The Tories are becoming ungovernable

Today’s no-confidence vote in Boris Johnson is best seen as the next stage of a determined long-term plot to bring him down rather than as a stand-alone event. That is to say, Johnson will not be safe or restored to anything like full political health simply by winning it. Unless he triumphs by a crushing margin, he will have been further weakened and face new waves of attacks from a Labour opposition into whose lap huge amounts of extra ammunition will have been deposited by Conservative backbenchers.

One can almost already hear Keir Starmer at PMQs this week making the taunting observation that ‘more than a hundred of the people sitting behind him right now agree with most of the British people that he isn’t fit for office’. The spectacle of Johnson struggling to keep his head above water – and internal plots against PMs are always in part a mass spectator sport – will further weaken Tory prospects in both of the impending by-elections; one in Johnson’s northern Red Wall, one in the traditional Tory Blue Wall.

So don’t believe Conservative loyalists who claim that any numerical win this evening automatically ends the uncertainty about whether this PM will lead the party into the next election.