LONDON – Prime Minister Boris Johnson survived a tense vote of no confidence on Monday, against a mutiny however that left him reeling and predicted a volatile period in British politics, as he fighting for power and leading a divided Conservative Party.
The vote, 211 to 148, fell short of the majority Tory lawmakers needed to oust Mr Johnson. But it shows how severely his support has eroded since last year, when a scandal erupted over the revelation that he and his senior aides held parties at 10 Downing Street violated government lockdown regulations. More than 40 percent of Conservative lawmakers voted against him in an unexpectedly large rebellion.
Mr Johnson vowed to stay, claiming victory would end months of speculation about his future. “It’s a convincing result, a decisive result,” the Prime Minister said from Downing Street after the results of the secret ballot were announced.
“As a government,” Mr Johnson added, “we can focus and move on to the things that really matter to people.”
However, history shows that Conservative prime ministers who have been subjected to such a vote – even if they win – are often dismissed, if not immediately, within months.
Mr Johnson won less support for his party on Monday than his predecessor, Theresa May, did in 2018, or Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did in 1990, when they survived the vote of no confidence. Mrs May was forced out of her job six months later. Mrs Thatcher lasted only a few days.
However, Mr Johnson is a singular figure in British politics, cheerfully defying convention and often appearing immune to the rules of political gravity. With a comfortable majority in Congress, his party is in no danger of losing power. He could choose to weather the storm, declaring, as he did on Monday night, that he has a bigger mandate than when he was first elected leader of the party in July 2019.
However, for a politician who led the Tories to a landslide election victory in 2019 with the promise of “getting Brexit done”, it was a crushing fall for grace – one thing that could get him involved in a political uprising within his party, an empowered opposition. , and subsequent electoral defeats undermined his credibility.
In two and a half years, Mr Johnson has gone from Britain’s most trusted vote of confidence – a famous politician who has redrawn the political map of the country – to a scandalous, public figure. His job has been in jeopardy since the first reports of illegal repressive parties. emerged in November of last year.
When Britons paid tribute to Queen Elizabeth’s 70-year reign last week, they were fighting back against their tumultuous tenure as prime minister. On Friday, Mr Johnson was booed loudly by the crowd at St. Paul when he and his wife, Carrie, attended a thanksgiving service for the queen.
That moment may have been the crystallization of the loss of public support for Mr Johnson, a journalist, a politically-turned politician, morally flexible, who is frequently in public more forgiving than not by a public with which he appeared conversant.
For now, however, Mr Johnson remains in power and under current party rules he cannot face another vote of no confidence in a year. His removal rate will depend on a number of wild cards.
Would his Cabinet turn against him, as Mrs Thatcher did after the 1990 vote, prompting her to step down quickly? Would the party threaten to change the rules and hold a second no-confidence vote, as it proposed to Mrs May, convincing her to negotiate her withdrawal? Is Mr Johnson gambling by calling an early general election, seeking the public mandate he cannot get from his party?
Mr Johnson sought to deflect questions about the new election on Monday night, saying only, “I certainly don’t care about snap elections.”
In 1995, Prime Minister John Major initiated and won a leadership contest within the Conservative Party, only to suffer a crushing defeat to Tony Blair and the Labor Party two years later. Given Britain’s economic troubles and the Conservative Party’s weakness in the polls, some Tories fear a similar outcome this time.
Opposition leaders took this result to show that Conservative lawmakers endorsed the leadership of an illegitimate prime minister.
“Conservative MPs made their choice tonight,” said Labor leader Keir Starmer. “They ignored the wishes of the British public.” Voters, he said, were “fed up – fed up – with a prime minister who made big promises but never delivered”.
The result left the Conservatives protesting and divided, after a tense day in which senior members of the party went public on social media. Some lawmakers argued that his stance had become unacceptable.
Roger Gale, a Conservative lawmaker, expressed surprise at the scale of the uprising. Mr Gale told the BBC: “I think the prime minister has to go back to Downing Street tonight and think very carefully where he’s going from here.
But one of Mr Johnson’s defenders, James Cleverly, a minister in the Office of Foreign Affairs, Commonwealth and Development, said, “he won it comfortably and now we need it.” begin work”. He said of Mr Johnson’s election track record, “No other candidate will get anything like that level of support.”
Mr Johnson was given a warm welcome as he addressed the Conservative Party in the early afternoon, with several lawmakers banging their desks in a gesture of support, according to attendees. But he also received challenging questions, and when the members left the committee room afterward, it was clear that he had not convinced all who opposed him to stop their mutiny. .
“I told the prime minister that if he breaks the law, he has to go,” said Steve Baker, an influential pro-Brexit lawmaker who has called for Johnson to step down. “He clearly broke the law, he obviously agreed to the law being broken, so I follow my word that I made in the record that he should go.”
Noting that he helped Mr Johnson become prime minister, Mr Baker described it as a “terrible moment.”
Mr Cleverly said the prime minister was “in a very serious mode”, and that his speech was “light on jokes and heavy on plans and policies”.
“He really has a plan for what he wants to do next, how we deliver on the promises we made in the 2019 general election,” he said, “how we keep going through really, really tough times.”
The latest chapter in the series began on Sunday when Graham Brady, the head of a committee of Conservative Party supporters, announced that the threshold of 54 letters calling for a vote of no confidence had been reached. Mr Brady and Mr Johnson then negotiated the timing of a vote, with the prime minister pushing to hold it quickly.
That gave Mr Johnson a tactical advantage as it would give opponents time to organize a showdown with him. One potential challenger, Jeremy Hunt, tried to move quickly, announcing on Monday that he would “vote for change”. Mr Hunt, the former Health Secretary and Foreign Secretary, lost to Mr Johnson as party leader in 2019.
Nadine Dorries, Mr Johnson’s culture secretary and one of his most ardent defenders, harshly criticized Mr Hunt for “destabilizing the party and the country in the service of his own political ambitions”. he”. In a Twitter post, she said, “You were wrong about almost everything, now you’re wrong again.”
The timing of the vote is also set by Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Year, a four-day celebration that ends on Sunday. Mr. Brady is adamant not to let the news of the no-confidence vote overshadow the festivities. As a result, British political drama takes place behind closed doors while the political establishment gathers to pay tribute to the queen in a series of public events.
After being informed of the vote, Mr Johnson and his wife, Carrie, attended a beauty pageant at Buckingham Palace, where his face showed no sign of a brewing crisis. Several lawmakers sent letters calling for the votes to ask Mr Brady that they be adjourned so as not to be seen as interfering with the Jubilee.
During a star-studded concert on Saturday night, Mr Johnson watched performers including Alicia Keys and Queen while Conservative lawmakers reviewed a memo from hidden members listings circulated on their WhatsApp group, which warned that if not removed Mr Johnson would bring the party in, according to a report in The Telegraph.
The blunt assessment of the memo, published by The Telegraph, was that “Boris Johnson is no longer an electoral property.”
Megan Specia contribution report.
