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June 6, 2022 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
01:37:50
20220606_piers-morgan-uncensored-the-boris-johnson-no-confi
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Growing Self-Doubt Creeps In 00:08:49
Well good evening.
This is Piers Morgan on censored for the next two hours, an extended version of our show because of the massive breaking news tonight.
The no confidence vote in Britain's Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.
You're looking here at live footage from a helicopter over the houses of parliament, which tonight I can tell you are a hotbed of intrigue, gossip, backstabbing, malice, revenge, and just about everything else you could possibly wish for in a political bombshell moment.
And if you go in even closer, you will see the windows of the 1922 committee room.
This is where voting is probably just about finished now into the future of Boris Johnson.
This is where 359 Conservative members of parliament have filed in over the last two hours and cast their vote as to whether they have confidence in Boris or not.
They include, by the way, Boris Johnson, who's had to go and decide whether he has confidence in himself as Prime Minister, which given what he did, of course, with the EU referendum, where apparently he had a yes and a no plan, maybe he went in and wasn't sure till the last minute.
Do I have confidence in myself?
But either way, we'll find out in about an hour.
So about nine o'clock, it will be breaking news as to what's happened.
And there are three scenarios, really.
Boris Johnson loses, in which case it's all over.
He's an ex-Prime Minister.
And for that to happen, 180 of his MPs will have had to vote against him.
Or he's won comfortably with a stunning majority that no one's expecting.
And he's safe for at least another year because that's the time limit on when you can then go at him again if you're a rebel.
Or what is much more likely in my estimation, but we'll find out soon, is that he wins but not by very much.
And that in many ways could be the worst scenario possible for the Conservative Party, because that would mean this just carries on for weeks, months, until probably the inevitable departure of the Prime Minister.
So those are the options.
Let's go to talk to his political editor Kate McGann, who's buried inside the bowels of the palace in Westminster and in London Bridge, presented the news desk, of course, Tom Newton Dunwell.
Welcome to both of you.
Look at you both almost shaking with excitement.
Kate, more than Tom, I have to say.
Because it doesn't get much bigger than this, Kate, does it?
We are literally now 40, well, 58 minutes away from hearing whether Boris Johnson has survived this vote.
Although my gut feeling, and correct me if you feel I'm wrong here, is it's likely that he has won the vote, but it may be he's not won it by a convincing enough majority to actually buy his safety.
I think that's the real problem that Boris Johnson faces now, Piers, because even if he does win this vote and his advisors today briefing us that just one vote is still a win, that's enough for them, the reality is that that just isn't true.
And when you've got MPs like Deanna Davidson coming out to say, I can't back Boris Johnson, I've voted against him, that is a real problem because that's not somebody who's a usual suspect.
It's not somebody who you expect to hear that kind of thing from.
And it shows you that there is a real division.
There's some wavering.
Some of that has crystallised over Party Gates.
Some of it goes a little bit further back than that.
And I think the big question is, can Boris Johnson do anything now, if he wins, and we expect that he will, to move his party forward?
And that will largely focus on policy.
Some of that will be the levelling up agenda, but a lot of that will be about taxation, about the cost of living crisis, about how the Prime Minister moves forward.
Now I have Ben Bradley here with me.
He's a Conservative MP.
He's somebody who's very keen on the levelling up agenda, somebody who's been a backer of Boris Johnson all the way through this.
Do you think he's done enough tonight, Ben?
Well, I hope so.
I would like to think that colleagues like Deanna, you mentioned there, other Red Wall colleagues, would recognise where the votes came from in that 2019 election, because I think sometimes as MPs, we maybe believe our own hype a little bit.
A lot of those people in my constituency too were voting for Boris Johnson in that election, and a lot of them still will.
We all get emails from constituents who feel very strongly, even in my own seat, 16,000 majority, there's still 15,000 people who have never and will never vote for me.
So I think we sometimes need to recognise where those dissenting voices come from.
The vast majority of people that I speak to in my constituency are very supportive, and don't you dare let him go.
But there is a real division in the party, isn't there?
And you know, you mentioned Deanna there.
