Boris Johnson and Liz Truss are spitefully disloyal to Rishi Sunak already

Two former prime ministers putting their name to a rebel amendment is an ominous sign for the new guy, writes John Rentoul

I suspect that the amendment will come to nothing (Getty)

Yesterday I wondered why politics had become so unstable that we had three prime ministers this year. No sooner had my article been published than Boris Johnson and Liz Truss confirmed that part of the explanation is a breakdown of discipline in the parliamentary Conservative Party.

The two former prime ministers have signed an amendment to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill to permit local authorities to grant planning permission for onshore wind turbines. This is of course a thoroughly Good Thing, and it was a Bad Thing that land-based windmills have been more or less banned since 2015, when David Cameron gave in to Conservative MPs who didn’t want them in their constituents’ back yards.

But if we ignore for a moment the merits of the case, what is remarkable about Johnson and Truss’s signatures on the amendment is their disloyalty. In Johnson’s case the offence is compounded by his hypocrisy, as a recent prime minister who kept Cameron’s ban and who now that he has left office has decided that whoever was prime minister between 2019 and 2022 really should have overturned it.