Partygate

The stench of death clings to Boris Johnson. Bury South MP Christian Wakeford has crossed the floor to join Labour. David Davis has told him to resign ‘in the name of God’. Tory MPs reportedly continue to hand in letters of no confidence to the 1922 Committee. Once they reach 54, there will be a vote of confidence. Fresh polling on the Red Wall, conducted by JL Partners for Channel 4, puts Labour at 48 per cent and 37 per cent for the Tories, a near inversion of the 2019 election result. Sir Graham Brady — and Sir Keir — should expect some more knocks on their doors. The revelation

Since he was defeated by Boris Johnson in the 2019 Conservative leadership contest, Jeremy Hunt has had a quieter life as a backbench MP. He has campaigned for the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from custody in Iran and has been an effective and interventionist chairman of the Health Select Committee, often calling out his own party over inadequacies in their response to the Covid crisis and NHS funding. But could he now be preparing for another shot at the top job? Now that partygate looks increasingly likely to lead to a change of leader, Hunt has told the House magazine that: ‘I won’t say my ambition has completely vanished, but

Boris Johnson had hoped to move attention this week from parties — with a series of policy announcements planned as part of ‘Operation Red Meat’, his fightback plan. Nadine Dorries this afternoon told MPs in the Commons of plans to freeze the BBC licence fee for two years while No. 10 plan to bring the military in to tackle the channel crossings — a move that led MPs to congratulate the government on the Tory WhatsApp group. Yet as No. 10 waits for Sue Gray’s report into Partygate, the situation is moving. This afternoon, Boris Johnson’s former aide turned tormentor-in-chief Dominic Cummings published a blog on his Substack in which he made new allegations

The life-or-death question for the Prime Minister is not whether Downing Street and Cabinet Office parties were illegal and should result in criminal prosecutions. Nor is it whether all or indeed any of the parties were actually organised by him. No. What will determine his survival is whether he has the faintest chance of persuading his MPs that he can reform the toxic party culture, rather than being part of it. On the illegality of the assorted parties, there is a loophole – though it is unclear whether it was being exploited when the parties were happening or only as a defence after the event. The point is that official

Whips are made for leadership crises. They are a party leader’s early warning system; they can sniff out plots before they get going. So it is, as I report in this week’s magazine, far from ideal for Boris Johnson that relations between him and the whips office remain strained. The problem dates back to the Owen Paterson affair. The whips were furious that their chief, Mark Spencer, received so much of the blame when they felt he was just following orders from No. 10. The result, one Johnson ministerial loyalist complains, is that ‘the whips’ office are on a go-slow’. When Labour went on the attack with an urgent question on Tuesday,

Haunted. Ashen. Defeated. That’s how the PM looked in parliament this afternoon as he faced the flamethrowers of the opposition. He began with a long apology about the May 2020 party in Downing Street which he said he had attended. And he openly acknowledged the ‘rage’ of the British public. His excuse – embarrassingly flimsy – was that he’d misunderstood the character of the get-together. And he was forced to adopt the lawyerly terms he so decries in others when he referred to the party as ‘the event in question’. So what was it? A wine-tasting? A discreet sherry at sundown? Or a major session with dancing on the tables?