Boris johnson

Friday

James Forsyth

Another letter goes in — how close is Boris to 54?

Nick Gibb has become the latest Tory MP to declare that he has submitted a letter of no confidence in the Prime Minister to Graham Brady. The former schools minister writes in the Telegraph that ‘to restore trust, we need to change the Prime Minister’. Gibb’s letter will worry the Johnson operation because he is not a usual suspect. Yes, he left government in last September’s reshuffle. But he has hardly been a serial critic since then. If parliamentarians like him are coming out publicly, No. 10 will worry about how many more are submitting letters behind the scenes. The whole question of how many letters are actually in, as opposed to being publicly declared, is shrouded in mystery.

James Forsyth

Who would join Boris’s No. 10?

Munira Mirza’s resignation over Boris Johnson’s refusal to withdraw his Savile barb at Keir Starmer led to Downing Street bringing forward the departure of various senior staff. Johnson’s shadow whipping operation were keen to emphasise that these were the very changes to his operation that he had promised Tory MPs on Monday night. Leaving aside the fact that these departures looked rather chaotic, the real challenge will come with whether Johnson can persuade anyone to come into Downing Street. As I say in the Times today, the failure to get Lynton Crosby to take on a formal role shows how difficult it will be to get the kind of big hitters into the building that Tory MPs are expecting.

Steerpike

Loyalists parrot the party line

Mass resignations. Backbenchers demanding blood. Frontbenchers distancing themselves. It's all gone a bit JG Ballard over at No. 10 as Boris Johnson seeks to prevent his premiership being scuppered by partygate. Fortunately though, the much-maligned Whips' Office has come up with a cunning plan: a co-ordinated MP Twitter storm, eulogising the surprise resignation of five No. 10 aides as part of a long-term Johnsonian plan. Brilliant! For while the resignations of Jack Doyle, Martin Reynolds and Dan Rosenfield were long-expected, those of Munira Mirza and Elena Narozanski were not and can hardly be construed as such.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Why Munira Mirza’s resignation matters

Boris Johnson's great strength has always been his ability to spot, recruit and hire a great variety of brilliant people. He did so when he edited this magazine and as London Mayor with a superb crop of deputy mayors. As Foreign Secretary he couldn’t hire anyone, so he struggled. As Prime Minister, his gift seemed to have come back when he hired Munira Mirza as policy chief. She was one of his deputy mayors and having her in No. 10 was, to me, a promise of great things to come. Her resignation, today, suggests a prime ministerial team that’s falling apart rather than being rebuilt. She is an academic, a thinker, a fighter, writer (she once wrote a superb cover story for us) and I always saw her as a potential London mayoral candidate.

Isabel Hardman

Boris is finished — it’s when, not if

This week, Michael Gove's lengthy Levelling Up white paper talked about the ancient city of Jericho. This was largely because of its size and natural irrigation, but perhaps the Biblical story of the city's walls falling might be more fitting given the state of Downing Street. The response in the Conservative party to not one but four senior resignations — for unconnected reasons — is pretty fatalistic. Martin Reynolds and Dan Rosenfield were doomed because of the former’s ‘BYOB’ email and the latter’s unpopularity with Tory MPs. But the Munira Mirza case is stranger: senior staff don't tend to quit. Ministers like to resign in a blaze of glory, but even in the dying days of an administration people tend to want to go down with the ship.

James Heale

The Zac Pack: the well-connected group quietly shaping Tory policy

Who let the dogs out? That’s the subject of a Whitehall probe into the recent Afghanistan debacle. When the Taliban took Kabul, an estimated 1,200 people who qualified for evacuation to the UK had to be left behind. But on 28 August, waiting Afghan families were left helpless on the ground as 173 cats and dogs were escorted past them into the airport and off to safety. The big question: on whose authority were animals put ahead of humans? And did any of this have the Prime Minister’s backing? As ever with Johnsonian drama, the truth is elusive, but one minister seems closer to it than others.

