How the Tories can avoid a repeat of their confidence vote conundrum

Boris Johnson insists that his victory in last night’s confidence vote means he will be able to ‘draw a line under issues our opponents want to talk about’. But what the result actually shows, as Boris undoubtedly knows, is that even some of those who backed him in the vote now want him gone.

Why? Shortly after the debacle, Matthew Parris in the Times hit the nail on the head. One minister had, he wrote, let the cat out of the bag when he (or she) confided to him: ‘He’s appalling: he’s got to go’ before trooping in to vote against the no-confidence motion with gritted teeth. It is a racing certainty that there are many others who thought, and acted, in just the same way: without doubt many more than the 32 who would have had to switch sides to change the result.

The problem, of course, is that for anyone on the government payroll (a group comprising something over 160 MPs), this exercise in party democracy was not exactly either free or fair.