Boris Johnson won the confidence vote but in every other way he is the big loser
Boris Johnson won the confidence vote but in every other way he is the big loser
Prime Minister wins by 211 to 148 but 40% of Tory MPs fail to back him.
The prime minister is damaged; so are the country and his party. His relief will not be long-lived.
After a snap contest whose abbreviated timetable was tailored to his advantage, Boris Johnson won the vote of confidence tonight only by 211 to 148 votes, with all 359 Conservative MPs casting ballots. It is a win, but it is also a disaster for the prime minister.
The real victor in the 2022 Tory leadership confidence vote was not Johnson. He is irreparably damaged. Politicians don’t recover from such things. Nor was the victor the Conservative party. The winners were the parties of opposition: Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the nationalists. That is because, with the unpopular Johnson losing his electoral allure but now reconfirmed, but only just, as Tory leader, the opposition parties are now on course to oust the Conservatives from office in the next general election.
A new Tory leader might have had time to rebuild the party’s image. Johnson cannot do that.However much Downing Street may pretend otherwise, this is not the end of the story, for three main reasons. First, and most immediately, Johnson is not yet out of the woods. That’s partly because of the forthcoming privileges committee inquiry into whether Johnson lied to MPs. But a pair of Tory defeats in this month’s two byelections – in Wakefield, where the main challenger is Labour, and in Tiverton and Honiton, where the challenge comes from the Lib Dems – would terrify Tory MPs once again and reignite the leadership issue.
Boris Johnson no-confidence vote: prime minister wins by 211 to 148 but 40% of Tory MPs fail to back him – as it happened
Some of Johnson’s critics argued that this week’s contest should not have occurred until after those byelections. Technically, there can now be no challenge to the leader for 12 months. Yet the Tory party’s rulebook is a malleable thing. If the demand on the backbenches and in the constituency associations is loud enough, a way is likely to be found. Things have just got more unstable.
Second, there’s the situation at Westminster. The Tory party was already difficult enough to manage. Now it is even more ungovernable than before. The scale of the vote against Johnson is very large. A hundred and forty-eight MPs voted against Johnson – more than those that voted against Theresa May in 2018.
This deals a lasting blow to the prime minister’s authority. With Jeremy Hunt now openly offering an alternative, there are now at least two Tory parties in parliament. The internal conflict has become louder and more obvious. It will be much harder for Johnson to get his way on policy. He can propose but not dispose.Third, the swirling divisions over what the Tory party now stands for will endure.
An anti-Johnson backbench memo circulating today complained that “the entire purpose of the government now appears to be the sustenance of Boris Johnson as prime minister”.
The Tory divisions are not just about personalities and office parties, but about policies. None of the reasons why Johnson’s critics called for this week’s contest will go away. And as Jesse Norman put it in his devastating critique of Johnson, these things “make a decisive change of government at the next election much more likely”.
Four of the last five Conservative premiers have now faced party votes on whether they should stay in office. None has managed to turn their votes of confidence to advantage. Johnson is now in the same boat as Margaret Thatcher in 1990, John Major in 1995 and Theresa May four years ago. He is no longer an electoral asset. The Heineken has gone rancid. By reconfirming him as leader, Tory MPs have made their own task of re-election much harder and made a change of government at the next election much more likely.
Courtesy: The Guardian London
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist