Rishi Sunak will hold back from trying to bring Boris Johnson down – for now

Will the chancellor follow the example of Michael Heseltine or David Miliband, asks John Rentoul

Rishi Sunak was in Ilfracombe with Selaine Saxby, the Tory MP, while the prime minister was apologising to the nation (Twitter / Rishi Sunak )

How might Boris Johnson’s time as prime minister come to an end? For a long time all eyes have been fixed on the inscrutable grin of Sir Graham Brady, who as chair of the 1922 Committee acts as the postbox for letters demanding a vote of confidence in the party leader.

But I cannot find any Conservative MP who thinks that anything like 54 of their number have sent their requests to Sir Graham, whether by letter or email. “More than four,” said one MP, asked how many letters have been sent. As four MPs have gone public calling for Johnson to go, this tells us little. The important fact is that the number of letters has not hit the threshold that requires Sir Graham to convene an impromptu news conference outside St Stephen’s entrance to the Palace of Westminster.

Attention switched yesterday, therefore, to the cabinet. The other way a prime minister might be dislodged is if one or more cabinet ministers resigns and says the prime minister should go. There would still have to be 54 MPs writing to Sir Graham to start a leadership contest, but the assumption is that this would definitely happen if members of the cabinet gave a lead.

Hence yesterday’s show of serial loyalty, as cabinet ministers expressed their support for Johnson in interviews and on Twitter. The most significant was the belated tweet from Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, expressing his lukewarm support eight hours after Johnson’s apology in the Commons for attending a “work event” that looked like a lockdown-busting party.

Sunak’s people put the delay down to the chancellor’s being in a long meeting with the prime minister, talking about policy, but that doesn’t explain why he hadn’t said anything before it.

It wasn’t just the timing, though, but the lack of enthusiasm in the words: “The PM was right to apologise and I support his request for patience while Sue Gray carries out her enquiry.” In other words, he did something wrong and if Sue Gray finds he did more things wrong my patience will be at an end.

It is possible that those words were drafted for him by No 10, as they are similar to those used by other ministers, in which case the prime minister’s operation has only itself to blame, but even so the feeble support offered by Sunak and most of his colleagues must seem ominous to Johnson.

“Sunak leaves Johnson in limbo” was the front-page headline on The Daily Telegraph, Johnson’s own newspaper. Alex Wickham, author of the influential Politico morning email, speculated that Sunak might resign if Gray’s report on Downing Street parties is critical. Well, there are two stages there. One is that Gray, a senior and respected civil servant, is going to criticise the prime minister directly. The other is that Sunak would then calculate that his best chance of the top job would be to use such a criticism to launch a leadership challenge.

I doubt if Gray would want to be responsible for bringing down the prime minister, but equally Johnson himself has accepted that things should have been done differently and she will want to avoid the accusation of a whitewash. So there might be half a chance for a coup if Sunak wanted to go for it. He is the only cabinet minister who has a chance of bringing Johnson down. Anybody else could be shrugged off and replaced, but Sunak is different. He is the second most powerful minister, the Tory heir presumptive and still the most popular politician in the country.

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Yet I don’t think he will do it, precisely because he is in such a strong position. I don’t think he will hold back because of the folk mythology of the Tory party, dating from the time of Michael Heseltine – “he who wields the knife never wears the crown”; “the favourite never wins”. Neither of those is borne out by the recent career of Boris Johnson, who resigned from Theresa May’s cabinet and – after a short period being nice to people in Portcullis House, the annex to the House of Commons – who returned, as the bookies’ favourite, to the top job.

And I suppose Sunak may pause to reflect on the career of David Miliband, who as foreign secretary should have challenged Gordon Brown in 2009. Miliband was the heir presumptive and the favourite to succeed Brown, and yet found himself outflanked by his younger brother when the time came.

But I think Sunak is in a stronger position than the elder Miliband ever was, and less likely to be overtaken at the finish by a candidate he didn’t see coming. It is not obvious that either he or Liz Truss, his main rival, has an advantage in a leadership contest sooner rather than later.

So I think he will wait and see. But not for ever.