Huzzah! Rishi and Boris find that they do have something in common…

…and that’s plunging popularity ratings, with the PM now polling as low as his predecessor at the time of his No 10 departure. But, says John Rentoul, don’t believe the hype that the Tories would be in better shape had Johnson stayed on

If the Conservatives had chosen Rishi Sunak to replace Boris Johnson, would they be quite so far behind in the polls? (Reuters)

I am told there is at least one Conservative MP who voted to get rid of Boris Johnson who now thinks that the party should have stuck with the leader who won them the 2019 election.

MPs who change their minds tend to be shy about it, and I have been unable to identify him or her, but I have been assured that they exist. More importantly, the argument that the Tory party would be better off if it had kept Johnson in No 10 has some plausibility, so it is worth testing.

YouGov reports that Rishi Sunak’s favourability rating is now worse than Johnson’s was in September last year, when Johnson stood down. This is true, but it is worth noting that Johnson was even more unpopular at the time he announced his resignation, in July. Once he said he was going, his rating bounced back a little, while he carried on being prime minister, not doing much, during the two months of the Tory leadership election.

Sunak is not yet as unpopular as Johnson at his most unpopular (a net favourable rating of minus 49, versus minus 53), but there is not much in it. The prime minister may not find much comfort in this, but he still has some way to go to be as unpopular as Liz Truss (minus 70). And even she may not have been the most unpopular prime minister there has ever been.

YouGov records don’t go far enough back (the company was founded in 2000), but if we compare Ipsos’s net “satisfaction” ratings, which are slightly different from “favourability”, John Major was on minus 59 in August 1994, whereas Truss’s worst rating was minus 51 in October last year.

Still, there is no doubt that those Conservative MPs who opposed Johnson in the vote of confidence in his leadership in June last year, in the hope that a change of leader would revive their standing with public opinion have been disappointed.

Johnson talks rot about how the Conservatives were “only a handful of points” behind Labour in the opinion polls when he was ousted. The Tories were eight points behind in the opinion poll averages, and the gap was only likely to widen when a spate of ministerial resignations forced him out.

But Johnson has a point that the situation is worse now. Labour is now an average of 17 points ahead. So you can see how the myth, not just of “bring back Boris”, but of “Boris should never have gone”, might grow.

I have heard it said that it would not be possible for Johnson to come back – and if you want a dog that hasn’t barked, there has been no suggestion that he is looking for a seat at the next election – but that if he were still prime minister, he would be able to turn the party’s fortunes round. Only his unique campaigning skills could pull an unlikely victory out of the jaws of impending defeat.

This is an exercise in counterfactual history: what if Johnson had never pretended that he had no idea that Chris Pincher, the deputy chief whip, had been in trouble before, which was what finally prompted ministers to move against the prime minister? It is no real guide to what the Tory party should do now.

Even so, the implication of the Boris myth is mistaken. No one can prove what would have happened if Johnson had been allowed to continue in office, but my view is that the Tory party would be in as much trouble as it is now – it is just that the causes of voter alienation would have been different.

The Conservative Party’s mistake was not to get rid of Johnson, but to elect Truss to replace him. If the party had switched painlessly to Sunak as prime minister, it might have had a chance of, well, being less far behind the Labour Party now.

Professor John Curtice, the elections guru, has identified two big moments in the decline of Tory support since the last election. One was the revelation of lockdown parties in No 10; the other was the Kwasi Kwarteng mini-Budget. A clean switch to Sunak could have distanced the party from the first and avoided the second.

So no, the party was not wrong to get rid of Johnson. The British public had turned decisively against him, and it was worth trying a different leader. Unfortunately for Sunak (and for the rest of us), leadership challenges gain a momentum of their own, in directions not foreseen by their instigators, as Michael Heseltine found when he stood against Margaret Thatcher in 1990.

Sunak is in trouble now, but there is no use for the party in harking back to an alternative past it has missed. The question for the future is whether he can recover any lost ground in the second and probably last year of his premiership, or whether things can only get worse.