UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson survived his confidence vote Monday evening in a rapid poll of top Conservatives announced this morning.
Sir Graham Brady, the Conservative Member of Parliament and party functionary in charge of the leadership challenge mechanism announced Monday night from the House of Commons that 211 people voted in favour of the Prime Minister.
148 people voted against him, giving him a 63% majority and a relatively easy victory.
Boris, though, is in no way safe according to the party’s rules and traditions. While winning a confidence vote is relatively simple, weathering the ramifications is more difficult: winning a subsequent election while dealing with public impressions of having been challenged for your own leadership by colleagues looms large over the campaign.
The confidence vote was only declared this morning, following a Conservative internal process that sees such challenges become official after 15% of the party’s sitting MPs send Sir Graham sealed letters. With the announcement and the vote coming within hours of each other, it was evident that a decision had been made to get the process over with as soon as possible.
Boris Johnson had agreed to bring the vote forward as soon as possible, Sir Graham disclosed in comments Monday morning. It’s possible that this was done on purpose to deny the rebels time to plot and build their own support network.
While Boris Johnson has faced opposition from inside the Conservative Party since taking office, primarily from the once-powerful pro-Europe, anti-Brexit wing, concern about his leadership has intensified in recent months with his handling of the Coronavirus lockdown restrictions.
Although the United Kingdom was not the harshest in the end, falling short of certain countries’ forced vaccination laws, Boris Johnson’s government did lock down the country hard and early.
Pollsters noted that while ordinarily free-loving Britons appeared to be delighted with the measures at the time, discontent grew as it became clear that the government had broken its own laws.
This alleged failure by Johnson and other top figures to obey their own standards was detailed in an internal memo circulated among Conservative MPs over the weekend that laid out the case for deposing Boris.
The memo claimed that the Prime Minister had gone from an asset to a liability, saying that his brand was robbing even popular Conservative programmes of their capacity to reach through and gratify people.