Rod Liddle

Boris will never recover from partygate

When a political party is hit by a crisis, the tendency these days is for both the politicians and their supporters to pretend that there isn’t a crisis at all, hunker down inside a comfortable state of denial and blame it all on a hostile media. To a degree, this has always happened — but social media has unquestionably exacerbated the process, to the extent that at any one moment a vast number of people are living under a bizarre delusion from which only much later do they emerge blinking into the sunlight. The polarising effect of social media and its echo--chamber properties have led to it becoming little more than a vast conduit for confirmation bias, and this informs the way in which politicians react to crises.

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson is drifting

Tory MPs only have one topic of conversation: the fate of Boris Johnson. They huddle together in offices in Portcullis House, comparing notes, assessing the Prime Minister’s survival prospects. At the time of writing, there is a sense in Westminster that attempts to oust Johnson have been delayed; that the danger for him will flare up again after the police end their investigation into Downing Street parties or after the local elections in May. But Johnson is not being helped by the fact that many of the hints of favour or policy change he has dropped to MPs as he has tried to shore up his position have not come to much. This is causing irritation and making MPs more inclined to send in no-confidence letters.

Peter Jones

Claudius, Messalina and how not to choose political advisers

The Prime Minister has been having some trouble with his inner circle of advisers. Tacitus supplies fine examples of how they worked in Rome. Emperors chose whomever they liked to advise them. Augustus, for example, chose men like Agrippa and Maecenas, who had provided excellent service for him while Rome was still (just) a republic. The fourth emperor C-C-Claudius, by contrast, despised by the imperial family but thrust into power by the military, put his trust in politically experienced and highly efficient Greek freedmen (ex-slaves). Pallas was put in charge of the treasury, Narcissus in charge of correspondence (nothing got past him), and Callistus in charge of justice and law. One incident illustrates the way Narcissus worked.

The Spectator

Letters: The Christian case for cash

Naysayers needed Sir: I was struck by James Forsyth’s observation that in 10 Downing Street, ‘hard truths and hard choices are too often ignored… because the Prime Minister’s top team fear he will find them uncomfortable’ (‘The battle to save Boris’, 22 January). During a working life spent in business, I came to realise that one of the most valuable skills you could master was how to tell someone things they would rather not hear while maintaining good relations with them. If the PM is intent on firing many of his staff, it would be prudent for whoever appoints their replacements to ensure that as many of them as possible possess that ability.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Sue Gray speaks, Boris goes to Ukraine and 477-mile bolt of lightning strikes

Home Sue Gray, the second permanent secretary in the Cabinet Office, in a 12-page ‘update’ on her investigation into 16 gatherings in Downing Street, refrained from comment on particular cases, 12 of which were being looked into by police. ‘Some of the behaviour surrounding these gatherings is difficult to justify,’ she concluded. ‘There was a serious failure to observe… the standards expected of the entire British population.’ Some events ‘should not have been allowed to take place’. She said that ‘excessive consumption of alcohol is not appropriate in a professional workplace’. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told the Commons that he ‘wanted to say sorry’.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Boris doubles down on Jimmy Savile claims

Today's PMQs suggests that some of the immediate heat has gone the partygate crisis, if only temporarily. Sir Keir Starmer did not make all his questions about parties, instead widening out his attacks to Conservative tax policy. The faces of most of his backbenchers froze as he doubled down, saying that Starmer had apologised for what the CPS had done Starmer did though open by complaining about the behaviour of the Prime Minister in Monday's statement on the Gray report, saying that the leader of the party of Winston Churchill was now repeating the conspiracies of 'violent fascists to try and score cheap political points'.

James Forsyth

Boris Johnson’s fightback has been cut short

Tobias Ellwood, the chair of the defence select committee, has this morning announced that he is sending a letter to the 1922 chairman calling for a no confidence vote in Boris Johnson. In a way this is not a surprise: Johnson cut Ellwood from the government when he became Prime Minister and the two are temperamentally very different. But the worry for No. 10 is that there are rather a lot of former ministers on the backbenches these days, and if a lot of them start writing letters then a no confidence vote will become a near certainty. Another concern for No. 10 this morning is whether they can live up to the expectations set in terms of the government’s change of direction and personnel.

