Johnson left too little time to engage with wavering MPs

It took just 13 hours from the announcement of a no-confidence vote in Boris Johnson’s leadership until his MPs delivered their verdict. At a hastily arranged appearance before the cameras outside Parliament shortly after 8am, 1922 Committee chairman Graham Brady announced there would be a vote between 6pm and 8pm that evening. More than 54 MPs had written in to say they no longer had confidence in Johnson, among them Jesse Norman, who also wrote to the prime minister.

Norman criticised a number of government policies, including the planned unilateral scrapping of the Northern Ireland protocol, which he described as “economically very damaging, politically foolhardy and almost certainly illegal”.

He said neither the Conservative party nor the country could afford to squander the next two years in endless debates about the prime minister’s leadership.

“For you to prolong this charade by remaining in office not only insults the electorate and the tens of thousands of people who support, volunteer, represent and campaign for our party; it makes a decisive change of government at the election much more likely,” he wrote.

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Within minutes of Brady’s announcement, the first cabinet ministers tweeted out their support for the prime minister and a few MPs announced they would vote against him. John Penrose resigned as the government’s anti-corruption tsar, saying he could not back Johnson; and Jeremy Hunt, who came second in the 2019 leadership contest, said he would be voting for change.

In the morning, both sides agreed that Johnson would win the vote and the only question was about the size of the margin. But as lunchtime approached, and only about 100 of the 180 MPs the prime minister needed had publicly endorsed him, rebels noted that when Theresa May faced a similar vote in 2018, a majority of Conservative MPs had publicly backed her by 1pm.

Johnson and his allies, who knew on Sunday that Brady had received 54 letters, deliberately chose to have a vote as soon as possible to prevent the rebels from organising. But as the day progressed, it became clear the prime minister had left himself too little time to engage individually with wavering MPs.

At 4pm, he was greeted with the standard banging of desks when he addressed his MPs, urging them to take the chance to end the “media-driven focus” on the party leadership.

“If you will give me your support tonight, we have the chance to stop talking about ourselves and start talking exclusively about what we are doing for the people of this country and instead of getting into some hellish groundhog-day debate about the merit of belonging to the single market, relitigating questions that we settled two and a half years ago, we can get on, we can deliver and we can unite,” he said.

“Let us refuse to dance to the tune of the media, let us refuse to gratify our opponents by turning in on ourselves.”

The prime minister cheered his MPs by promising tax cuts but, when asked about his attendance at leaving parties in Downing Street during lockdown, he said: “I’d do it again.” Shortly afterwards, a senior party source asked reporters outside the meeting, “Is there anyone here who hasn’t got pissed in their lives?”

Conservative MPs queued quietly to vote in the evening, leaving their phones at the door. May arrived in a ball gown and sequinned heels on her way to a jubilee dinner.

Brady announced the result at 9pm in Committee Room 14 – and there were gasps when he said Johnson had won just 211 votes to 148, a smaller proportion than May won in 2018.