At prime minister’s questions this week, Boris Johnson appeared to be fired up. He scored a point against Keir Starmer, needling the Labour leader about whether he would say schools were safe to return to, and claiming Starmer had been silenced by the teaching unions. Several MPs on his own side remarked how pleased they were to see him back to what Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, of the 1922 executive committee, called “such robust form”. But it was a rare and fleeting victory in a troubled fortnight, marked by U-turns and missteps. And when he met members of the 1922 executive immediately after PMQs, they delivered a stark warning about the risks of walling himself off from the rest of his party. Such are the rising concerns, not only over the chaos of U-turns but also the prime minister’s health, that some senior Tories are going so far as to wonder openly whether Johnson will stay the course until 2024. “There are doubts about Boris’s health, his competence and his judgment,” said one former minister. “He might not be the statesman that some had hoped he could become. Throw Cummings into the mix and you start getting MPs openly talking about the fact that he will have to go before the next general election.” In the nearer term, restive Tory MPs – even those who are normally sympathetic – are warning that their leader could be forced into more embarrassing U-turns in the weeks and months ahead if he fails to listen to his own party. It comes after a chaotic week for Downing Street which included, aptly, a real-life car crash when the PM’s vehicle was shunted outside parliament. On Tuesday, the prime minister abruptly changed his position on free school meals after a high-profile campaign by the footballer Marcus Rashford. Up to 30 Tory MPs had been threatening to vote with Labour on a motion calling for the £15-a-week voucher scheme to be extended over the summer.
Then, on Thursday, Matt Hancock announced he was ditching plans for a standalone NHS track and trace app, instead incorporating the Google-Apple technology other countries had turned to weeks ago, while claiming he had “backed both horses” from the start. And, while MPs welcomed Friday’s announcement of £1bn to help schoolchildren catch up with lost lessons, it came against the backdrop of mounting frustration that education had not been a higher priority throughout the crisis. Robert Halfon, the Harlow MP who chairs the education select committee, has been lobbying the government relentlessly about the issue for weeks, including challenging Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, in parliament. He is one of a number of former ministers, including Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark, who are using their chairmanships of select committees as a platform to press Johnson and his team publicly about their handling of the crisis. Clark hauled the health minister Edward Argar to the Commons on Monday to ask why the government had not yet published the findings of an investigation into the 2 metre distancing review Johnson had promised him three weeks earlier, instead setting up a new review in No 10. Hunt, who was beaten to the Tory leadership by Johnson, has pressed Hancock, the health secretary, politely but relentlessly on multiple issues, in particular the testing, tracing and isolation of Covid-19 sufferers. There have been worries, too, about whether Johnson has recovered his “vim” after being admitted to intensive care with Covid-19. “I definitely think Boris’s absence set things back: it was different before he fell ill,” said one concerned MP.
Many of these critics feel their voices are barely heard, let alone heeded, inside Downing Street. Johnson’s No 10 team of staunch loyalists, many veterans of the Vote Leave campaign, pay scrupulous attention to focus groups and opinion polls, but MPs say they are rarely consulted, and in many cases, neither are ministers. Hancock conceded this week, for example, that the decision to roll the Department for International Development (DfID) back into the Foreign Office after two decades, portending a major shake-up of foreign policy priorities, had not been discussed by cabinet. That decision brought down the wrath of three former prime ministers, but was also greeted with dismay by some of Johnson’s supporters. Andrew Mitchell, the former development secretary who had backed Johnson for the leadership, said the prime minister had “sat in my office and looked me in the eye and told me DfID would be safe”. Critics say sceptical voices rarely make their way to the ear of Johnson, who prefers not to hear from what he calls “the doomsters, the gloomsters”.
Meanwhile, cabinet critics have been relegated to the backbenches, and unsympathetic special advisers edged out by Dominic Cummings, chief adviser, and Johnson’s director of communications, Lee Cain, who has the final say on new advisers’ appointments. One veteran former cabinet minister commented: “The last time No 10 was this centralised was under Tony Blair: Cummings has massively centralised everything.” He added that the single-mindedness that helped win the Brexit referendum and then power Johnson to his 80-strong majority might not be the right skillset for shuffling the scores of complex and shifting issues inside No 10. “What is the characteristic of a campaign team? It is that it focuses on one thing at a time,” he said. Cummings also takes a notoriously scathing view of MPs. In a blogpost last year, he addressed what he called “the narcissist-delusional subset” of the Brexit-backing European Research Group, telling them they should be “treated like a metastasising tumour and excised from the UK body politic”. Johnson’s parliamentary private secretaries, Trudy Harrison and Alex Burghart, whose job it is to liaise with MPs, are well-liked by colleagues, but many feel it is Cummings’ judgment that prevails. Johnson’s parliamentary party has a very different makeup to the one he inherited from Theresa May. The Europhile liberals who left or were expelled during the Brexit crisis – David Gauke, Rory Stewart, Philip Hammond – are no longer in Westminster, while the party has been refreshed by an influx of new “blue wall” Conservatives, with different seats. “These MPs have very, very different views about things like free school meals – they’re not these free-market libertarians,” said one Conservative MP who has watched his party evolve around him in the past 12 months. He highlighted other issues, including nurses’ pay, and the continuation of free school meals vouchers over the Christmas holidays, where the new MPs were likely to try to make their constituents’ voices heard. Summing up the view of several MPs, he said: “The government need to get on the front foot.”