Boris Johnson and Liz Truss are spitefully disloyal to Rishi Sunak already

Two former prime ministers putting their name to a rebel amendment is an ominous sign for the new guy, writes John Rentoul

I suspect that the amendment will come to nothing (Getty)

Yesterday I wondered why politics had become so unstable that we had three prime ministers this year. No sooner had my article been published than Boris Johnson and Liz Truss confirmed that part of the explanation is a breakdown of discipline in the parliamentary Conservative Party.

The two former prime ministers have signed an amendment to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill to permit local authorities to grant planning permission for onshore wind turbines. This is of course a thoroughly Good Thing, and it was a Bad Thing that land-based windmills have been more or less banned since 2015, when David Cameron gave in to Conservative MPs who didn’t want them in their constituents’ back yards.

But if we ignore for a moment the merits of the case, what is remarkable about Johnson and Truss’s signatures on the amendment is their disloyalty. In Johnson’s case the offence is compounded by his hypocrisy, as a recent prime minister who kept Cameron’s ban and who now that he has left office has decided that whoever was prime minister between 2019 and 2022 really should have overturned it.

I suspect that the amendment will come to nothing. Government sources have already said that Michael Gove, the levelling-up secretary, will be working constructively with backbench colleagues to get the bill right. This means that the government itself will probably amend the bill to allow wind turbines where there is local consent and everybody can argue for the next six blue moons how local consent should be measured.

So the significance of the amendment is for what it says about the unity of the Conservative Party. It was proposed by Simon Clarke, the Tory MP for Stockton-on-Tees who was promoted by Johnson and then Truss (he was levelling-up secretary for her seven weeks in No 10), but who is now on the backbenches. There, he is one of the 51 per cent of Tory backbenchers who are former ministers, according to Sam Francis of the BBC, including, unusually, three former prime ministers.

The longer a party is in government, the more former ministers there will be on its back benches. This should not necessarily mean that a government suffers more parliamentary rebellions, but in practice it does. Rishi Sunak was careful to try to balance the factions in making his government, knowing that the dispossessed would be looking for chances to make trouble at some point – but he must have hoped for a truce lasting longer than 30 days.

Johnson and Truss are not uniquely disloyal among Tory former prime ministers. Ted Heath was resentful of Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was unhelpful to John Major, stirring the party’s divisions over Europe. Major was rude about Johnson. David Cameron was the recent exception as a model of restraint. Theresa May was an occasional critic of Johnson’s government, but she waited longer than 30 days before she got started.

Nor is the traffic all one-way. Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have been blunt about the “mistakes” made by Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. At the Spectator awards this week, Kemi Badenoch, the international trade secretary, mocked Johnson, comparing him to the villain Thanos in the Marvel universe.

She was named “minister to watch”, and said: “I thought I might get resignation of the year, but actually it went to a far more deserving candidate. For those of you who are Marvel fans, it really was like Avengers Assemble. Sajid [Javid] was Captain America: ‘It’s time to take down Thanos.’ We did it.”

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Yes, it was a joke, just as Hunt’s comments, on receiving “survivor of the year” – about Truss having painted over Johnson’s gold Downing Street wallpaper – were not strictly factual. But they sound like a party at war with itself.

The levelling-up bill amendment is another straw in the (onshore) wind. Former prime ministers are stoking parliamentary rebellions. Cabinet ministers make jokes at the expense of former prime ministers. Conservative MPs are starting to announce that they are standing down. Each can be explained away. It is a sensible amendment; it was just a joke; there are many reasons for MPs standing down.

But together these straws suggest that the political weather is changing – and not necessarily to the government’s advantage.