Might Tory MPs refuse to recognise Boris Johnson as PM?

Might Tory MPs refuse to recognisee Boris Johnson as leader if party members choose him? George Osborne raises the prospect on the Andrew Neil Show today saying:

“I think there’s a real chance the Tory parliamentary party says ‘we don’t accept the result of the members’ ballot. We don’t accept that 200 of us are going to serve under a PM we didn’t want’. And so I think the crisis will develop sooner than the privileges committee. It will develop at the end of this coming week and the beginning of this coming week, the beginning of next week, if Johnson gets through.

This might reflect the attitude of Osborne’s contacts in Parliament (who found Boris V1 hard enough to deal with) but it’s not, so far, hugely widespread. There are degrees of Boris hatred, and only a small number are at the stage when they’d resign the whip or trigger a by-election if he came back. Johnson can have that effect on people.

But Osborne left Parliament in 2017 and isn’t really plugged in to the new, far-more-Brexity lot. About a third of Tory MPs arrived after he left and a good number would not be in parliament at all if it were not for Johnson.

But most of all, refusal to recognise the results of any leadership election would be Trumpian act of insanity which would trigger a constitutional crisis in and split the Tory party. There are some Tories who are in 'après nous le déluge' mood, but so far only a handful. If the Tory MPs really were of that inclination they’d have cut the members out completely. Instead they have gone to this untested digital vote malarky to be seen to abide by the letter of the constitution.

But Osborne is right in one important regard. A Tory party that voted heavily for Sunak but ended up with Johnson would be ungovernable, with rebellions aplenty. This was the case before he left. Such was Johnson’s epic party mismanagement that his stonking majority had, in effect, vanished before he quit and that’s why he quit. Dozens of ministers had resigned, refusing to serve for a man they could no longer trust.

My hunch is that Tory members will factor this in when they vote. They are caricatured – by people like my good friend James Kirkup – as swivel-eyed loons with a picture of Boris on their bedside. But they also want a semi-functional government and will have noticed that Johnson was ultimately unable to achieve this. They will not be naive about the implications of foisting Johnson upon a party that rejected him by (say) a margin of three-to-one.

Two days ago, I’d have said that if Johnson got to the members then he won. Polls of members (a pretty inexact science) indicated he led Sunak three-to-two. But that was a hypothetical. Now we’re facing a changed situation, with new information. But the wall of hostility Johnson has encountered, from former diehard loyalists like Suella Braverman and Brexit spartans like Steve Baker, will be noticed by Tory members. They will also notice that, 24 hours after his team claimed to have 100 names, they can only name 60 of them. Who are the rest?

This matters. If Johnson is already misleading people before he has even declared – or if his team was so chaotic that someone misled on his behalf but without his knowledge – then what does that say about Boris V2?  Nothing says ‘I’ve changed’ more than lying about the number of solid campaign backers. This is precisely what led to the Chris Pincher debacle, and the situation where ministers could not repeat No. 10 pledges on radio because even they could not trust them. We have gone back to the bad old days, before Johnson has even declared for leader.

Tory members will notice this. They will also know that his campaigning prowess has blunted a bit – the below chart shows that all PMs steadily cede popularity, and Johnson went through his pretty quickly. 

Again, Tory members are not the imbeciles that they are commonly made out to be. And you can’t blame them for Liz Truss. If they had a full choice last time, polls show they’d have gone for Kemi Badenoch – but they were given a stitch-up by the MPs and that got up their nose. Even then, Sunak won 43 per cent of the vote: he just needed another 7 per cent. 

So I no longer believe that Johnson is likely to win in a members’ vote against Sunak. Tory members are not the suicide cult of their caricature. If MPs go heavily for Sunak, they’ll factor that in. There are, still, many variables in this race – there are about 100 MPs whose intentions we don’t know. Anything can still happen. But the Tory MPs refusing to recognise the result of their own party’s election result is, I’d say, one of the few outcomes that we can rule out.