The mood among Tory MPs is too mutinous to permit that. This does not mean that heJohnson is in the clear and will get away with it. The revolt of MPs in the confidence vote last month, meanwhile, was botched by being both badly timed and unsuccessful. Johnson will feel his policy of choosing his cabinet for its fidelity not its ability has protected his flank. The cabinet refused to move against Johnson in June when it should have done, and the departures of Sunak and Javid have not yet been followed by other senior ministers. The other would be a revolt of the parliamentary party, of the kind that eventually did for Theresa May three summers ago.īoth of these possibilities have now gone off at half-cock. A cabinet revolt would be one, as happened when Thatcher was forced out. Ordinarily, one of two things would finish him off. Under a highly effective assault from Keir Starmer and some of his own MPs, he has now lost his authority in the House of Commons. He has lost his chancellor and two other cabinet ministers in less than two weeks. If he stands, he could be the one to beat in the now almost inevitable succession contest. With this speech, with its focus on the values that Johnson readily flouts, its echoes of Geoffrey Howe’s role in the ousting of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 and its resonant “enough is enough” line, the former health secretary has made himself the principal voice of Tory backbench anti-Johnson feeling. Javid’s excoriating speech to MPs today was the moment when Johnson’s survival chances crossed a watershed.

Mutiny vapors