That does mean that this isn't just a split of the usual suspects.
This is a split that runs quite deep.
How is he going to bring people back together?
I think if you looked at Deanna's voting record over the last couple of years, she's been fairly consistently rebellious in some of these things.
So not entirely a surprise.
But I think there is a big job to do to bring us back together.
We hope, and the PM certainly says he hopes that you get through tonight and you draw a line and you move on.
We'll see whether we're allowed to do that.
But for the kind of agenda we want to see, that leveling up agenda that affects constituencies like mine, we've absolutely got to keep them and we've got to make it happen.
Ben Bradley there saying that the right answer is to keep the Prime Minister in position.
He's hoping that the party can come back together, Piers, but I think it is a real difficult task, as you mentioned there.
And that's what's going to be so exciting for political journalists, not particularly for number 10 over the course of the next couple of weeks, trying to see if he can manage that task.
What is the key number here, Kate, tonight?
What are we looking for when this result gets announced in 55 minutes?
What is the key figures you'll be looking at thinking, right?
He's survived.
Obviously, we know if he's lost, but he's survived, or the number of the majority is low enough for this to still be potentially terminal.
It's a fantastic question, Piers, and it's one that nobody here agrees when you ask them the answer to it.
I mean, Boris Johnson's own advisors say 180 is the number he needs to reach.
That's when he's effectively won, 180 plus one.
That would be a win for them, that they would see that as a success.
I have to say, I don't think anyone else would necessarily agree with that.
They will be looking for far higher, maybe 220, 230, 240.
When you start getting to 250, 260, that's quite high.
That's quite ambitious.
And I think what's happened this afternoon, this morning, there was a little bit of buoyancy from those around the Prime Minister saying, you know, it'll be fine.
I think there's a bit of self-doubt creeping in.
And I know it's not particularly helpful for you or for anybody watching, but there is a growing sense that either Boris Johnson does much better than expected, and actually the quiet ones have gone his way, or all the quiet ones that we haven't heard come out on Twitter or make their views public, they go the opposite direction.
And actually, things are much, much worse than he expected.
I think in that case, then this is clearly a real problem, even if he does win by just one vote.
But actually, either way, a confidence vote in a Prime Minister is never a good thing.
And it usually does spell the beginning of the end, even if it isn't immediate.
So difficult either way, I think.
And the truth is, a lot of those MPs are completely self-serving, treacherous little weasels who will be saying one thing in public and quietly going in and signing his death warrant.
Well, look, your words are not mine, Piers, and Paul Ben is still here.
He can still hear what you're saying.
But look, I'm not saying either way.
Well, I don't even know.
No, don't worry.
I'll make sure he doesn't think that.
But look, there are some cabinet ministers, I have to say, who've been out and about milling around here behind me in central lobby throughout the day today, being very publicly supportive, saying the Prime Minister is the right man for the job.
But behind the scenes, they have some real concerns.
Some of them saying to me, look, I don't understand why he didn't do more over the weekend to try and shore up support for himself.
He apparently didn't make very many phone calls, didn't really make much of an effort.
Others saying, yeah, look, there is a really deep problem here.
And of course, those in the cabinet, there will be some of them who think maybe I could have a little tilt at this.
So, how many of them, when they got into that ballot box, of course, the secret vote, will have thought, maybe I'll just put my cross in the no confidence box and see what happens, unleash a little bit of chaos.
The difficulty, I think, that Boris Johnson, and your question really does betray it, is that actually his relationship with his party is transactional.
And that transaction, when it benefits them, it works.
If it doesn't necessarily benefit them, and those by-elections are looming in the distance, if losses like that start to stack up, then that's a problem.
And I think that's a big concern.
Yeah, I think the big problem is they're looking at their own positions, their own jobs, their own seats, and they're trying to calculate, is this guy going to lose me my job?
And if enough of them calculate, I think he might, bang, he's done.
It's as ruthless as that.
Kate, we'll be back to you a little later.
I can see you're literally buzzing with excitement down there.
And talking about buzzing with excitement, actually, it doesn't look that exciting, does it?
