It’s one year today since Boris Johnson resigned as prime minister, following mass resignations in the ministerial ranks. At the time Johnson hinted he would return, but 12 months later he is no longer an MP. Meanwhile the Tories have fallen further back in the polls. The last YouGov poll taken before Johnson resigned had Labour on an 11-point lead. The latest YouGov poll finds that this has extended to a 25-point lead, with Rishi Sunak struggling to reverse the party’s fortunes.
So, where did it all go wrong? As expected, those who back Johnson look at those poll differences and argue it is evidence that the Tory party collectively lost its mind last summer and has been paying the price ever since. On our latest Coffee House Shots podcast, Fraser asks whether the party would really be in a worse place had MPs just stuck with Johnson. In such a scenario, Liz Truss’s mini-Budget – the moment the polls really turned in Keir Starmer’s favour – would never have happened.
However, Johnson was on a collision course with the Privileges Committee. Right now, MPs are campaigning for the Uxbridge by-election, sparked by Johnson’s decision to quit the House of Commons. In a world where Johnson had never quit, he could right now be fighting a by-election – sparked by a suspension for misleading parliament – as prime minister. On the podcast, Fraser says the Privileges Committee may not have put forward a suspension over ten days (what triggers a recall petition that can lead to a by-election) had Johnson still been prime minister. But it was certainly the fear of even some supportive MPs when Johnson pondered a return after Truss’s demise.
The truth is that it’s near impossible to predict what would have happened in the event Johnson had stayed put. What is clear is that MPs moved to oust Johnson seeing it as a course correction that would put the party back on track and improve their chances of re-election. ‘There was definitely a sense of hope that the situation was fixable,’ says one former minister. Twelve months on, there is little sense of mutiny but many MPs are now pricing in defeat when it comes to next year’s election.
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