun as ‘‘normal mid-term blues’’.

So Johnson continues to enjoy a comfortable majority and the time that buys him.

But there is another theory,

with a less happy ending for him.

The most important reason why the usual rules of political gravity didn’t apply to Johnson when he first became prime minister was that he was not just prime minister but the tribune of Brexit. Those who opposed it wanted to see him ruined, and would attack him. Those who wanted Britain to leave the European Union tended to defend him, and dismissed any attacks as sour grapes from Remainers.

A great many Tories swallowed their doubts about him as a leader because they thought that he, and only he, would get Brexit done.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, Johnson’s most vigorous cabinet defender, has tried to revive that argument this week, pointing out that Johnson’s critics were on the other side of the Brexit debate.

But this is not having the effect that it once would have done. One of those tasked with shoring up support for Johnson among his MPs says: ‘‘This isn’t splitting on Leave/Remain lines.’’ One of the few to have actually called for him to go, William Wragg, was a Leaver.

Indeed, one of Johnson’s problems is that the most ardent Brexiteers in the parliamentary Conservative Party are not particularly enamoured of his leadership.

Many of them have fallen out with him over lockdown or tax rises. They applauded the resignation of his Brexit minister, Lord Frost, in protest at the ‘‘political direction’’ of the government.

They are frustrated that the government isn’t doing more with its hard-won Brexit freedoms. ‘‘There’s no way of telling people why we did Brexit, because we are not doing anything,’’ complains a former cabinet minister who was a key figure in Johnson’s leadership campaign.

Several Conservative MPs tell me that they are coming under pressure from their Conservative associations to be more critical of the prime minister. This is significant because during Brexit, these associations were, as a general rule, putting pressure on any MPs who had doubts about the tactics that Johnson was using to pursue his goal.

Most Tory MPs are neither Boris lovers or haters but simple Johnson pragmatists. They are prepared to put up with the chaos and drama he brings in exchange for electoral success.

It is a very transactional relationship. So when times get tough, Johnson doesn’t have a big base of personal or ideological support to fall back on.

‘‘It is inherently dangerous for any leader to base their entire relationship with their parliamentary party on the fact that they are an electoral asset. For when that goes, you have little left,’’ says one Tory with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Conservative MPs.

It is no coincidence that the most senior Tory to call for the prime minister to go is Douglas Ross, the leader of the Scottish party. He and his colleagues have long considered Johnson to be an electoral negative.

The next group that No10 should worry about is Conservative MPs in Liberal Democratfacing seats. One of them laments: ‘‘My whole election campaign will be about Boris.’’ His worry is that will make it impossible for him to win again. ‘‘We just can’t support Boris.’’

The question is how widespread this feeling becomes.

If it is contained to Scottish Tories and those with relatively small majorities over the Lib Dems, it won’t be enough to trigger a vote of no confidence. But if it spreads more widely, then Johnson will have a problem – and for him, the crucial thing is to avoid a no-confidence ballot in the first place. He would be unlikely to survive one.

If things got to that stage, most Tory MPs would consider the situation to be unsustainable and would take their cue from a Scot: Not Ross, but Macbeth: ‘‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.’’ Many regard the outcome of such a ballot as a ‘‘foregone conclusion’’.

The prime minister’s fate now hangs on two factors.

One is the polls. If more show the Conservatives falling into the 20s, and that persists after the Gray report, MPs will increasingly worry about their own seats. In these circumstances, removing Johnson would seem to be a solution to many.

The second factor is the May local elections. In March, people will start canvassing properly for the first time in two years. One minister who wants Johnson to survive admits that if activists are hit with a wall of noise about these events, MPs will take fright.

Johnson was elected Conservative leader not because MPs thought he was the best administrator the party had, but because they thought he could connect with the electorate in a way that other politicians could not. Now his fate depends on what those same voters tell their MPs.