Portrait of the week: A no-confidence vote, a marginal win and the Queen’s Jubilee

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Boris Johnson won a vote of confidence in him as prime minister among Conservative MPs by 211 votes to 148 (58.8 per cent in favour, compared with 63 per cent in favour of Theresa May in 2018). No more such votes are allowed for a year. Workmen had still been dismantling the staging in front of Buckingham Palace from the Jubilee celebrations when Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee, announced that, as at least 54 MPs had written letters requesting it, there would be a secret ballot on the question. Boris Johnson had been booed by people in the crowd as he walked up the steps of St Paul’s with his wife Carrie for the service of thanksgiving for the Queen’s 70 years on the throne. A memorandum had circulated last weekend saying that ‘MPs are having to defend the indefensible, not for the sake of the party, but for one man’.