This is Danny's Free right now, covered with some old bunting from the weekend.
Party Self-Destruction Looms 00:03:22
Looks sort of ominously quiet, almost like a funeral pyre this evening, doesn't it?
Very quiet, very somber.
A car has pulled up.
This could be anybody.
This could get exciting.
Who's this?
No, it's an Uber driver.
It's his evening pizza.
We don't know who that is.
But let's go to Lord Marlin, who was a former minister, instrumental in the campaign to have Boris Johnson elected as Mayor of London.
And you think that this shouldn't be happening at all, Lord Marlin.
Why is that?
I think it's shocking.
I mean, we have all these major issues going on in the world, and the last thing we need now is the Conservative Party self-destructing before our eyes with bitter argument and dispute and throwing to the wind potentially a leader who's won them a massive majority.
It's a complete disaster.
I mean, he's also the only Prime Minister that you have described.
He's the only Prime Minister ever to have been served with a fine by the British police for breaking a law, and indeed it's one of his own laws.
I mean, I just don't understand how any Conservative who believes in integrity and probity in high office could be comfortable with that fact.
Well, no one's comfortable with it.
In fact, it's a shocking thing.
But on the other hand, I'm very comfortable with the way that he's led the world in terms of Ukraine.
And by the way, Ukraine is being bombed at every moment.
And, you know, he was on the telephone today to their leader dealing with some very substantive issues.
He's also had to deal with the COVID crisis.
He's had COVID himself.
He's had to deal with Brexit.
He's had all manner of crises, which actually, by and large, he's handled extremely well.
And of course, you quite rightly say there is public disgust in the behaviour at number 10, which isn't just him.
It is all manner of civil servants and people who are meant to support them.
And I feel actually quite sympathy for these civil servants because they've worked all round the clock during the COVID crisis.
Well, you said you feel sorry, just to clarify, you feel sympathy for them that they all broke the law, over 80 of them, including the boss.
They all broke their own COVID lockdown law.
No, no.
Your mars are putting words in people's mouths.
No, I don't feel sympathy for them breaking the law at all.
I feel disgusted by it, as all of us do.
But the fact is, they have worked all the way around the clock.
No credit's been given to that.
They've dug slightly their own grave after performing a magnificent task.
And now they are reaping the whirlwind.
I mean, you make it sound like this was the inevitable consequence of their hard graft for the nation.
Whereas I would argue that they systematically, in large numbers, broke the very laws that they had laid down for the public, which meant, for argument's sake, to give one illustration, that Her Majesty the Queen, whose reign we've just been celebrating for four days, had to spend the funeral of her long, longtime husband and rock, Prince Philip, on her own, because she felt a duty to obey these lockdown rules laid down by Downing Street.
And then it turned out that there were not one, but two illegal parties in Downing Street the night before Philip's funeral.
History Repeats Itself 00:11:20
And that's, I think, what has incensed people, is that they look at all this, they look at the volume, the volume of parties, the volume of people working there who were fined by the police.
They look at the Prime Minister being personally fined himself, and they've drawn the conclusion that they think this is brazen double standards and hypocrisy.
And I want to play you the clip just to remind you and the viewers of what happened when Boris Johnson finally came face to face with the British public, many of whom are royalists, monarchists, likely Conservatives.
This is what happened on Friday morning at St Paul's Cathedral.
I mean, when that happens to a football manager, Lord Marlon, they normally get shown the door very quickly when their own fans turn on them.
I mean, as a conservative...
You couldn't possibly watch that with anything but a shudder, could you?
No, but also your friends, the Sussexes, got very heavily booed.
Because they also lost the support of the Middle English party.
Yeah, and I was with the royal family at the Braymar Games when Tony Blair and Sheree Blair were booed by the whole stadium.
And in fact, I had lunch with a friend of yours today, Ian Botham, who said, I used to get booed the whole time.
Booing is quite normal for prime ministers.
It doesn't mean it's right, and it doesn't mean it's not the public venting their anger.
Of course, they're venting their anger, and justifiably so.
