James Forsyth

The Tory party is in stasis. Currently, Tory MPs aren’t prepared to move against their leader. But they don’t want to look as though they are trying to cover for him, either – which is why the government had to drop its amendment yesterday. As I say in the Times this morning, the loudest sound at Westminster at the moment is the silence of Tory MPs who are trying to avoid saying anything either way. Tory MPs are exhausted by partygate, it has been rumbling on for more than five months now and the Times reports that the privileges committee investigation likely won’t conclude until the autumn. Tory MPs just want this story to go away, but they know it won’t.

Today has been a double blow to Boris Johnson. First, he now faces an investigation by the Privileges Committee into whether he deliberately misled the house when he said that the Covid rules were followed in Downing Street. At the very least, this means that this story – which is exhausting Tory MPs – won’t end with the publication of the Gray report. Second, the U-turn has shown that Tory MPs aren’t prepared to go all in on defending Johnson. Most Tory MPs will keep their counsel until after the local elections next month The new whipping operation has generally received positive reviews from Tory MPs. But the amendment it put down last night misread the mood of the parliamentary party.

It is worth thinking back to late January when Boris Johnson’s premiership seemed in the greatest danger. As I say in the Times today, back then those Tories trying to remove Johnson were split into two camps. One group thought that they should go hell for leather to get the letters to force a no-confidence ballot. They worried that if they waited, Johnson might escape a police fine. He could then use that as a shield against the criticisms that the Gray report would contain. The other faction, which contained several former cabinet ministers, argued that the danger in going early was that Johnson could survive the no-confidence ballot. Better, they argued, to wait for the police to fine him and then move at a point when they could be sure he would lose.

The government’s announcement today that it wants to send a number of those who cross the Channel in small boats to Rwanda will be subject to challenge in both the Lords and the courts. It is hard to see how the policy gets through the upper house, where the Tories do not have a majority. But, I suspect, that a fight with peers over the policy is regarded by many in government circles as a feature not a bug of this policy. Even if the policy does get through the Lords in the end, there will almost certainly be legal challenges to it; Johnson referred to the likelihood of this in his speech this morning. Again, I suspect that there will be Tories who privately welcome this—remember how well the government’s defeat over prorogation played for Johnson in 2019.

We have just had the first ministerial resignation over partygate. David Wolfson, the justice minister in the Lords, has quit over the matter saying that he doesn’t believe that continuing to serve is inconsistent with his ‘ministerial and professional obligation to uphold the rule of law’. Wolfson, who was a highly successful QC before becoming a peer and a minister in 2020, writes: I regret that recent disclosures lead to the inevitable conclusion that there was repeated rule-breaking, and breaches of the criminal law in Downing Street.

The U-turns on conversion therapy last night reveals a problem for Downing Street. After its partygate troubles, No. 10 is very keen to avoid issues that cause tensions with Tory MPs. I understand that desire, in part, lay behind the decision to drop legislation to ban LGBT conversion therapy.  But the problem is that there are a host of issues on which Tory MPs don’t agree. So as soon as news of the U-turn broke last night, taking several of the ministers you would have expected to have been involved by surprise, there came pressure from another set of Tory MPs for a U-turn on the U-turn. The result: No. 10 U-turned again and there will now be a ban on gay conversion therapy, but not conversion therapy for trans people.

In his speech in Warsaw today, Joe Biden said of Vladimir Putin: ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.’ This comes after Biden condemned Putin as a war criminal and ‘a butcher’. So, what did Biden mean by this? At first blush, it looks like a call for either a palace coup or a popular uprising in Russia – the two ways that Putin could be ousted from power. But the White House has been quick to downplay the remark, telling US reporters: ‘The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbours or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.