When they come for Boris Johnson, he will find he has few friends among Tory MPs

The prime minister has damaged his standing with the voters – and with his own MPs, writes John Rentoul

The Tory MPs behind the PM on Wednesday are unhappy (PA)

Some Conservative MPs blame Mark Spencer, the chief whip, for this week’s disaster. Others blame the prime minister. In other words, they all blame Boris Johnson.

Complaining about the chief whip is a way of complaining about the party leader while pretending to be loyal. In Tudor and Stuart times, the monarch’s loyal subjects would suggest that the Crown was receiving bad advice – and that this or that royal adviser should go. What they meant was that the king or queen had got it wrong, and a U-turn was in order.

After the prime minister asked them to vote for the indefensible on Wednesday, only to admit his mistake on Thursday morning, Conservative MPs are in a state of ferment.

Those who abstained in the vote to block Owen Paterson’s punishment for breaking the rules, along with those who found themselves unavoidably away from Westminster and who forgot to appoint a proxy to vote on their behalf, are feeling pleased with themselves.

The brave 13 who actually voted against the government, including new MPs Aaron Bell, Kate Griffiths, Holly Mumby-Croft and Jill Mortimer, ought to be feeling proud – if resigned to not being promoted in the foreseeable future.

But those who were persuaded to vote for something that the government admitted hours later was a mistake are bruised, resentful and less likely to obey a three-line whip in future. That was Johnson’s real mistake.

It was bad enough that he sought to pursue a personal campaign against Kathryn Stone, the independent standards commissioner, who criticised the funding of his holiday in Mustique two years ago, by trying to overturn her verdict in Owen Paterson’s case. But it was very much against the prime minister’s own interest to make Tory MPs look like corrupt fools.

Johnson has damaged himself twice over. He has made himself look bad in the eyes of the public. Last night’s YouGov poll showing the Tory lead narrowing is only the start of it. Indeed, the immediate cost in the opinion polls may not be that great.

Last year, Johnson refused, in the teeth of overwhelming popular disapproval, to sack Dominic Cummings, his chief adviser, for breaking lockdown rules and went on to recover, spending the whole of this year ahead in the polls. But these things take their toll.

People notice that the prime minister’s first instinct is so often to try to avoid doing the right thing and to back down only when the hue and cry starts. He did it in July, when he and Rishi Sunak tried for a few hours to get out of isolation after a meeting with Sajid Javid, who tested positive for the virus.

Now he has done it again – but this time, he has implicated 249 of his parliamentary colleagues. They supported Andrea Leadsom’s amendment, which referred Paterson’s case, after he was found to have lobbied ministers for personal gain, to a Tory-dominated committee of MPs (the vote was officially recorded as 250, including Rob Roberts, independent, and Sammy Wilson, DUP, plus the two Tory whips who acted as tellers on the vote; but one name has gone missing from the official record).

That is the damage that may count against Johnson in the end. His fortunes in the opinion polls will ebb and flow; this week’s mistake means there will be more ebb and less flow.

He has reinforced a theme that means his support will be lower than it would otherwise have been: putting personal interests above the public interest – one rule for Tory MPs and another for the rest of us.

At some point, public opinion will turn against Johnson so far that Tory MPs will see him as a liability at the next election. I had assumed that this point wouldn’t be reached until after the election that is likely to be held in 2024. But after this week, I think it will come earlier than it would otherwise have done. Then the damage that Johnson has done to his standing among Tory MPs will count against him.

He never had much of a committed band of supporters in the first place. The party turned to him in desperation because he was the only candidate who could get it out of the Brexit hole.

So, when the tipping point approaches for Tory MPs to decide that they would have a better chance of saving their seats if Sunak – or whoever – were leader, Johnson will now have even fewer loyalists to argue his case.

I wonder if Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, has opened his post in the past 36 hours? A vote of confidence in the party leader would be triggered when he receives 55 confidential letters from MPs requesting one.

Sir Graham is usually sitting on a secret pile of a dozen or so from determined malcontents. The date when the 55th letter arrives is almost certainly still some way off; it may be several years off; but the events of this week have inevitably brought it closer.