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If the prime minister’s loyalists continue to turn on him, these disastrous byelection results could lead to real discontentWhen Boris Johnson was running for the Tory leadership in the summer of 2019, he faced resistance from the parliamentary party. The sense was that if he made it to the final round voted for by the Tory grassroots he would be the next prime minister – but first MPs had to put him there. A significant breakthrough came in early June. An op-ed appeared in the Times by three Tory rising stars: Robert Jenrick, Rishi Sunak and Oliver Dowden. Their message: “The Tories are in deep peril. Only Boris Johnson can save us.” Members of the team who worked on Johnson’s leadership campaign credited it for turning the mood among MPs.But in the wake of a disastrous set of byelection results that saw the Tories lose to Labour in Wakefield and to the Liberal Democrats in the formerly safe seat of Tiverton and Honiton, one of those authors is now putting Johnson in dangerous territory. After taking in the results, Dowden handed in his resignation, declaring: “We cannot carry on with business as usual.”His decision blindsided aides in Downing Street and showed how the mood in the Tory party continues to turn against the prime minister. Others believe his resignation was more predictable. “He’s been the subject of negative briefings for months – they expect people to be loyal even when they are treated like rubbish,” says one senior Tory.Dowden’s resignation creates problems for Johnson. First, he needs to find a replacement – which one MP predicts will be a “frothing loyalist” (MPs complain that attempts to reach out to different factions in the party is often just talk). Second, given Dowden was loyal to Johnson and is not seen to harbour leadership ambitions, his resignation is much harder to dismiss than an intervention from a figure like Jeremy Hunt. Dowden is widely seen by colleagues as someone who is loyal to the party rather than personally ambitious.While Johnson meets with world leaders at the Commonwealth summit in Kigali, his MPs back home are in an increasingly restive mood. It’s not that the losses were a surprise. If anything, given the government’s problems of late, the party’s defeat in two byelections seemed likely. But the scale of the defeat is an issue. There had been false hope in Tory circles that the mood was improving and they could cling on to the seat which had a Tory majority of more than 24,000 votes. Instead, the Lib Dems won it comfortably, with a majority of 6,144.Katy Balls is the Spectator’s deputy political editor Continue reading...