Boris Johnson is at odds with his parliamentary party on the biggest issue of the day. Not Brexit – where the vast majority of Tory MPs continue to back his hardball approach – but Covid.
No. 10’s approach, as I say in the magazine this week , now is one of pre-emption. They want to clamp down on the virus long before it has a chance to get out of control. Tory MPs, though, still favour a policy of containment: broadly, they believe that the government should stick to the approach that guided the easing of the lockdown, trying to keep the virus within the capacity of the health service to deal with it.
Right now, Tory MPs who don’t like the direction of the policy can’t do much more than grumble. But the emergency powers that the government have been using need to be renewed at the end of this month. Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee, is planning an amendment to the bill that would require a vote before any new national restrictions came into force. Both government whips and the rebels think that more than 40 Tory MPs will back it, wiping out the government’s majority.
No. 10 is now trying to find a compromise that leads to the amendment being dropped, or support for it draining away. Johnson is already promising more statements and debates and the ability for MPs to question the government’s scientific advisers more frequently. (There is also a chance that the amendment might not be called for procedural reasons). The bulk of the rebels, though, are adamant that there must be a return to votes in parliament on these matters.
Votes would pose a danger for No. 10. There’d, inevitably, be Tory rebels – and voting against the government tends to be habit forming.
It would also present Keir Starmer with the opportunity to present himself as a responsible leader of the opposition supporting a Prime Minister who has lost control of his own party. It is not hard to imagine circumstances in which more than 40 Tory MPs might bridle at, say, a temporary shutdown of hospitality. At which point, Starmer could tell the Prime Minister to bring the measure forward anyway as Labour would support it.
Johnson won’t need reminding of the damage that this can cause to a Prime Minister. He will well remember how at David Cameron’s first Prime Minister’s Questions as Tory leader he offered to support Tony Blair’s school reforms, telling him that he didn’t need to water them down to gain Labour support as the Tories would be with him in the division lobbies. The offer simultaneously made Cameron look statesmanlike while also driving a wedge between Blair and his own side. If parliament ends up voting on every Covid measure, Starmer would have plenty of opportunities to pull off this trick.
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