Spoiler alert: I have no idea how many MPs will vote tonight to depose Boris Johnson. What I can do is suggest some benchmarks. 180 anti-Johnson votes comprise a majority: he would be gone. Fewer than 100 (implying more than 250 pro-Johnson Tory MPs) and he is safe.
However, the crystal ball turns murky if the rebellion is more than 100 but fewer than 180. Technically, Johnson carries on, and no further confidence vote can be held for at least 12 months. That’s what Theresa May thought in December 2018, when she won a confidence vote by almost two-to-one (200 to 117). She was gone seven months later.
Of course, no such dramas are exactly alike. May was broken by her party’s inability to come together over Brexit. She was ousted because of political failure, not her personal qualities: even her Tory opponents acknowledged her essential honesty, decency and commitment to public service. In contrast, Johnson’s weakness results from his lack of these very qualities.
What is similar about May and Johnson is the way voters saw them as they struggled to hang on. When May faced her confidence vote, Ipsos Mori found that her satisfaction rating was minus 22 (satisfied 35 per cent, dissatisfied 57 per cent). By the time she was forced out the following summer, her rating had collapsed to minus 44 (25-69).
Johnson’s latest rating is minus 36 (28-64). He has actually recovered slightly from his worst rating in January, minus 46 (24-70). However, he is still in election-losing territory. It is hard to see how the Conservatives could win the next general election with him as their leader.
Now, that may not in itself be a reason to depose him. In 1995, John Major resigned as party leader in order to provoke a contest. He won it easily—and the Tories crashed to a landslide defeat against Tony Blair’s Labour Party in 1997. But by 1995 the Tories were doomed to defeat, whoever led them. There was nothing they could do to avert it.
That’s not the case this time. True, the Tories lost seats in last month’s local elections, and Labour holds a consistent lead in the polls. But Labour’s national lead (2 per cent in the local elections, around 6 per cent in the polls) is fairly modest. At this mid-term stage in the current parliament, an opposition would need sustained leads of 15-20 points, or more, to be confident of winning the next election.
The essential message from the polls is that the Johnson brand is beyond repair, but the Conservative brand can still be saved. They need a leader that enough voters regard as honest, competent and on their side.
Johnson has none of these qualities. His downfall was not caused by his stumbling across a birthday cake or speaking at an official’s leaving bash. It was because he broke his own rules, lied (in the minds of eight out of 10 voters) about what he had done, and generally behaved as if there was one law for him and another law for everyone else.
It is in the Conservative Party’s interest to kill Johnson’s premiership quickly and cleanly. Then the process of putting the party back on the road to recovery can begin. The longer the melodrama goes on—if Johnson survives tonight, but limps on, wounded—the greater the risk that the Tory brand will be tarnished beyond recovery.
