How the rebels plan to finish off Boris

The Tory party knows it has a problem with plotting. Of its last nine leaders, six have faced a leadership challenge of some sort. The current rules for removing a leader are designed to constrain the party’s appetite for regicide – no one can be challenged unless 15 per cent of the MPs write demanding a no-confidence vote, and the incumbent benefits from a second layer of protection: win, and they can’t be challenged again for a year.

The purpose of this year of grace is to ensure that rebels can’t keep coming back until they have finished off a wounded leader. But this being the Tory party, the rules are not set in stone. They are determined by the group of MPs who run the 1922 Committee of backbenchers. They can change them at a time of their choosing. Given how close Monday night’s vote was, rebels are already thinking about how they might engineer another in the next few months.

They fell 32 votes short this week. So how to find 32 converts? The coming by-elections in Wakefield and Tiverton might be sufficiently traumatic. If Boris Johnson loses a Red-Wall seat to Labour and a normally solid Tory seat to the Liberal Democrats on the same day, it will cause concern at both ends of the Tory parliamentary party. His great claim is to be an election winner, but that result would suggest he can no longer perform this service. One cabinet loyalist was terrified about the no-confidence ballot happening after these by-elections, believing that if both seats fell, Johnson would have been done for.

As a former cabinet minister who voted against Johnson puts it, ‘If we had been more organised, we would have withdrawn 30 letters on Monday morning, and put them back in after the by-elections.’