Forget Keir Starmer, Boris Johnson is also under threat from those within his own party

Just when the prime minister is finally up against a credible external opposition, he faces a challenge from his own backbench, writes John Rentoul

Spin is no good in a crisis (EPA)

The prime minister has been warned not to meet Sir Graham Brady, the backbench Conservative advocate of lifting the coronavirus lockdown, on his own, while Jacob Rees-Mogg is leading the charge from within government for parliament to set an example by going back to normal.

The nervousness of Boris Johnson’s aides about Sir Graham, chair of the 1922 Committee and representative of backbench Tory MPs, was revealed by the prime minister himself, as he was photographed clutching a memo outside his folder in Downing Street.

Sir Graham will, “as he has previously, seek to ensure that it is just the two of you”, Johnson was warned by “BG”, presumably Ben Gascoigne, one of his political advisers. “It is important that at least the Chief [whip] stays in the room.” BG went on to warn that Sir Graham “will almost certainly raise the Covid response and the lockdown”, having previously called for lifting restrictions as quickly as possible.

The chair of the ’22 has aligned himself with a group of traditionalist Tory backbenchers who insist on going into the Commons chamber if possible – Sir Graham was there for part of Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday.

They have a champion around the cabinet table in Rees-Mogg, who as leader of the House of Commons is the government’s parliamentary manager. Rees-Mogg yesterday called on MPs to go back to work in person on 2 June, after the Whitsun recess.

He said their staff and many of parliament’s staff could continue to work from home, but that MPs themselves should take the government’s advice: “If you need to go to work, you must go to work.”

He said they needed to be there in person because of “the ineffectiveness of scrutiny in comparison to when the House is operating in the normal way”. Under the hybrid rules allowing some MPs to take part remotely, “we simply have a series of prepared statements made one after another. That is not the House of Commons doing its proper duty and playing its proper role of scrutiny of the government.”

Most MPs disagreed with him, but because they weren’t in the chamber he was able to warm to his theme uninterrupted: “The intention is for schools to go back: how can we say to our schoolchildren, ‘You’re safe going back’ – some of them – but we are not? How can we hide away while schoolchildren are going back?”

He insisted that social distancing could be observed on the parliamentary estate (although I can report that a lot of the one-way systems require people to be within two metres of each other) and said: “We can get 50 people into this chamber, which, it has to be said, is often as many as are here for an ordinary debate. It is only on high days and holidays and Prime Minister’s Questions that the chamber is bursting at the seams.”

It all sounded rather grand as he declaimed: “Are we a people set apart, a special class who are exempt from what the rest of the country is doing? No, we are not.”

But there are problems with his approach, which is that there are 24 MPs aged 70 or over – Jeremy Corbyn, 70, has finally started to take part by video link rather than in person – and others who are more vulnerable to coronavirus. Robert Halfon, the Conservative MP, who is disabled and currently shielding, said: “It’s not that I don’t want to come in, I would come in tomorrow if I could. It cannot be a Darwinian parliament. It is not a parliament for survival of the fittest, it’s a parliament for everybody.”

Yet it is Sir Graham who speaks for the majority of Tory MPs – or claims to, as “BG” pointed out. The argument about parliament is proxy for a bigger debate about how quickly the country comes out of lockdown. Rees-Mogg is not the only voice at cabinet meetings urging a faster return to normal.

These pressures from his own party are unlikely to push Boris Johnson into easing lockdown restrictions more quickly, because public opinion is still strongly in favour of keeping them. A YouGov poll found nearly half of people (46 per cent) thought the changes to the lockdown rules announced on Sunday “go too far” and only 10 per cent said they “don’t go far enough” – 35 per cent said “the balance is about right”.

But it is dangerous to the prime minister to face the spectre of internal opposition so soon after winning a convincing election victory, and when he is up against a credible external opposition in the form of Keir Starmer.