- Boris Johnson and two of his closest political allies have announced their intention to step down as Members of Parliament, triggering a series of by-elections.
- Johnson is stepping down ahead of the publication of a report set to conclude that he deliberately misled parliament over ‘partygate’ while his allies have joined him in solidarity and because Rishi Sunak did not approve their appointment to the House of Lords in contravention of convention.
- This is the latest chapter in the ongoing struggle between the two men with Sunak’s resignation as Chancellor last year crucial in forcing Johnson out of No 10. However, with Johnson’s standing in the party and country much reduced, his resignation does not for the time appear to pose a systemic risk to Sunak’s premiership even if the Conservatives lose all three by-elections.
- The biggest threat to Sunak is that the Johnson saga continues to rumble on detracting from his efforts to set out and deliver his own agenda and to unite the party and wider Conservative movement against Keir Starmer and Labour ahead of the coming general election.
Johnson and his key allies attack Sunak on their way out
The Boris Johnson soap opera is once again dominating political discussions in the UK after his dramatic announcement late on Friday that he would resign from the House of Commons. His decision was driven by the intention of the Commons Privileges Committee to accuse him of deliberately misleading parliament over ‘partygate’, the series of lockdown breaching parties in No 10 that helped force him out of office last year. The Committee was reportedly going to recommend a suspension of over ten days, a sanction that, if upheld by a vote of the whole House, would in turn have given his constituents an opportunity to vote him out in a by-election.
Faced with the ignominy of having the findings of the report and associated sanction upheld by a House of Commons with a large Tory majority, one which he feels he personally secured at the 2019 election, Johnson decided to leave on something approaching his own terms. This way he and his diehard supporters can keep his legend alive by claiming that he was unfairly forced out by a partisan committee, indeed in his statement he described the Committee as “the very definition of a kangaroo court.”
In parallel, two of Johnson’s closest political allies, Nadine Dorries and Nigel Adams, also resigned their seats. The trigger for this was a dispute around Johnson’s resignation honours list which proposed giving Dorries, Adams and other close allies peerages, i.e. lifetime appointments to the House of Lords. The problem was that Sunak needed to approve the list but wanted to avoid a series of inconvenient by-elections. Johnson had been hoping that Sunak would find a way of approving the appointments with his allies remaining in the Commons until after the next election, a move which would have breached long-established parliamentary convention.
Johnson met Sunak recently to discuss the issue and reportedly came away from the meeting with the impression his list would be approved in full, only to find out on Friday that it did not include the peerages he had promised his allies. Furious, Johnson and his allies accused Sunak of deceit. For his part, Sunak said that Johnson had asked him to over-rule the decision of an independent vetting committee which he “didn’t think was right.” While there was speculation at one point that six or seven core Johnson allies would all step down, ultimately only two decided to do so, thereby triggering the by-elections that Sunak had been so keen to avoid.
How much of a threat does this pose to Sunak?
Ultimately, the highly technical nature of the dispute around the appointments is less important than the big picture which is that Johnson and his supporters have progressively seen their standing within the party eroded while the consequences of Johnson’s actions as Prime Minister over ‘partygate’ and other issues eventually caught up with him to the extent that he saw no other way out. While coordinated, these resignations seem to be driven by genuinely held frustration and disillusionment, so any damage caused to Sunak is the result of personal animus as opposed to any calculated and strategic campaign designed to dislodge him.
Indeed, from conversations with party insiders, the general sense even among those who had previously supported Johnson, is that his time has passed and it is time to move on. The party only turned to him out of desperation and while there may be some lingering sympathy for him following the triumphant 2019 election and the circumstances of his demise, there is a vanishingly small hard-core of MPs who think that he should get another shot as Prime Minister and/or party leader.
There is wide acknowledgement of the very challenging situation in which the party finds itself following the rolling Johnson psychodrama followed by the chaos of the Truss government, so most MPs are minded to stick with Sunak given the lack of an evidently superior alternative. Indeed, while there is much discontent over government policy, particularly on issues like taxation and immigration, Johnson is not a good conduit for this discontent given he was in office when much of this policy direction was set.
The party now faces three by-elections and could plausibly lose all three. Johnson’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat is the most marginal and is highly likely to be won by Labour. Dorries’ Mid-Bedfordshire and Adams’ Selby and Ainsty seats have much larger Tory majorities so are safer on paper but under the circumstances, with opposition parties highly motivated, holding them will still be an uphill struggle.
In any event, even if the party loses all three, unless it is by staggering margins, these defeats will largely be blamed on Johnson and his allies as opposed to Sunak – for this reason the government is likely to want to hold them quickly and get them over and done with. Holding any of the three, or frankly even losing them only narrowly, will be seen as a bonus. Practically it won’t make a big difference – as The Financial Times’ Stephen Bush quipped, “If Sunak is unlucky, all three seats could be won by MPs who wish to do him great political harm.” In any event, the government will still maintain a large majority, and losing some of his most bitter detractors might even make party management a bit easier.
That said, the biggest threat to Sunak is that the by-elections and ongoing attacks by Johnson and his supporters suck up political oxygen in a way that makes it harder for him to demonstrate how he is delivering the improvements he promised upon becoming Prime Minister – or at the very least trying to. Sunak wants to undermine the credibility of Keir Starmer and Labour while also setting out a positive agenda for what he would do in a full term with his own mandate but an ongoing civil war within the party and wider Conservative media ecosystem makes that much harder to achieve.
Indeed, Starmer has enjoyed a great run of fortune in recent times with yet more Conservative infighting and also the news that former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon had been arrested over the SNP funding scandal – big news that would have received higher billing if not for the Johnson saga. This is likely to further boost Labour in Scotland at the SNP’s expense and thereby bring more Scottish seats into play at the next general election.
Is this the end of the road for Johnson?
Johnson has famously been written off before only to confound critics by bouncing back. As such, many commentators are hesitant to say that this is definitely the end of the road for his political ambitions – many cite Winston Churchill, one of Johnson’s political heroes who also had a number of comebacks. They also say that, if the Tory party is badly defeated at the next election, they may once again turn to a proven winner, the only Tory capable of winning traditional Labour seats in the so-called ‘red wall’.
However, while Johnson may indeed have defied political gravity before, having finally reached the very top he is a different proposition to a potential PM in waiting, there is a track record to assess. While he may still command fervent support among some voters, his current net approval stands at -34 compared with -18 for Sunak.
Some have speculated that by standing down and avoiding losing a by-election could open the possibility of standing at a different seat with a supportive local association at the next election. However, the party authorities are unlikely to look favourably upon such a bid and could well block it given his latest antics and the inevitability that any such bid would make the general election campaign focused around Johnson.