Nick Cohen

Boris is dragging the Tories down with him

Tories occasionally like to pretend that they are not wasting their talents and lives defending a bottom-feeding demagogue. They lecture critics who damn Boris Johnson as a British Trump and tell us we have him all wrong. Fraser Nelson, my own editor here, once argued that, far from being a sponger and fraud, the Prime Minister was a liberal conservative, a centrist, indeed, who had absorbed and defeated populism.  I wonder what Fraser thinks now. I wonder whether Conservative MPs and Conservative voters realise what Johnson is doing to them. All power corrupts, but Johnson’s power corrupts all who defend him. To maintain it, Johnson is screaming desperate lies at those who hold him to account.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Boris must go!

Conservative sympathisers, Conservative voters and Conservative parliamentarians have a simple choice to make this week. Do they stand by a Prime Minister who besmirches his office and whose moral credibility diminishes a little more each day he remains, squatting, in Downing Street? Or do they, instead, accept the obvious reality that Johnson is not fit for the office he holds, draw the obvious conclusions from that recognition, and do the decent thing? For every Tory MP and cabinet minister who fails to act this week deserves to be judged themselves. These MPs might be weak or venal or cowardly or blind or simply stupid but they cannot claim to be ignorant. Those who fail to support this Prime Minister’s removal soil whatever remains of their own reputations.

James Forsyth

Tory rebels are split over Boris

Those Tory MPs who want to oust Boris Johnson are not a single group. They come from all wings of the party and all intakes and would not agree on who should succeed him. This means there is no single view among them about the best way to proceed.  But one of the most influential of their number tells me they have now come to the view it would be best to act after either the police investigation has concluded or the May elections, whichever comes first. Their argument is that, at this point, there would be the greatest consensus in both the party (and among Tory MPs) about the need for change. This would minimise the amount of poison the deed would inject into the Tory bloodstream.

Monday

Katy Balls

Inside Boris Johnson’s showdown with Tory MPs

After Tory MPs spent the afternoon laying into Boris Johnson over Sue Gray's summary of her report, the Prime Minister finds himself in a much more fragile position than when he started the day. Tonight he addressed Tory MPs at a meeting of the 1922 committee. Given Johnson's Commons appearance rattled MPs rather than improving relations, Johnson went into the meeting on the backfoot. The demand to hear the PM speak was so great that MPs arriving late were turned away. The demand to hear the PM speak was so great that MPs arriving late were turned away Johnson began the meeting by telling MPs he had a really torrid time in the Commons chamber and needed to do a better job of explaining how seriously he took Covid, given it did 'nearly kill me'.

Katy Balls

Johnson faces a mauling from his own MPs

Ahead of the publication of Sue Gray's report into partygate, there had been talk that the police investigation — which meant the most tricky parts of Gray's investigation were left out — would help Boris Johnson by ensuring he got off lightly. However, anyone watching the reaction from MPs to the Prime Minister's statement in the chamber will have been left wondering what the full report would have triggered. While the shortened report meant the Prime Minister was spared embarrassing details coming to light, it did not stop Johnson from facing a mauling from his own side.

Isabel Hardman

Johnson’s defence deteriorates

That Boris Johnson regards the Gray update as an opportunity to come up for air was very clear from his statement on the report in the Commons. The Prime Minister's opening remarks struck what seemed to be a reasonable balance between apologising, offering some operational changes to No. 10 (to show he was taking the report's recommendations for 'learning' seriously) and trying to buoy up Tory MPs with a reminder of what his government was achieving. Brexit, freeports and the comparatively early end to Covid restrictions all came up. He might have been pleased with himself as he commended his statement to the House, but things went downhill after that. The first deterioration in the situation came as Sir Keir Starmer gave one of his best speeches in parliament to date.

Sunday

Keiran Pedley

How bad are the polls for Boris Johnson?

It’s no secret that the polls do not look good for the Prime Minister at the moment. The most recent Ipsos Mori political monitor, released this week, shows that seven in ten Britons are now dissatisfied with the job Boris Johnson is doing. The PM’s numbers now are similar to Theresa May’s just before she left office in 2019, Tony Blair’s in January 2007 and the types of figures registered by Gordon Brown throughout 2008 and 2009. In this context, some six in ten Britons think the Conservatives should change their leader before the next general election (up from 42 per cent last July), including more than one in three Conservative voters. Johnson’s struggles appear to be having a real impact on wider public perceptions of the Conservatives too.