Boris Johnson’s loss of authority

There is an uneasy truce in the Tory party. The 148 MPs who voted no confidence in Boris Johnson last week haven’t suddenly changed their minds, but some of them are prepared to give him a year’s grace to try to turn his premiership around. Others are looking for an earlier opportunity to strike, yet they know it is counterproductive to admit that now. They realise that if they are going to persuade the 1922 executive to change the rules to allow another confidence vote within 12 months they will need to argue that the circumstances have substantially changed. While they wait for the moment to attack, it would not be helpful to their cause if they hinted that they are already working out how to change the rules.

There is relief among Johnson’s supporters that he has lived to fight another day. One secretary of state who is as inclined to optimism as his boss thinks that ‘the greased piglet might slip through’, pointing out that Labour had a bigger lead in polls in 2013 than it does today and that the speed of change in British politics means Johnson could recover.