Last weekend, David Cameron had few rebels at all in his party. This week, he has 118.
The vote on the 1922 Committee membership was a free vote, of course, so this can by no means be compared to a proper, whip-defying Commons rebellion. But we have seen there are scores who are not
prepared to support the leadership automatically. As I say in my News of the World column today it
was unnecessary to draw such a dividing line over a party that badly wants the coalition to succeed.
True, Tony Blair bossed his party about. But Blair earned the right to when he won a landslide victory. His message was “if you follow my modernising path, we get mass popular support”. Cameron cannot say this: you have to go back to 1885 to find a Tory Prime Minister who was taken to office with such low electoral support.
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