The Times - UK (2022-06-08)

8 2GM Wednesday June 8 2022 | the times

News

Conservative rebels are determined to
change the party’s leadership rules and
force another vote on Boris Johnson’s
leadership within months.
Leading figures among the 148 MPs
who voted for a new leader on Monday
said they did not believe the prime
minister should be afforded the usual
year-long period of immunity from a
further challenge.
The rule protecting Johnson until
next June can be changed by a simple
majority of officers of the 1922 Commit-
tee of Conservative backbenchers.
There are 18 officers on the committee.
“There is a majority of 1922 officers
who will agree to change the rules
when the time is right,” said one influ-
ential opponent of Johnson, adding
that they expected the change before
the party’s annual conference in Octo-
ber. “If we let him get to conference, he
will effectively launch the election
campaign and people will feel it’s too
late,” the MP said.
Another rebel said they wanted a
new confidence vote straight after a
pair of by-elections later this month.
Conservative MPs widely expect their
party to lose in both Wakefield and
Tiverton & Honiton. Wakefield is an
archetypal red wall seat, which flipped
to the Conservatives in 2019, whereas
Tiverton & Honiton has been Conserv-
ative since universal suffrage.
A complicating factor in any attempt
to change the rules is that elections for
the 1922 Committee’s executive are
likely in the coming weeks. Officers of
the 1922 are braced for Downing Street
to attempt to replace them with loyal-
ists, though crucially only backbench-
ers are able to vote in 1922 elections.
Not all Johnson’s opponents support
a change to the rules. David Davis, the
former Brexit secretary who called for
Johnson to resign in January, said the
confidence vote had produced “poss-
ibly the worst outcome, neither decisive
nor supportive”, adding that MPs who
submitted letters of no confidence
should have waited until after the by-
elections and the privileges commit-
tee’s investigation of Johnson.
Writing in Red Box today, Davis said:
“I do not support changing the interval
between confidence votes, as was threat-
ened with Theresa May at an equivalent
point in the process with her. Doing so

threatens to destabilise every future

Conservative leader, which would be a

disastrous outcome to this episode.”

Dominic Raab, the deputy prime

minister, warned against another confi-

dence vote in the coming year. He told

the BBC: “Fiddling with the rules when

you don’t like the result is a bad look.”

Backbenchers could try to frustrate

Johnson’s legislative programme, but

loyalists and rebels alike point to the

lack of ideological cohesion behind

those who voted against Johnson as

evidence that they are unlikely to prove

an insurmountable obstacle.

Lord Hammond of Runnymede, the

former chancellor, told the i newspaper:

“The prime minister’s position is seri-

ously damaged by the vote. I think he

will find that drawing a line under it...

is a lot more difficult than Downing

Street appears to think.”

Day of reckoning beckons for Johnson,

letters, page 28

When the result of the Conservative
leadership confidence vote was an-
nounced on Monday night, all eyes
were on a quintet of Tory MPs who filed
into room 14 on the committee corri-
dor. The wood panelling, the grim ex-
pressions, the group foreman holding a
small piece of paper: it could have been
a jury returning to deliver a verdict in a
messy domestic manslaughter trial.
The person with the piece of paper
was Sir Graham Brady (MP for Altrin-
cham & Sale West), the chairman of the

The chloroform’s been put back in the cupboard — at least for now

The MPs who run the

1922 Committee are

holding back on using

their deadly power,

writes Quentin Letts

1922 Committee; the others were his ex-

ecutive colleagues. Beside Brady stood

his two deputies, Nusrat Ghani (Weald-

en) and William Wragg (Hazel Grove).

Both are viewed as stinging critics of

Boris Johnson.

The sight of Wragg, in particular,

may have shivered timbers at 10

Downing Street. A figure of un-

bending, Edwardian probity, aged

34 but going on 60, he was standing

with hands firmly behind his back,

his face rigid with distaste.

Wragg has noticeably lost

weight in recent weeks.

Stress? Or, as can happen

with politicians, evidence

of ambition?

“The 22” is sometimes

called “influential”. A more

vivid description might be

“deadly”, for these are the men

and women who, during Tory

leadership crises, traditionally take

soundings from colleagues and decide

when to tilt the chloroform bottle on to

a suffocating mouchoir and euthanase a

stricken leader. They were once called

“the men in suits”. That expression is a

touch binary for today’s tastes but the

political function has not changed.

The 1922 executive has the power to

dispatch a prime minister.

According to the current rules,

Monday’s confidence vote

cannot be repeated for 12

months. However, those

rules could be changed in a

single meeting, were the

executive so to decide.

Earlier this year there was

a serious move to do just

that. The arguments ran to

and fro and things ran pretty close but

in the end it did not happen.

Could we see a new attempt to re-

write that rule and thus lay Johnson

open to the possibility of another confi-

dence challenge, perhaps after the two

by-elections later this month? After all,

the current executive’s mandate is

fresh. It has only just been re-elected to

office and will remain in place for the

rest of this session of parliament.

