No. 10 will be waiting nervously at 10pm on Thursday. Will the end of voting in the local elections bring forward more Tory MPs calling for Boris Johnson to go? At the moment, that seems unlikely: there is a sense among the plotters against the Prime Minister that Thursday is not the right time. So Johnson will move on to the Queen’s speech. But this will reveal another problem for the government. There will be lots of legislation but a lack of a defining theme. This has been a creeping issue for Johnson since his 2019 victory.
Before the Tories go to the country again, they’ll have to show they have a plan for dealing with the problems facing Britain
The two central Tory promises in that campaign were to ‘get Brexit done’ and to stop Jeremy Corbyn: both were achieved quickly. The lack of a subsequent agenda was obscured by the pandemic, which dominated from March 2020 on.
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