UK: Will PM run out of road?

Pursued by angry MPs and a wily Dominic Cummings, and paranoid about his own staff, a volatile Boris Johnson is approaching the cliff edge.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

It was Tuesday when Boris Johnson and his closest aides realised they had a serious problem. After a quiet weekend, 20 rebels from the 2019 intake of MPs had met and agreed to submit letters of no confidence in his leadership.

Dan Rosenfield, the No 10 chief of staff, called a meeting of parliamentary private secretaries (PPSs) – the backbench MPs who work as assistants to ministers. Many of them had won their seats in Johnson’s landslide two years ago.

What happened next left Rosenfield astonished and the British Prime Minister on notice that even those on the government payroll might not stick with him, should the rebels succeed in forcing a confidence vote this week.

One after another the PPSs – the lowest rung of government office – expressed their displeasure at the chaotic mess that is Johnson’s operation. At least three called for senior resignations.

Paul Holmes, an aide to Home Secretary Priti Patel, said the operation was “a failure” and that “heads must roll”. Mark Fletcher, who works with Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, agreed. Then Jane Hunt spoke up. The mild-mannered aide to Steve Barclay, the Cabinet Office minister, told him: “I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.”

In the meeting, Rosenfield claimed the PM would ride out the scandal surrounding lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street when Sue Gray, the Whitehall watchdog, completes her investigation. He said the report would come back by that Friday, and promised to lead a clean-up of No 10 and install a new team.

“He thought he was talking to his ground troops,” said one ministerial aide. “He was quite patronising.”

By close of play on Tuesday, confidence in No 10 that Gray would report that week had evaporated and, as word spread of the breadth and depth of her inquiries, concern grew that the document would be highly damaging.

With support disappearing, Johnson decided to deploy ground troops of his own. The Prime Minister called several of the ministers and MPs who helped get him elected leader in 2019. The message was clear: he did not trust the Downing Street apparatus to save his job. “Let’s get the old gang back together,” he told aides.

Those called included the former whips Nigel Adams, Chris Pincher and Chris Heaton-Harris, plus Conor Burns, his own former PPS. They set up a shadow operation to lobby MPs – a tacit admission that Johnson had lost faith in his chief whip, Mark Spencer. They even commandeered Spencer’s constituency office in the Commons. “Boris sent up the bat signal. Avengers assemble!” said one MP, mixing superhero metaphors.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps was asked to dust off the spreadsheet he used to count supporters and opponents three years ago, complete with a record of their views, which Johnson loyalists had spoken to them and what their concerns were.

Boris Johnson in in the House of Commons in London.

“The whole operation is geared to telling Boris who to call and what to say,” said an insider. The Prime Minister is hitting the phones at [prime minister’s official country retreat] Chequers to try to shore up support.

Those close to him say Johnson is in emotional torment, his mood fluctuating wildly. His temper veers between complacent confidence and a determination to fight, plus a fatalistic fear that his brand of political magic has been broken, according to those who have spoken to him in the last week.

“It reminds me of when he came back after he had Covid,” one Downing Street official said. “A lot of his trains of thought didn’t make a lot of sense. He’s quite up and down. He doesn’t trust any of his team.”

In calls with cabinet ministers last week, Johnson continued to express anger that he had been let down by his No 10 team. However, he was cocky when he addressed a meeting of Tory peers on Wednesday evening.

“He turned up and was quite dismissive about the inquiry, talking about when all this stuff has blown over,” said one of those present. “He seemed to think the report would be fine.”

On Tuesday he was hangdog when he expressed regret in a television interview about the No 10 party that raged on the eve of the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral.

In the interview, he claimed no one told him that the key party he attended, on May 20, 2020, was against the rules. Watching, David Davis, a fellow Brexiteer, resolved to speak out.

Having asked Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, for “a free hit” at the end of prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Davis got to his feet and intoned the words with which Oliver Cromwell dismissed the Long Parliament and Leo Amery helped destroy Neville Chamberlain in 1940: “You have sat here too long for all the good that you have done. In the name of God, go.”

Johnson’s allies were withering, comparing Davis’s quest for the limelight with that of Michael Heseltine: “Margaret Thatcher used to say, ‘The trouble with Michael is he wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.’ That’s DD.”

In the tea room afterwards, Leo Docherty, a defence minister, called Davis “a traitor”. When he was tipped off, Davis texted Docherty, inviting him to “duel with pistols”.

In fact, Davis’s intervention helped to unify the Conservatives. It came after Christian Wakeford, the Tory MP for Bury South, defected to Labour just before prime minister’s questions. The anger that act provoked in his colleagues caused a closing of the ranks.

Wakeford had been in talks with Labour for months but only agreed to jump in a meeting with the party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, on Monday. Labour officials dubbed it Operation Domino, and suggested that other red wallers could cross the floor.

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson at a Coronavius update.

Wakeford had not been present at two meetings of the 2019 intake – the seeds of the rebellion. On Monday, a dozen MPs disillusioned with Johnson met in the office of Chris Loder, the MP for West Dorset, for what one described as “group therapy more than strategy”.

They were already under surveillance. A staffer from the office of Rebecca Harris, a whip, was lingering in the corridor as they went in. “We probably should have pulled it,” one MP said. “But we’re new to this.”

The following day, around 20 gathered in the office of Alicia Kearns to decide what to do. There was talk of a joint letter or statement calling for Johnson to quit. Some were unwilling to show their hand, so they held a secret ballot to determine how many had already submitted a letter to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee, demanding a no confidence vote. The procedure would be triggered by 54 letters.

Ten letters had already gone in and 10 more were soon to follow. The whips and the shadow whips responded with a combination of carrots and sticks, with accusations that these veered towards bribery and blackmail.

