U-turn on Commons vote confirms the weakness of Boris Johnson’s position

The prime minister has so weakened the props of his support among Tory MPs that they are not prepared to lift a finger to save him, writes John Rentoul

The PM’s position has been so undermined by his apparent belief that the normal rules don’t apply to him and by his recklessness with facts (Reuters)

Keir Starmer is turning out to be good at this opposition business. Successful politics does not consist of calling your opponent a liar. The successful bit was in drafting a Commons motion that was so mildly worded that Conservative MPs felt squeamish about voting against it.

Today’s government U-turn exposes the fundamental weakness of the prime minister’s position. He cannot rely on his own MPs to vote for him when the opposition parties make a reasonable suggestion. The Labour motion asked the Commons to refer the question of whether the prime minister had misled parliament to a committee of MPs with a Conservative majority – the Labour chair of which, Chris Bryant, has recused himself from its deliberations – but not until after the police have completed their investigations.

If Boris Johnson had been in a stronger position, he could have asked his MPs to vote against the opposition motion just because it was an opposition motion. He could have pointed out to Tory MPs that Labour are playing parliamentary games, which of course they are.

That much should be obvious, because Starmer had to preface today’s debate by standing up to admit that he too had misled parliament. He withdrew his comments of yesterday, when he had attacked the prime minister for accusing the BBC of “not being critical enough of Putin”. This should have been a good illustration of the importance of the distinction between inadvertently misleading parliament and doing so “knowingly”, which is what the constitution prohibits and what the word “lie” means.

Starmer had believed what he read in the newspapers, particularly, the front page headline in Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph, which turned out not to be accurate.

Starmer knows perfectly well that he is unlikely to be able to show that Johnson “knowingly” misled the Commons when he said in December that all the rules had been followed in No 10. So far Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief adviser, has said that the prime minister would have been warned that the “bring your own booze” event in the Downing Street garden was a bad idea, but there is no evidence that he was.

However, the prime minister’s position has been so undermined by his apparent belief that the normal rules don’t apply to him, by his reluctance to set the record straight, and by his recklessness with facts. He was at it again yesterday, repeating the claim that there are now “record numbers of people now in work”, having been repeatedly reminded that this is untrue.

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That is why Starmer has Johnson on the run. The prime minister has so weakened the props of his support among Tory MPs that they are not prepared to lift a finger to save him. Most of them are not prepared to lift a finger to get rid of him either, mainly because there isn’t (any longer) an obvious candidate to replace him and because the next general election is still two whole years away. But they are not prepared to risk their reputations by standing up for him in the meantime.

That was the skill of Labour’s motion. It was a parliamentary device to force a vote which would require Tory MPs to put their names to a defence of their prime minister. The details were important, but what really mattered was that Labour would be able to produce leaflets saying the local Tory MP had voted to block an inquiry into the prime minister misleading parliament.

What was surprising was that Chris Heaton-Harris, the new chief whip, fell into that trap. Instead of advising the prime minister that the opposition motion was so anodyne that the government could happily live with it, the government tabled an amendment to try to weaken the motion still further and tried to persuade Tory MPs to vote for that. They said no, and this morning, just before the Commons debate started, the government surrendered, abandoning its amendment and allowing a free vote on Labour’s motion, which will now pass unopposed.

This is a procedural humiliation that reveals the government’s majority of 75 to be merely notional. If Boris Johnson wants to ask parliament to vote for anything difficult, his backbenchers will melt away. The prime minister is in government but not in power. Keir Starmer looks more and more like a prime minister in waiting.