LONDON (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Boris Johnson’s authority, according to Labour, is ‘draining away.’
Labour’s Peter Kyle has rebutted Northern Ireland minister Conor Burns’ allegation that the government has always wanted the Privileges Committee to look into whether Boris Johnson lied to parliament.
He had watched agog as he spoke those words to them in his interview, Mr Kyle told Sky’s Niall Paterson. “If they had the numbers, they would have defeated the motion yesterday.”
On the day of the vote, they put in a wrecking amendment to attempt to derail the whole thing, but they couldn’t even get that through with an 80-vote majority, so they took it out at the last minute.
That indicates there aren’t enough Tory MPs who feel Boris Johnson is telling the truth to really walk through the lobbies and say so.
You could sense Boris Johnson’s and his government’s power ebbing away yesterday, he added.
Johnson is facing an “unprecedented” crisis, according to a former No. 10 chief of staff
Lord Barwell, Theresa May’s former chief of staff, has described Boris Johnson’s leadership as “pretty unprecedented.”
Normally when a government got into trouble, it was because it was doing something that was either very unpopular with their viewers, or it was doing something that was unpopular internally with its party, he told Sky’s Niall Paterson. However, the problems the current government had were all about the prime minister’s behaviour, he added.
The other way it was unprecedented was that whenever a government had a difficult story, the best way to deal with it was to get all the facts out there as soon as possible and apologise, whereas the truth had been dragged out of No 10 day by painful day over the course of about six months.
Steve Baker’s intervention yesterday, in his opinion, was really crucial. Steve was a pivotal figure in Theresa’s downfall, he added.
He was not someone with whom he agree politically, but Steve was a highly principled individual who was also a very successful organiser, so if he were still working in No 10, Niall said he would be quite concerned about his intervention yesterday.
Conservative MPs must ‘take matters into their own hands,’ according to Ellwood.
Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the Defence Select Committee, told Sky News that it was up to Tory MPs to push for a change in the leadership.
There was a recognition that every MP now realised it was up to them to take ownership of this, the former Conservative minister, told Niall Paterson. He was afraid, the lack of discipline, focus, and leadership in Number 10 during that lockdown period had led to a huge breach of trust with the British people, he added.
It was creating such long-term damage to the party’s brand, and repairing it was becoming difficult.
Could it be fixed before the next general election? he asked.
He continued to say that as a result of this, all Conservative MPs were obligated to take matters into their own hands, and he believed, as he said, that this was where things would go, especially because there was more bad news to come.
