It’s groundhog day in Westminster, where the leaked images of a No. 10 leaving party have prompted the re-emergence of some of the Prime Minister’s most vocal yet indecisive critics. Cometh the hour, cometh the carpers as veteran Sir Roger Gale and Scottish satrap Douglas Ross returned to their familiar place in the headlines yesterday by attacking Boris Johnson once again. Mr S would have much more sympathy with both Gale and Ross if they both didn’t seem to keep changing their minds on Johnson’s future.
Take Sir Roger – a veteran backbencher and longtime Boris-basher. He submitted a letter of no-confidence in the PM to 1922 chair Sir Graham Brady as far back as May 2020 over his handling of the Barnard Castle affair. After the Shropshire by-election in December 2021, he told the PM ‘one more strike and you’re out.’ Yet in April he then suggested that he had now changed his mind on challenging Johnson’s leadership following the Ukraine invasion. He claimed that ‘All of us – every last miserable backbencher like me – should be concentrating our effort on the matter in hand’ that ‘the game has changed’ and that ‘we should not seek to destabilise the government of the United Kingdom’. Gale also expressed his ‘fear’ about an imminent contest.
But now, barely eight weeks later, he says ‘honourably’ there is only one course open to Johnson, given he ‘misled us from the despatch box’ – even though, the war in Ukraine is still raging. A similar story is true of Ross who said the images released by ITV would make people ‘very angry’ and that the PM needed to explain why it was ‘acceptable.’ The Scottish Tory leader has repeatedly flip-flopped on the questions of Johnson’s leadership, declaring the PM ought to go in mid-January as ‘his position is no longer tenable’ only to withdraw his letter of no-confidence a mere eight weeks later. According to Ross, the Ukraine crisis meant that Johnson was back to being ‘fit for office’ – as though fitness for office is a passing phenomena that sort of comes and goes, like Magic FM in the Chilterns.
They may not like parties but Ross and Gale do seem to enjoy playing games. In, out, shake it all about – you write your Brady letter and U-turn around, that’s what it’s all about!
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