Tory rebels have Boris Johnson in their sights

Boris Johnson’s position will be ‘intolerable’ if he is found to have knowingly misled parliament over the Downing Street parties scandal, a senior Tory MP has said.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson says the matter of his leadership has been settled. Picture: AFP

Boris Johnson’s position will be “intolerable” if he is found to have knowingly misled parliament over the Downing Street parties scandal, a senior Tory MP has said.

Steve Baker, a critic of the British Prime Minister who has called for him to resign, has ­become the first backbencher to announce his candidacy in the forthcoming elections of the 1922 Committee that oversees confidence votes.

Mr Johnson narrowly survived a confidence vote earlier this month, when four in 10 Tory MPs voted to remove him from office. Under the present rules he is safe from challenge for ­another year.

The Prime Minister said on Monday that he believed the matter was now “settled” and that he had a “mandate” from his party to stay on as Prime Minister despite the scale of opposition to his leadership.

But Tory rebels want to change the 1922 Committee’s rules to allow for another challenge. Its 18 officers and executives are due to be elected in a fortnight.

Mr Baker said that the committee must be “quick and resolute” in changing the rules if the Prime Minister is found to have breached the ministerial code. The code states that ministers who “knowingly mislead” the House of Commons must resign.

The privileges committee, a cross-party committee of MPs, is investigating whether Mr Johnson “knowingly misled” MPs when he claimed that there were no Downing Street parties.

Scotland Yard issued 126 fixed-penalty notices last month to people in No.10 for attending lockdown-breaching parties, including the Prime Minister and Chancellor Rishi Sunak.

Writing in The Times, Mr Baker said: “It is one thing to make an inadvertent error and correct it but intolerable to deliberately mislead.”

Mr Baker is one of several critics of Mr Johnson who are ­expected to stand in the 1922 elections, increasing the likelihood of a change in the rules. The officers and executives on the committee will be elected by 213 backbench Tory MPs and 51 government aides known as parliamentary private secretaries. The majority of the backbenchers are thought to have voted to remove the Prime Minister.

Mr Johnson’s allies argue that changing the rules to remove him from office would permanently destabilise the Conservatives. They say that his successors would be unable to plan for the long term because they would worry about their future.

“The new leader would be just as destabilised,” one ally said. “Every leader would have a gun to their head from their back benches. They’d be only able to think six months ahead.”

At the G7 summit in Germany on Monday, Mr Johnson said about the questions over his leadership: “We settled that a couple of weeks ago. What I’m focused on, and what we’re doing is getting on with, number one, all the stuff we’re doing to help people with the cost of living in the short term.”

European Council president Charles Michel, left, helps direct Prime Minister Boris Johnson to his spot for the extended family photo of leaders from the G7 and partner countries. Picture: Getty Images

He told the BBC that the vote had given him a “mandate” to stay on.

“I not only have the authority, I’ve got a new mandate from my party, which I’m absolutely ­delighted about,” he said.

“I’m focused on what I’m doing as a leader of the country, and it’s driving a massive, massive agenda.”

The Environment Secretary, George Eustice, told Times Radio that Mr Johnson had the support of his cabinet despite the resignation of Oliver Dowden on Friday as chairman of the party.

“I sometimes feel in these situations that prime ministers can’t win,” Mr Eustice said. “They either say that they want to carry on and they’ve got a lot to do and they want to keep going. And that’s what obviously Margaret Thatcher said and what Boris Johnson is perceived to have said.

“Or like Tony Blair, they say they’re not going to go on and on and people spend years arguing about the date of their departure. So they can’t really win in these situations.”

The Times