For half an hour yesterday, Boris Johnson united his party – now it’s split again

Conservative MPs cheered Johnson on as he defended the nation from the spectre of a three-week lockdown. But they are now furious with him again, writes John Rentoul

Boris Johnson during Prime Minister’s Questions this week (PRU/AFP/Getty)

The day after he united his party, the prime minister disunited it again. Yesterday, Conservative MPs cheered him on as he defended the nation from the spectre of a three-week lockdown proposed by Keir Starmer. Yesterday, they were furious with Boris Johnson for conceding, essentially, that Starmer had been right, and that, 72 hours after new restrictions were imposed, it was time to impose greater ones on much of the country.

So the Conservative back benches have resumed their normal state of incipient rebellion, deciding that their prime minister is not on their side against Starmer, but on Starmer’s side against them.

Not that the Labour Party is happy that the government has moved in its direction. Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, still managed to say that people may die as a result of the government’s failure to go far enough. He argued in the Commons that moving London, Manchester and somewhere called Elmbridge into tier 2 is not enough. (If you had told me Elmbridge was the fictional setting of one of George Eliot’s lesser known works, I would have fallen for it: actually it’s Esher and a cluster of other commuter suburbs just outside the Greater London boundary to the south.)

The Labour Party is not united either, however. Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, led the modern equivalent of the Pilgrimage of Grace – via Zoom, and then a press conference on the steps of the town hall – refusing to accept that his city should be moved into tier 3. 

He had several different arguments, some of them contradictory, but he pressed them all simultaneously. He seized on Starmer’s plan for a short national “circuit breaker” lockdown to argue that he wouldn’t accept the additional restrictions of tier 3 unless the whole of the country did. And if that didn’t work, he said he wouldn’t go into tier 3 unless the government gave him more money. Besides, he wasn’t going to sacrifice jobs and businesses in Manchester “to try and save them elsewhere”.

He would say he was arguing for equality of sacrifice around the country, but he came close to saying that he didn’t agree with the national Labour Party’s call for greater temporary restrictions at all. Having previously sounded like Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, in arguing for tighter restrictions in his area, he was now resisting them.

All local leaders have to take the side of their electorate against central government, but Khan did so by arguing to go up a tier, while Burnham argued not to. It was also striking that Burnham seemed to borrow some of the themes of the Scottish National Party, saying: “We will not be treated as second-class citizens where the government can impose an underfunded regional lockdown on us.”

This phase of the coronavirus crisis is having a dramatic effect on sub-national identities being defined against London – as we saw with yesterday’s Ipsos MORI opinion poll showing a record 58 per cent support for Scottish independence.

There is disunity all round. But the most worrying split for the prime minister is that with his MPs. The rallying effect of Starmer’s clear policy difference proved to be short lived. It was only on Tuesday this week that 44 Tory MPs defied the whip in a protest vote against the prime minister (42 voted against and there were two more who acted as tellers for the vote), which is – just – enough to wipe out the government’s working majority of 85.

But that was a symbolic vote, on the 10pm closing-time law that had already been superseded by the three-tier rules. If there were a real rebellion over approving some of the rules that Tory MPs now regard as, in effect, a second lockdown, the numbers could go higher. The government won’t lose a vote in the Commons yet, because Labour won’t back the Tory rebels, but no prime minister wants to rely on the opposition in order to carry on governing.

After a brief respite that lasted for about the half-hour of Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Boris Johnson is up against it again, struggling to hold together a divided party.