It didn’t look like that last week. Partygate, the scandal in which the prime minister did not comply with the corona rules that his government had set itself and attended several parties at 10 Downing Street during the strict lockdown, seemed to be fatal to him. The scandal started as a peat fire early this year, but after an official investigation led by Police Commissioner Suasan Gray concluded that there had been “difficult behavior” on the part of the Prime Minister and the police fined him, his position was increasingly more perilous.
One party leader after another has lost confidence in Boris Johnson in recent days. On Sunday, John Premrose, a member of the House of Commons and the anti-corruption czar of the Conservative Party, expressed in an open letter that he no longer had faith in the prime minister. Later in the day, conservative heavyweight Jeremy Hunt also followed. He said he would not vote for Boris Johnson because he would lose the next election. Over the weekend, as Johnson attended Queen Elizabeth’s 70th anniversary celebrations, a memo circulated among Conservative cadres from an anonymous Member of the House of Commons, who explained in over 750 words that Boris Johnson could no longer be held as party leader and that a major electoral defeat lay ahead if he stayed on.
No trust
In the memo, widely shared on conservative WhatsApp groups, the anonymous MP says Boris Johnson is no longer an “electoral asset” and has gone from a voter to a loser. That wasn’t just the result of ‘party gate’ and the poor polls. The party’s supporters no longer trust the prime minister, the memo says. “Boris Jonhson’s booing at the anniversary celebration tells us nothing that the data doesn’t also make clear to us. There is no social group that trusts him, 55 percent of current conservatives call him untrustworthy, and only 25 percent still trust him.”
On Sunday, at least 54 members of the Conservative faction in the House of Commons informed the so-called 1922 Committee of the Conservative Party that they no longer had faith in the prime minister. The required number for a vote of confidence of the entire group had thus been reached. On Monday, the House of Commons of the Conservative Party met to decide the prime minister’s political future. The group expressed its confidence in him by voting against.
According to the rules of the Conservative Party, the party leadership is now banned for a year. That is not to say that the prime minister’s position is now completely safe for the coming year. After all, rules can be changed.
lenders
Johnson had to work hard on Monday to secure his victory. On Monday morning he made an extreme effort to placate the conservative faction. In an open letter, he pointed out to party members that he has taken “bold and innovative solutions to difficult long-term problems.” He admitted that the criticism of him for partygate was “justified”, but that this moment was also a “golden opportunity to put this behind us.” He addressed his group members once more on Monday evening. He told his party members that there were still big plans ahead in the field of taxes and housing and that he could certainly win the next election. “Let’s not dance to the tune of the media. I will again lead you to victory and the winners will be the people of this country,” he told his party comrades.
He also engaged 23 major lenders of his party. They had paid the party with 18 million pounds in recent years. In an open letter published on Twitter, they said it would be “stupid” to evict Johnson at the moment and expressed their “unwavering support” for the prime minister.
Whether the support of the conservative House of Commons will be sufficient in the longer term remains to be seen. Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May retained the support of two-thirds of the group in December 2018 in the same procedure. In the longer term, however, that turned out not to be enough to stay on as prime minister. In the months that followed, her chair legs were sawed hard, especially by Johnsen and his companions, and May had to resign in June. Even ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher found in 1990 that the loss of support from much of her party left her vulnerable. She resigned after it appeared that she probably would not gather enough votes to defeat her rival Michael Hesseltine in the battle for party leadership.