Asked on Friday whether he took personal responsibility for the disastrous North Shropshire byelection result, Boris Johnson suggested the problem was that everyone else was talking about the wrong issues. “My job as prime minister is to get the focus on to the things that matter for all of us,” he said. Yet after weeks of self-inflicted crises and the drip, drip of stories about lockdown-busting parties at the heart of Downing Street, many of his MPs believe it is Johnson himself who is the real problem – and some are warning he is now on borrowed time. Johnson faces an intensely challenging period. The Omicron wave is breaking over Britain, but his MPs are in open revolt against Covid restrictions; the economic backdrop is deteriorating just as taxes are about to rise, and Simon Case’s inquiry into the rule-breaking parties is yet to report. As one frontbencher put it: “We’re starting to enter a perfect storm of shitness.” As the storm clouds gather, Conservative MPs are united in believing that if the government is to regain the public’s trust, Johnson will have to change his approach significantly – but divided about whether he is capable of doing so. “He has to take some drastic action. He needs to show tangible action to show he gets it,” said one frontbencher. Byelections, where opposition parties can pour resources into a single seat, are unrepresentative of what might happen at a general election – Lib Dem leader Ed Davey visited North Shropshire five times, for example. But scores of anxious Tory MPs will nonetheless have been scrutinising the result and wondering what their own fate might be if the voters continue to feel they want to give the Tories “a kicking”, as the party chair Oliver Dowden put it. A much smaller swing against the Tories than the extraordinary 34% seen on Thursday would put scores of Conservative seats into the Liberal Democrats’ sights. A 20% swing would wipe out Michael Gove in Surrey Heath, Dominic Raab in Esher and Walton and Steve Brine in Winchester, for example, among many others.
Johnson has few genuine friends in the parliamentary Conservative party, and his popularity with colleagues was always contingent on his campaigning prowess. Yet one fear his MPs now have is that the very qualities that once made Johnson a winner with the public – his roguishness and devil-may-care approach to politics and life in general – are precisely those that have become electorally toxic. Paula Surridge, an elections expert at the University of Bristol, said: “My instinct is that he’s in real trouble now, because I think what you’re getting is a blend of the grief and anger and emotion of the last 18 months attaching itself to these endless stories of parties and rule-breaking, and I think that’s going to be a really dangerous combination and really difficult for both Boris Johnson and the Conservative party more generally to shake off. “These issues attach themselves to people when they feed into the perceptions people already have of them. I think this does now feed into that perception, both of what Boris Johnson’s like but also the ‘one rule for them, another rule for us, not looking out for the little guy’ perception of the Conservative party. You’re back to the nasty party.” With the polls now consistently giving Labour a modest lead, one veteran Conservative said MPs with small majorities were likely to panic. “A lot of my colleagues are driven by fear, and they’ll get angry if they see their future being put at risk,” they said, adding that recent events had “taken the Teflon off Boris”. The North Shropshire result – a Liberal Democrat win in a leave seat – also raised questions about whether Brexit was starting to lose its hold over the electorate. That could be bad news for Johnson, who was able to unite voters in disparate seats in 2019 by promising to “get Brexit done”. If Brexit is starting to become a less crucial determinant of voting behaviour, he will need to find another potent argument to hold his electoral coalition together – and many MPs are not convinced “levelling up” is it. Johnson’s colleagues are now calling for a reset, including an overhaul of the prime minister’s Downing Street operation and a new chief whip, after a series of poorly handled recent votes including this week’s humiliating rebellion on Covid restrictions. Others would like to see heavyweights such as Jeremy Hunt, Greg Clark and Liam Fox brought back into cabinet. But senior MPs are also sceptical about how much Johnson is likely to be able to sharpen up his act. “It’s not about ‘Downing Street’, it’s him,” one minister said. “We have the problems we have because either he’s caused them, or his whole approach means other people do things they really shouldn’t. So it will be down to what he chooses to do.”
If they come to believe Johnson is no longer an electoral winner, they could decide to trigger a vote of no confidence – which if Johnson lost, would mark the end of his premiership. It takes 54 Conservative MPs to kick off such a vote, but a much larger 181 to win it. Sir Graham Brady, the inscrutable chair of the backbench 1922 Committee, never reveals how many letters of no confidence he has received until the threshold is reached. Few backbenchers believe many more than a dozen, perhaps 20, are likely to have accumulated so far, but with each crisis – particularly when self-inflicted, like the Paterson fiasco – more are likely to drop into Brady’s inbox. The veteran backbencher Sir Roger Gale spoke for many colleagues on Friday morning when he said: “Nobody wants a leadership challenge in the middle of the pandemic but one more strike and he’s out.”