Boris Johnson’s pitch to his MPs for support in the confidence vote gives too few reasons to save him

What will Conservative MPs decide in the secret ballot on the prime minister tonight, asks John Rentoul

If Boris Johnson loses the confidence vote by Tory MPs, the Conservative Party will face a fresh leadership election (Victoria Jones/PA) (PA Wire)

The prime minister has written a three-page letter to his MPs setting out why they should support him in the vote tonight. He wisely doesn’t dwell too much on his past achievements, because he knows that politics doesn’t operate on gratitude.

He reminds MPs that he won them their majority at the last election, without saying explicitly what they know, which is that no one else could have done that.

Linked to that was his success in securing Britain’s departure from the EU – which he rebrands “resolving the Brexit crisis”, in an attempt to persuade the Remainer rump of the party that it was good for them too. Brexit was a huge achievement, and it will be the one thing that history will remember him for, but only half of the population thought it was a good thing, and besides, it has been done. No one thinks any other leader of the Conservative Party would try to undo Brexit – not even the opposition proposes to do that.

And Johnson’s electoral appeal has disappeared. So “Brexit plus election winner” is no reason for Tory MPs to stick with him. All MPs have already written off the two by-elections later this month, for example, and most of them don’t think Johnson can recover his election-winning ways. They don’t know that a different leader could do any better, but being a vote-winning miracle worker is no longer a positive reason for voting “confidence” tonight.

The other big achievement claimed by the prime minister is “the fastest vaccine roll-out in Europe”. Again, it’s in the past. What is worse, most people don’t think Johnson handled the pandemic well, even before they get on to the subject of lockdown law-breaking, and they attribute the success of the vaccines to Kate Bingham, the head of the vaccines task force. It was significant that Jesse Norman, her husband and a former Treasury minister, was vitriolic in his letter calling for a vote of confidence that was published just before the vote was announced.

No surprise, then, that Johnson skates quickly past his leading role in rallying to support Ukraine “against Russian aggression” – most people agree with it, but any other leader would probably do the same. He devotes most of the letter to dealing with the cost-of-living crisis, which is what the voters – and therefore most MPs – care about.

But here the letter becomes even less convincing. He claims credit for “shielding the public from the energy price spike”, saying “we are finding the cash because we are compassionate Conservatives”. On the other hand, he says: “We also know you cannot just spend your way out of inflation, and you cannot tax your way into growth.” The trouble with trying to appeal to One-Nation Tories and tax-cutting punk Thatcherites at the same time is that neither side believes you and both tend to be over-optimistic about their chance of getting someone more consistent on their side of the argument into No 10 instead.

In desperation, Johnson ties himself to “Rishi”, saying he and the chancellor will be setting out plans to “cut the cost of government” in the next few weeks. But if Tory MPs think that Sunak is an asset, despite his problems of his own, they might be tempted to ditch Johnson and get the chancellor in instead.

The prime minister ends up with a few slogans about “levelling up” the country and uniting the party, but nothing specific about how he and he alone can see off the threat from Keir Starmer at the next election. He deals only obliquely with his biggest problem, which is that so many voters think he presided over a casual attitude to coronavirus restrictions in Downing Street and that he hasn’t been honest about it.

“I know that over recent months I have come under a great deal of fire,” he says, complaining that “some of that criticism has perhaps been fair, some less so”. He claims to have “listened and learned and made significant changes”, but it sounds as if he thinks he has been hard done by.

There is something almost Corbynesque in his sign-off, which urges MPs to “put an end to the media’s favourite obsession”, as if the leadership speculation and tonight’s vote is a conspiracy against him got up by journalists.

What is remarkable about the letter is that it fails to give any strong reasons for MPs to cast their secret ballot for him. The one thing he cannot say is that no other candidate would be obviously better, but once Conservative MPs get to that point, they might decide that any other candidate has at least a chance of being better.

Having assumed a few days ago that Johnson would prevail in a vote of confidence and would stumble on for several more months, it might be time to contemplate the possibility that the prime minister will lose the vote tonight.