Rory Stewart vows to ‘bring down’ Tory leadership rival Boris Johnson over no-deal Brexit threat

The international development secretary said MPs would set up parliament outside the Palace of Westminster if the frontrunner for PM tried to lock them out

Tory leadership candidate Rory Stewart has said he will “bring down” frontrunner Boris Johnson as prime minister if he tries to suspend parliament to force through a no-deal Brexit.

The international development secretary, who scraped through to the second round of the contest with 19 votes, repeated his demand for Mr Johnson to come clean on whether he was ready to use the process of prorogation to prevent MPs blocking no deal on 31 October.

Mr Stewart said he and other MPs were ready to sit as a parliament outside the Palace of Westminster if Mr Johnson took this step as prime minister.

And he compared the use of prorogation – which would require the prime minister to ask the Queen to suspend parliament to a date chosen by the government – to Charles I’s dismissal of parliament in 1629, which paved the way for civil war.

Mr Stewart told Sky News that if Mr Johnson prorogued parliament, “every other MP will sit across the road in Methodist Central Hall and we will hold our own session of parliament and we will bring him down”.

He said: “You don’t ever lock the doors on parliament in this country. Somebody who attempted to subvert our constitution, our liberties, our parliament, and who dared to stand as prime minister and claim they could lock the doors on parliament would not deserve to be prime minister.

“This parliament would meet, whether he locked the doors or not, and we would bring him down.”

Any decision to prorogue would indicate that a prime minister knew that parliament was “entirely and completely opposed to the central plank of his policy” and he would try to stop parliament from bringing him down by preventing it from sitting, said Mr Stewart.

“That’s what Charles I did and that led to very, very disturbing things in our country,” he said.

Mr Johnson has not ruled out suspending parliament in order to fulfil his pledge to take the UK out of the EU by 31 October, deal or no deal. But he is understood to have told MPs at a hustings earlier this week that he was not in favour of the controversial move.

Hard Brexit leadership contender Dominic Raab has made clear that he regards prorogation as part of the “toolkit” which he may have to use to convince Brussels he is serious about being ready to leave without a deal on 31 October.

Johnson supporter Daniel Kawczynski said: “Mr Stewart only just avoided being thrown out from this competition by two votes and now he is saying he is going to take Boris on. I think he should have a little bit of humility at this moment in time.”

Veteran former cabinet minister Kenneth Clarke, who is backing Mr Stewart for the leadership, said he agreed that the new prime minister should not lock parliament’s doors.

“It would be an outrage if we had a new prime minister who determined that because he hadn’t got a majority in parliament for a policy he would close parliament down and use dictatorial powers,” said Mr Clarke. Any candidate prepared to use prorogation would “rule themselves out for being PM”, he said.