the times | Saturday December 18 2021 7News
proved Tories’ undoing
which would only last 30 days. Many
voters said they were outraged at his
second income. Karen Tait, 50, a
homoeopath, was also annoyed about
Christmas parties in No 10.
“I voted for Owen Paterson last time
but anyone who thinks they deserve
£100,000 in fees alongside an MP’s
salary is just having a laugh. I’ve voted
for Helen Morgan because she’s local,
young and seems genuinely interested
in the people she’s going to represent.”
Alan Truesdale, 46, a delivery driver,
said he had voted Lib Dem after voting
Tory. He said: “I think the breaking
point for the Conservatives here was
Owen Patterson. And then the fact that
the party tried to save him rather than
immediately getting rid of him.”
John, 58, a Green voter, and his wife
Rachel, 57, a swing voter, said they voted
tactically to make sure Neil Shastri
Hurst, the Tory candidate, did not win.
“It’s ridiculous that the Tories
thought they would win by putting up
someone from Birmingham in this con-stituency,” John, an environmental
consultant, said.
In the Bailey Head pub, Denzil
Owen, 53, was taking in the news of the
by-election as he sipped a pint of bitter.
“I have never voted before, except for
the Conservatives once in the past.” He
said he “voted for change”.
The landlord, Duncan Borrowman,
61, said he voted Lib Dem after being
outraged at having to shut his venue
while Downing Street held parties. He
said: “My pub was closed, then the out-
door eating, curfews — the whole time
Downing Street were laughing at us.”
There was some support for the gov-
ernment however.
Simon Walker, 48, a labourer, and
one of 12,000 voters who stood by the
Conservatives, said: “I know Boris is
going through a rough patch at the mo-
ment but I still think he is the man for
the job. I think he’s been advised badly
but he still has the best interests of
people at heart. Boris deserves time to
put things right.”Boris Johnson knew it was coming.
Ever since revelations of a party in
Downing Street during lockdown
emerged, ministers and aides had been
grimly telling him that the Tories would
lose in North Shropshire. The ground
war in the constituency, they told him,
had become irrelevant.
As Tory activists knocked on doors,
they discovered that many of their trad-
itional voters were furious with the gov-
ernment on a multitude of fronts.
Claims about parties, U-turns, sleaze
and the prime minister’s chaotic speech
to business leaders in which he paid
homage to Peppa Pig World all cropped
up with alarming frequency. So when
the “political earthquake” happened in
the early hours of yesterday, with the
Liberal Democrats securing one of the
biggest swings in history, the govern-
ment made an early appeal for unity.
Just after 6am Conservative MPs’
phones across the country were pinged
with a message from the Tory whips
office. The result in North Shropshire,
party managers conceded, was “very
difficult” and there would be a lot of
“media interest” in the result.
The message urged colleagues to stay
off the airwaves, warning them that a
“running commentary” would be un-
helpful. It clearly did not get through to
Sir Roger Gale. The Tory MP for North
Thanet, a long-term critic of Johnson,
went on the media to say that the prime
minister is on “last orders”, adding:
“One more strike and he’s out.”
The ferocity of Gale’s response is not
shared by many of his colleagues but
there is widespread acknowledgment
that something needs to change.
“We’re in the endgame,” one senior To-
ry said. “It’s got that whole feeling that
something’s dying. The polling will get
worse. It feels like a turning point.”
Ministers believe that while the mid-
dle of the pandemic is not the time for
a leadership challenge, one is coming,
possibly as soon as the summer.
Rivals including Liz Truss, the for-
eign secretary, Rishi Sunak, the chan-
cellor, and Jeremy Hunt, the former
health secretary, are all said to be cir-
cling. Johnson, they say, has a brief
window in which he can salvage his
reputation.
“It’s lovely to see Roger Gale display-
ing the same loyalty to Boris Johnson as
he did to Margaret Thatcher,” one min-
ister said. “It is entirely fixable. If the
prime minister wants to fix it. The bor-
ing solution is a period of quiet, compe-
tent, sustained delivery in government.
That’s the best thing to calm things
down.”
One Conservative strategist said
Johnson was in no immediate danger
but that would change if the party was
still lagging in the polls going into the
summer. “That is the real danger point
for him,” they said. “If he can’t reverse
things in the new year going into theMPs warn embattled Johnson
News
Leadership rivals circle and
allies batten down hatches
spring then MPs are going to start seri-
ously asking whether he is the right
person to lead them into the next
election.”
A senior Tory MP said: “People will
take a cold, hard look at their majorities
and thinking to themselves — can he
win this for me?” Johnson’s defenders
argue that too many MPs lack an insti-
tutional memory.
