When the benchers bite back

Boris Johnson must answer to unruly MPs who will sacrifice their leader to maintain power, writes Sean O’Grady

The Tory leader is no longer such an obvious electoral asset (AFP/Getty)

Even after the political week from hell, it’s a simple question that, curiously, Boris Johnson seems disinclined to ask: what do his troublesome backbenchers actually want?

One obvious answer, and an equally unwelcome one, is “not you, mate”. There is now a solid constituency of Tory MPs who, even if they ever had any time for Boris Johnson, have exhausted what little patience they had. Some, maybe the likes of Desmond Swayne and Steve Baker, are repulsed by the prime minister’s mixture of incompetence and lack of political consistency. They tend to be libertarians, as opposed to liberals, and an issue such as so-called vaccine passports is guaranteed to boil their blood. The experience of the pandemic has confirmed their doubts about whether Johnson is indeed one of their kind, notwithstanding his record when a journalist of supporting freedom in its most comprehensive sense. They see a man who once pledged to eat an identity card in front of any state official bold enough to ask him to produce it on demand turning into the very kind of statist who would impose such strictures on free-born Englishmen and Englishwomen; that sort of vibe. Perhaps the purest example of the breed would be Marcus Fysh, who has apologised for comparing plan B with Nazi Germany.