Katy Balls Katy Balls

Can Boris take back control of No. 10?

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There’s a mutinous mood in Westminster this Christmas. In quiet corridors on the parliamentary estate the question is being asked: has Boris outlived his usefulness? Ministers are laying low. Tory WhatsApp groups are hushed. MPs are dodging calls from the whips, claiming to be sick or working from home. In conversations with Tory MPs, it isn’t long before the topic of Johnson’s long-term future comes up.

‘Everyone’s sniffing the air — you can just feel it,’ says a former adviser to the Prime Minister. Members of the cabinet, from Liz Truss to Rishi Sunak, are accused of being on manoeuvres. One former minister has taken to measuring his office to work out how many desks he can fit into it, should a contest begin sooner rather than later. The answer: 16, enough to host a small campaign team.

This isn’t how Johnson’s team imagined the Prime Minister would mark the two-year anniversary of the day the Tories won a majority of 80. Just a month ago, cabinet ministers were joking about which one of them could claim the credit for ‘saving Christmas’, thanks to the vaccine rollout. Instead, Christmas once again hangs in the balance and Britain is plunged back into uncertainty, not just over the Omicron variant but the government’s confused response to it.

It’s hard for Johnson to tell people not to go to parties when he is beating back stories that his own staff broke lockdown rules last winter and held as many as four parties in No. 10. His approach — to deny any parties took place — ran into problems when leaked footage emerged showing senior aides joking about a Downing Street Christmas party in a mock press conference. When Johnson moved to his Covid ‘Plan B’ and introduced vaccine passports just hours after the video became public, Tory MPs openly accused him of trying to distract attention from an uncomfortable story.

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