‘Show some backbone’: Tory rebel calls on cabinet to move against Boris Johnson

Senior backbencher plays down likelihood of early re-run confidence vote

William Wragg (Parliament TV/PA) (PA Media)

A leading Conservative critic of Boris Johnson has called on cabinet ministers to “show a bit of backbone” and take action on the leadership.

William Wragg, who chairs the House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee suggested that senior ministers with an eye on the leadership are damaging their own chances to succeed Johnson by failing to act decisively to remove him now.

Mr Wragg told BBC Radio 4’s Westminster Hour that former Tory chair Oliver

Dowden deserved “credit” for quitting the cabinet in the wake of disastrous by-election defeats in Wakefield and Tiverton & Honiton last week.

But he said there was growing disappointment on the Tory backbenches that other senior ministers have not taken similar steps.

“OIiver Dowden has resigned and credit to him for doing so in taking an element of responsibility,” said the Manchester Hazel Grove MP.

“But so far I think it is fair to say - and it’s all very well colleagues whispering to each other in the tearoom and in the corridors - that the sense of disappointment that there is on the backbenches towards the cabinet is palpable because you would have expected for some of them at least to show a bit of backbone and indeed leadership.

“Indeed, any of them with leadership aspirations might wish to consider this and do something about it.”

Mr Wragg, who has previously called on the prime minister to resign, said that last week’s election defeats were a “complete and utter disaster” for the Conservative Party.

“The question is are they mid-term blues? I suggest not,” he said. Instead, they appeared to be “symptomatic of a complete crisis in the Conservative vote in very different parts the country”.

Mr Wragg is a vice chair of the backbench 1922 Committee, which staged a confidence vote in Mr Johnson’s leadership earlier this month, won by the PM by a 211-148 margin.

Pressure is growing on the committee to amend rules which grant Mr Johnson a 12-month grace period before a re-run vote can be held.

Some Tory critics of Johnson have said they will stand in elections to the committee’s 18-person executive next month in the hope of securing an early vote, which they believe the premier would now lose.

But Mr Wragg said: “I don’t think it is desirable that the 1922 Committee should tinker with the rules although it did previously in recent history at the end of end of Mrs May’s government.”