Tory MPs should ditch Boris Johnson and put Rishi Sunak in No 10 as soon as they can

Conservative MPs may be about to face a momentous decision; John Rentoul analyses the question they have to ask themselves

Rishi Sunak: I totally support the PM and look forward to taking over from him (Sky News)

I don’t know what is going to happen but I do know what the question is. It is a two-part question that Conservative MPs have to ask themselves: How likely is Boris Johnson to regain public support, versus how likely is Rishi Sunak to lose his current popularity between now and the election?

In my view that calculation is clearly if not overwhelmingly in Sunak’s favour, but I am not a Tory MP. I suspect that the median Tory MP has a higher opinion of Johnson’s qualities than I have – and possibly a lower opinion of Sunak’s.

Ideally, I suspect Tory MPs wouldn’t want to make this decision now. They might prefer to let tax rises and the economy play out; to see whether time will heal the wounds inflicted by lockdown-breaking parties; and then see how they are placed in the autumn of next year for an election in the summer of 2024.

But they probably know that the timing of the decision is out of their hands, in that it will be decided by the most volatile and anti-Johnson fraction of the 359 Tory MPs (one fewer than at the start of the week, given that the single most volatile and anti-Johnson Tory MP is now a Labour MP). Which means that every Tory MP has to be ready to decide where they stand, because it is likely that, after Sue Gray reports next week on lockdown parties, the threshold of 54 MPs will be breached – the number needed to write to Sir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee, asking for a vote of no confidence in the party leader.

So they will have to make their decision on partial and imperfect information, but in the knowledge that if they keep Johnson as prime minister, they may not be able to revisit the question – or that they may not be able to return to the question in such relatively favourable circumstances. This is not so much a matter of the leadership election rules that say a leader, having won a confidence vote, cannot face another one for a year. The 1922 Committee could easily change that rule to six months, as it thought about doing after Theresa May won her confidence vote in 2018. It is more a matter of the damage to the party that might be done by an unpopular Johnson in the meantime.

As for the two-part question itself, my view is that Johnson is unlikely to recover his previous popularity. He was never that popular as prime minister (as opposed to as mayor of London, for example), but he did have a connection with enough non-traditional Tory voters to win an election in the unique circumstances of a Brexit election against Jeremy Corbyn.

Those unique factors will not be there next time, and Johnson’s personal appeal will be diminished, even if he can by some alchemy turn round the fury that the voters feel about him now. Tory MPs might be tempted to think that the current level of high emotion cannot be sustained for long, but they need to look only at the vitriol that greeted Tony Blair’s Order of the Garter to know that these things can last. They might think that a work event in the Downing Street garden is hardly comparable to a war in the Middle East, but too many people believe in both cases that the prime minister lied, thousands died.

As for Sunak, the commentators shake their heads and say he won’t be so popular when the tax rise comes in in April. Maybe he won’t, but he starts from a high base. The admiration for him in focus groups is unusual. Everyone knows someone who benefited from the furlough, or whose business was saved by a Treasury support scheme. Putting up taxes is never popular, but he has enough credit to make the argument that it is necessary if people want to get the NHS back to where Labour left it.

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Others dismiss Sunak as a Thatcherite who lacks Johnson’s broad One Nation appeal, but yesterday’s JL Partners poll of red wall seats found he was the most popular politician there as well as in the rest of the country. Yes, he is a Thatcherite, a small-state Tory, when he wants the votes of Thatcherite, small-state Tory MPs, but he is the chancellor who pursued a Keynesian policy of borrowing £400bn to save jobs during the pandemic.

Indeed, his last Budget speech was totally incoherent, as he tried to explain that he was a tax-raiser and a tax-cutter at the same time. But coherence is an overrated virtue, and competence an underrated one.

When Conservative MPs come to make the choice, they should not hesitate. Rishi Sunak is popular with MPs, with Tory party members and with the voters. They should get him into No 10 as soon as they can.