The 1922 Committee – the organising body for Conservative MPs – faces a momentous decision on Wednesday night. If its members believe the mood of their colleagues is that the Prime Minister must face an immediate further test of his popularity, following the Chris Pincher debacle and the serial resignations from government, they could allow a further vote of confidence in the PM.
But the threshold for such a vote would be massively increased, to avoid the charge that the committee was somehow on a vendetta against the PM and was trampling on the party’s internal rules of democracy.
The new trigger for a vote of confidence would be that the chair of the ’22 committee, Sir Graham Brady, would have to receive letters of no confidence equivalent to a simple majority of MPs.
To state the obvious, if more than half of MPs wrote such letters, it would be obvious that the PM had lost the argument, so it would be tricky for him to say that a new vote was deeply unfair.
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