Declan Lyons and Ben Gascoigne, two of Johnson’s political aides, contacted rebels they thought could be brought back onto the reservation. Kearns was told by an intermediary that there was a road to a government job if she ceased her activities.

It is Gray’s activities, however, that are really feared in No 10. She interviewed Johnson last week, as well as Martin Reynolds, the prime minister’s principal private secretary, who sent the email inviting people to “bring your own booze” to the May 20 party.

“She’s had to have conversations over the years with ministers about where they have put bits of their anatomy,” said one senior Tory. “She can be pretty blunt.”

One plank of Johnson’s defence – that he thought the party was a work event – will be the entry in his official electronic diary for 6pm that day. Sources said that what Johnson looked at on his phone was “staff meeting” or something like it.

The mood in No 10 changed midweek following rumours that Reynolds had “turned” and was helping Gray extensively. She has already obtained an email to him from one senior official warning the party was a bad idea. Dominic Cummings, the former Johnson aide who now wants him removed, and who is expected to see Gray on Monday, was another who told Reynolds to ditch the idea.

The concern is that Reynolds has told Gray he checked with the prime minister whether to proceed, or can point to a message he sent Johnson – a potential smoking gun. “Martin doesn’t have much to lose,” a colleague said.

One of the rebels said: “The Prime Minister is asking us to believe that the PPS [Reynolds] has had this advice from senior officials in No 10, ignored it, brought the prime minister to the party anyway - and Boris has turned up and is literally so stupid that he can’t tell the difference between a work event and a drinks party.”

Officials and political advisers quizzed by Gray have quickly been awed into co-operating. “She’s got everything,” said one special adviser. “All the pass data that shows what time people went in and what time they left. She knows how late these parties went on.”

It can also be revealed that the scope of Gray’s inquiry has expanded to include alleged parties in the flat that Johnson shares above No 11 Downing Street with his wife, Carrie, and their two children.

Gray has been told that two of Carrie Johnson’s close friends, Henry Newman and Josh Grimstone, visited the private flat on numerous occasions during lockdown – but that it was for work reasons.

A government source said that Gray was prepared to accept the explanation – but it is understood that some of her investigators regard it as difficult to reconcile with the rules, since both Newman (now a senior aide in No 10) and Grimstone (who works for the housing secretary, Michael Gove) were at the time working in the Cabinet Office, not No 10.

One Whitehall source said: “The investigators are concerned about the flat. Why are two spads [special advisers] from the Cabinet Office going there frequently to have work meetings with the Prime Minister without any officials present? It doesn’t pass the sniff test.”

Cummings has previously said there were parties in the flat. That will be worrying for both Johnsons, after a week in which they suffered the trauma of their new baby, Romy, contracting a bad case of Covid.

Former Number 10 special advisor Dominic Cummings.

Cummings’s testimony means that Gray’s report is likely to be delayed until at least Wednesday, if not Thursday. Whitehall officials say Rosenfield’s pressure on her to report by the end of last week caused tensions.

Gray is said to have told a friend that No 10 would be in a worse mess if she stepped back from the inquiry, although she made no threat to resign. “She was furious that Dan told MPs he was confident the PM was going to be exonerated,” a source close to No 10 said. “She felt she was being boxed in.

“She’s calmed down a bit, but there was a lot of grumbling.”

A source close to Gray said she had never threatened to resign or that anyone from Downing Street had put pressure on her directly to speed up her inquiry, but they could “not rule out” that she had made “a throwaway comment”. The source added: “She is aware of the pressure and significance of the report.”

Insiders say that Gray, a Whitehall lifer, has been stunned at the chaos and dysfunction she has uncovered at the heart of government. At least 40 officials are likely to be criticised.

Junior civil servants who sent out party invitations at someone else’s instruction, or those who just got drunk, are unlikely to be named (partly to avoid controversy when their names are then redacted). Instead their boss will be advised to have a disciplinary chat about behaviour.

Gray will give Johnson a copy of the report “a few hours” before it is released to the public, perhaps overnight. Johnson will then make a statement to the Commons to apologise.

His fate hangs on what happens next. Johnson said “Bring it on!” to aides last week about the prospect of a no confidence vote being triggered. But different “cells” of disgruntled ministers are also contemplating moving against him. One plotter, a former cabinet minister, said: “They won’t jump alone; they give each other cover.”

Even if he wins a no confidence vote, Johnson will need to bring those irate PPSs back into the fold - as well as those on the government payroll - with a shake-up in No 10.

“The senior staff are clear that we need to protect the prime minister,” said one of those in the line of fire, signalling the potential for mass resignations from Johnson’s inner circle.

Rosenfield told colleagues last week they may need to “fall on their swords” - although one colleague remarked: “He didn’t give the impression he would be leaping onto the first sword.”

There are discussions about Rosenfield being offered a peerage and a ministerial job in the Cabinet Office, or the chance to return as a mandarin to the Treasury. He could be replaced by Simone Finn, the deputy chief of staff, a more political figure. Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, could be found an ambassadorship or moved to an intelligence job, such as the head of GCHQ when the post next becomes available.

There are serious questions about whether Johnson can recover. One senior Whitehall figure said: “Everyone seems to be forgetting the spectre of the Covid inquiry, which is going to have to start this year. That psychodrama is going to continue. Is Boris going to give evidence about whether he wanted the bodies to pile high? That might be better as an ex-prime minister.”

Another of the parliamentary aides in the Rosenfield meeting said: “At some point in politics you always lose the benefit of the doubt and I think that this might be the time for him. That ability to glide through scrapes has gone.”

If Johnson has truly lost his political superpowers, it will not matter how many Avengers assemble.

THE SUNDAY TIMES