British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will face a vote of no confidence Monday evening after 15% of Conservative MPs (54) have demanded his departure. To stay in office, Johnson must win the support of at least 50% of the Tory MPs plus one, or 180 votes. If he wins, he should be safe from a similar challenge for a year.
The members are unhappy with the media stories describing how, during the height of the Corona pandemic, the PM held parties for his political allies when those were outright illegal. And then there’s the part about the failure of Brexit to improve the British economy, as Johnson promised.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party is probably going to suffer defeat in this month’s special election in Wakefield, according to a poll published in the Sunday Times. The loss could bring Johnson’s future as party leader and PM into question. According to a survey of 501 adults in Wakefield, Labour enjoys a 48% support in this historically Labour-voting constituency – even though Boris Johnson won a huge majority there in the 2019 general election.
Meanwhile, Sir Alan Johnson, a member of the Labour Party who served in the Cabinet in both the government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and is now a member of the House of Lords, said in an interview due to be broadcast Monday that Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn should not have his whip restored.
“Leave it where he is, and he’ll be happy and sanctimonious and pious where he is, leave him there,” Sir Johnson said.
The Labour party and the opposition in parliament have been led by Sir Keir Starmer who took over from the disgraced Corbyn in 2020. Corbyn appointed Starmer to the shadow Home Office ministerial team as Shadow Minister for Immigration, a role from which he resigned in 2016 in protest at Corbyn’s leadership, along with numerous other Labour MPs, saying that it was “simply untenable now to suggest we can offer an effective opposition without a change of leader.”
In October 2020, the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission announced that its investigation had found that the Labour Party had breached the Equality Act 2010 in three ways: 1. unlawful harassment by agents of the party; namely a councilor, Pam Bromley, and Ken Livingstone in his defense of Naz Shah; 2. failure to provide appropriate training to those handling the complaints; and 3. 23 instances of “inappropriate involvement” by Corbyn’s staff in antisemitism complaints. One of the complaints had been against Corbyn personally, regarding his response to the removal of the mural.
Asked in Monday’s interview about Corbyn’s supporters, Johnson said: “These people are out there, and they’re entitled to their beliefs, but they’ve got to stand on their beliefs, not … infiltrate the party.”
Johnson also said the far Left was trying to “steal our clothes” to get be allowed back into Labour.
Starmer’s tenure as the leader has been marked by his opposition to some of the Conservative government’s COVID-19 pandemic measures. During Starmer’s tenure, Labour suffered a by-election loss of the previously Labour seat in Hartlepool, followed by losses in Batley and Spen and Birmingham Erdington. Labour received mixed results in the 2021 local elections, followed by gains in the 2022 local elections.