The answer seems to be no. Other

members of the executive are less obvi-

ously anti-Johnson than Wragg and

Ghani. Brady himself may be no great

fan of Boris. He is said, somewhat

laughably, to harbour leadership hopes

of his own. Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown

(Cotswolds), 69, the group’s treasurer, is

difficult to read on Johnson. One col-

league, no doubt a little cattily, says:

“Geoffrey is desperate to retire from the

Commons and aches for a peerage.” But

other executive members, such as

Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall),

Karl McCartney (Lincoln), Jason

McCartney (Colne Valley) and Martin

Vickers (Cleethorpes), are all thought

to remain solidly in favour of Johnson.

It is said that they have the balance of

power.

There is also the danger that a rule

change now might also look a bit trick-

sy, and a return to the slippery behav-

iour seen when the last Speaker of the

Commons, John Bercow, tried every

ruse to stop Johnson in 2019. That

might not play well with the public,

Conservative activists or with the 1922’s

electorate, more commonly known as

the backbenchers of the Tory party.

When it comes to parliamentary she-

nanigans, nothing can ever be dis-

counted. But for the moment it seems

unlikely Brady and co will be replacing

the stopper on that chloroform bottle.

Sir Graham Brady is said to

harbour leadership hopes

News Politics

Rebels plot rule change to

allow new confidence vote

Henry Zeffman Associate Political Editor
Geraldine Scott Political Reporter

Six more points of danger

In the aftermath of the confidence

vote there is one thing that Boris

Johnson’s supporters and detractors

largely agree on: despite all the talk

from Downing Street of moving on,

there is no realistic chance of that

happening. Here The Times assesses

problems that could leave blood on

the carpet in the coming weeks. Five

daggers signifies the biggest threat.

BY-ELECTIONS

Voters go to the polls in critical by-

elections in Wakefield and Tiverton &

Honiton on June 23.

In Wakefield, the Conservatives

need to win if Johnson is to show that

support is holding up in the red wall

seats he took from Labour in 2019. Yet

a recent poll suggests not just that the

Tories will lose but they will be routed.

The second seat is notionally rock-

solid Tory territory, where the party is

defending a majority of 24,000. But

the Liberal Democrats are running an

insurgent campaign and there are

fears that the party could repeat its

success in North Shropshire where it

overturned a 23,000 majority.

While defeat will not lead to a

second confidence vote so soon, it will

nevertheless sharpen divisions in the

parliamentary party and make it far

harder for Johnson to reassert his

authority. Southern Tory MPs would

see a loss in Tiverton & Honiton as

evidence that the emphasis on

levelling up is alienating voters in the

party’s heartlands who are suffering

the cost of living crisis. A loss in

Wakefield would alarm red wallers

who would want to prevent any pivot

back to traditional Tory policies.

PRIVILEGES COMMITTEE INVESTIGATION

The most pressing concern for

Downing Street is the Commons

privileges committee investigation

into whether the prime minister

knowingly misled MPs when he stated

that he was unaware of lockdown-

breaking parties in Downing Street.

The committee is made up of four

Tory and three opposition MPs who

must decide whether his defence that

he was unaware of the extent of the

rule-breaking in No 10 is plausible.

We cannot assume that the Tory

members will vote to clear Johnson

regardless of the evidence. If one or

two side with Labour and conclude

that Johnson knowingly misled MPs,

he will probably be out.

TORY RULE CHANGES

Technically Johnson cannot face

another formal confidence vote for a

year. But that rule is not set in stone

and could be altered by a vote of the

1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers.

This was the threat that Theresa

May faced and which led to her

announcing her decision to step down

five months after she won her

confidence vote.

If it becomes clear in the next few

months that Johnson’s authority has

waned still further, the 1922

Committee is likely to reconsider its

one-year rule. Like May, Johnson will

be given warning that this is

happening. He will then have to decide

whether to follow her lead and

announce his departure voluntarily or

fight on and quite possibly lose a

second confidence vote.

RESIGNATIONS

Margaret Thatcher was brought down

within two days of winning a

leadership election by a similar margin

to Johnson. Her demise was triggered

by the cabinet concluding that her

time was up and privately calling on

her to go. This time there are — at the

moment — no men or women in grey

suits calling for Johnson’s departure.

But we know that Rishi Sunak

considered resigning after his

Downing Street party fine and it is not

inconceivable that something could

trigger one or more “principled”

cabinet departures. If the chancellor, in

particular, were to resign over a policy

clash with Johnson that could, in itself,

be enough to bring the prime minister

down.

LOCAL ELECTIONS

The likely date for the next general

election is the summer of 2024 and

there is at least one set of elections

before that — next May — that could

trigger a further move to oust

Johnson. These will be in seats last

contested in 2019 and will be the best

indicator of whether the Tories have

recovered in the polls.

EVENTS

Only nine months ago Johnson was

riding high in the polls with allies

claiming that he could be a ten-year

prime minister. Yet since then, the

Owen Paterson and parties scandals

and the cost of living crisis have

eroded his power, authority and

popularity. The problem for Johnson is

that any further scandal or mishap

that a powerful prime minister

might easily see off could be

enough to topple him. We do not

know what that might be — but

“events”, as they say, are something all

governments dread.