Brexit has thrown Labour and Tories into leadership contests – so what happens next?

There were Johnson and Michael Gove, looking abashed by what they had done – they had brought down their friend the Prime Minister, after all – holding a press conference at which the press were not allowed to ask questions

Boris Johnson at his Vote Leave 'press conference' today: Getty (Getty)

You know how Boris Johnson supposedly wrote two versions of his newspaper column in which he declared where he stood on David Cameron’s EU renegotiation? Michael Cockerell, the Maker of Documentary Profiles to the Nation, forced our next prime minister to admit it – that is, to fail to deny it. Johnson is said to have written one article saying he was for Remain and one for Leave before deciding to submit the Leave one for publication.

This is usually presented, including by Cockerell, as evidence of Johnson’s lack of principle and his opportunism in choosing to side with Leave as a way to steal Cameron’s job. I don’t think that is right: or at least if it is, it is complicated by Johnson’s sincere Euroscepticism. He says the Leave arguments felt truer to himself. Far from being criticised for this, I think he should be praised. Writing out the arguments for both sides strikes me as an admirable and intellectually rigorous exercise of the kind you would hope top politicians would do more of.

Well, I am just like Johnson, only not so well-paid and not about to become prime minister. Before the referendum, I wrote one article setting out what might happen if the people voted to Remain and another imagining a Brexit vote scenario. If I had been asked to submit just one for publication, I would have submitted the Remain one, because the Leave scenario seemed so unreal and therefore improbable.

Cameron coming out of Number 10 to announce he would stand down as Prime Minister as soon as a successor could be elected? That successor likely to be Johnson? It seemed a little like one of those “What if John Smith had lived” articles that people write – I have written them myself – to fill space in news-free August weeks. How much more plausible the continuation of the status quo seemed.

Since three o’clock this morning, though, the implausible scenario unfolded. Cameron came out of Number 10 and said what I had imagined him saying – only at the end there was a catch in his voice, because this was really happening, it wasn’t a made-up vision of the future.

Then Sky News was reporting that Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, was thinking of standing for the Conservative leadership to "continue Cameron's legacy". That was a platform you wouldn’t make up.

And there were Johnson and Michael Gove, looking abashed by what they had done – they had brought down their friend the Prime Minister, after all – holding a press conference at which the press were not allowed to ask questions.

Johnson was subdued and tactful, praising Cameron and emphasising how gradual Britain’s liberation from the shackles of Brussels would be. Gove was there to present himself as part of the putative prime minister’s team, and Gisela Stuart, the Labour MP, was there to make it look like a morning-after Leave campaign event rather than the launch of a leadership campaign.

While this was going on, a leadership challenge was under way in the Labour Party too, with Margaret Hodge tabling a motion of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn for Monday’s meeting of Labour MPs. I doubt if this will get anywhere, because the Labour leader is not elected by the party’s MPs. Under the rules, the MPs can express as little confidence in Corbyn as they like, and we know that most of them have none, but a leadership election is triggered by a motion at the party’s annual conference. That is less likely to succeed, and even if it did Corbyn would be re-elected by the party members who hailed his straight-talking honest politics less than a year ago.

I am all in favour of futile gestures if their motivation is to restore Labour to the role of a credible opposition, but my Brexit scenario pointed out that a vote to Leave was worse for Labour than it was for the Tories. I cannot see Labour easily adapting to being on the wrong side of the democratic verdict of the British people, whereas the Conservatives could easily unite behind Johnson and Gove in their new Eurosceptic future.

The next instalment of my Brexit scenario, though, is Prime Minister Johnson calling an early election – either in November or spring next year. As Vernon Bogdanor, Cameron’s Oxford tutor, pointed out on the BBC’s overnight results programme, it would be “logical” for the new prime minister to secure a manifesto mandate for the finer points of the terms of the UK’s new relationship with the EU. It would tie all Tory MPs to his Brexit policy and it would crush the Labour Party.

Get ready to go to the polls again. The unexpected result of the referendum will bring more unexpected events in train. I wrote the Brexit scenario as an intellectual exercise, and now it’s turned into real life.