Mid-term blues with by-election
losses to the Liberal Democrats were a
staple of both Margaret Thatcher and
Tony Blair’s premierships.
One cabinet minister referred to
leading Covid rebels as “grumpy men in
suits”. “Regicide is in their DNA, they
can’t help themselves,” the minister
said. “Whoever’s leader won’t be good
enough for them because they think
they are better. They are disenfran-
chised and bitter.”
The prime minister, they said, finds
himself sandwiched between two
groups of MPs — Brexiteers who are
“Ukippers in sheep’s clothing” and Re-
mainers who are still plotting to remove
him. “He has two packs hunting him
down,” they said. “Nothing he does will
satisfy either.”
Even the loyalist cabinet minister,
however, believes there needs to be
change, particularly in the whips’ office
which is in “freefall”. The prime minis-
ter, they argue, needs a “hard man” who
can stand up to him and tell him when
he has made mistakes.
Another minister said: “The whips’
office needs an overhaul. They were
briefing confidently last week that the
numbers of rebels were going down
when they were going up.
“He categorically needs a new chief.
[Mark] Spencer is so disengaged it is un-
believable. But he survived at the re-
shuffle because Boris took the view that
having a few half-dead bodies between
him and his assassins is quite helpful.
Once you start taking out the problems
around you, people start pointing the
finger at you.”
The whipping operation, said a
former cabinet minister, has become a
WhatsApp operation. “You’ll get a mes-
sage at the weekend saying, ‘Will you be
supporting the government in all the
votes next week?’ “There are far fewer
conversations than in the past and the
whips are picking up problems much
too late.”
Another former minister said: “I
do think the WhatsAppification
of politics has got huge down-
sides. The whips are not talking
to colleagues like they did in
the past. That is leading to mis-
takes.”
One government source,
however, said that blaming
the whips was “delusional”.
“The whips can only work
with what they’re
given.They don’t make
the sausages. That is
what the government
does. If the sausages
are shit it should not
be a surprise that the
whips can’t sell them.”
Others point to thedysfunction in Downing Street, sug-
gesting it is also ripe for a shake-up.
However, a senior Tory MP pointed out
that several key aides are friends of
Carrie Johnson, the prime minister’s
wife. “The issue of Carrie is coming up
in the tearoom,” they said. “If he wants
to change his top team he may find it
difficult.”
Another cabinet minister said
Downing Street’s attitude needed to
change if not its personnel. “My worry
is if you get rid of one person in No 10
who thinks they’re frightfully clever
and replace them with another fright-
fully clever person it won’t actually
make much difference,” they said. “It’s
the overall attitude that needs to
change.”
A senior Conservative said another
reset would not resolve the issues.
“How many resets have we had now?
[Johnson] is the fundamental problem.
He has to understand that and want to
change,” they said. “The time for him to
change was a year ago.”
The prime minister made clear yes-
terday that he does not view “fixing”
the management of his government as
his priority but is instead focused on
Omicron.
Allies suggest that coronavirus, once
Johnson’s biggest weakness, could once
again help to salvage his reputation.
The prime ministr, however, has taken
a gamble. By betting that a turbo-
charged booster campaign will blunt
the Omicron wave without the need for
further lockdown restrictions he has
put himself at odds with the caution of
advisers like Chris Whitty, the chief
medical officer for England.
They have told Johnson he might be
right but there is not enough evidence
to make that decision.
If his gamble goes wrong then hospi-
tals could become overwhelmed in the
new year as Christmas Day becomes a
super-spreader event with the young
carrying Omicron across the country
and infecting their elderly relatives.
“A 1 per cent hospitalisation rate from
this variant will topple the NHS, so it’s
a hell of a gamble to take,” one govern-
ment figure said. “The point is that Om-
icron results in much less than 1 per
cent hospitalisation because of boost-
ers.” A Whitehall source added: “It’s
bad. The NHS is probably going to col-
lapse.”
Whitty is more worried now
than he was in March 2020
when the first lockdown was
announced.
“People just don’t under-
stand the interplay of se-
verity and transmissibili-
ty,” a source said. “It’s like
that old adage, ‘Would
you prefer to fight
one duck the size
of an elephant, or
100 elephants
the size of a
duck’.”
The problem
for Johnson is
that, unlike his
wider political
travails,
having taken a
gamble on
Omicron, all
he can do now
is wait.A stormy week brings
more infighting among
Tories, Steven Swinford,
Oliver Wright,
Henry Zeffman and
Matt Dathan report
LEON NEAL/GETTY IMAGESHelen Morgan’s
win in North
Shropshire stunned
the Conservatives