But the question is: do you want 12 weeks of the Conservative Party tearing itself apart when in fact they should be governing the country and trying to get through these shocking crises that confront us?
Energy crisis, inflation, cost of living crisis, and of course the horrendous war on Ukraine, which is having the impact on our economy that is widely reported.
That's my point.
It's not the fact that he is right in doing what he's done.
It's not the point that he's right, that the civil servants are right in what they've done.
I'm merely saying, in their case, cut him a little bit of slack, but I quite understand that people don't want to.
What I'm saying is, is now the time to have this election, this 12 weeks of bloodletting?
Is it in the benefit of the Conservative MPs that want to do it?
Because in the end, the voter will not put up with it and the Conservatives will win the next election, and probably rightly so.
And who is going to deal with these crises?
So be careful what you wish for.
Well, I guess we'll find out tonight because he may well have already lost for all we know.
My guess is he'll win, but the question is by what margin?
And that margin, I mean, just finally for you, what is the tipping point for you?
What would he need to effectively win by in terms of a small majority where you would think his position is untenable?
Well, I think history relates, and your reporter said it brilliantly earlier, that most Prime Ministers who have this vote of no confidence against them, they find it very difficult to manage the party thereafter.
I'm not saying Boris can't, because he's got the energy and the vision and actually he's got that X factor that the public like and they forgive him for an awful lot.
But clearly it's going to be over 100.
I would have thought that's the number.
And it's not going to be easy from him from here on in.
Lord Marlon, I appreciate you joining me.
Thank you very much indeed.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, we've got Adam Bolton and Tom Newton Dunn with us now.
Adam Bolton, you've covered every election for the last 460 years.
How much trouble is Boris Johnson in?
It looks like he's in pretty big trouble.
I mean, all the signs from today's voting are that things haven't really gone his way.
There hasn't been a strong number of Conservative MPs coming out and expressing their support for him.
And I think what you were saying earlier on, Piers, about this possibly being more of a shocker for him in terms of a result is certainly the case.
And I think if we get anything near to 50-50 in the vote, even if he were to win by a vote or two, he would be finished.
We've got, I think, 150 odd Conservative MPs have said that they've voted for him.
But we've also got some of Team Boris coming out and telling journalists after the vote that Tory MPs are lying snakes.
So we shall have to see what the result is.
Obviously, we're going to know within the hour.
But I think this has gone extremely badly for Boris Johnson.
I think the rapidity with which the vote was called after the Jubilee, they hoped that would work in his favour.
It doesn't look as if it does.
So I think we are going to see a Prime Minister mortally wounded.
And remember, if a third of Tory MPs or more vote against him, by the standards of his own team, by the standards of Jacob Rees-Mogg at the time of the vote, which Theresa May suffered and lost only a third of her MPs, he said that wasn't good enough.
She should resign.
And I think Mr. Rees-Mogg will be reminded very loudly of those comments, as indeed will Boris Johnson, who also implied at the time that she should step down, even although she'd won technically.
I'd just like to apologise to any snakes that were offended by their comparison to lying Conservative members of parliament.
Adam, stay with us.
We'll be with you all night.
It's going to be a very exciting evening.
Having a short break, we'll be back with our stellar panel here.
I mean, it doesn't get better than these three.
Look at this.
Look at this.
Three beasts and the beauty.
We'll be back after the break.
How dare you.
Three witches of Macbeth.
Welcome back to a special extended version of Piers Morgan on Censor.
I'm joined now by Tom Newton Dunn on the News Test.
Tom, I just want to talk to you about potential successes should Boris Johnson lose his job tonight or be forced out in the next few months.
You go today a new poll.
If Boris Johnson were deposed, who would Conservative members want to succeed him?
It was quite interesting, I thought.
A lot of runners and riders, not a clear favourite.
Ben Wallace was at the top with 12%.
Liz Truss, 11%.
Jeremy Hunt, 10%.
Penny Morden, 8%.
Rishi Sunak, Michael Gove, 7%.
Pretty Patel, 6%.
Tom Tugenhart and Nadeem Zahawi 5%.
And Dominic Raab, 4%.
So, I mean, really, I would say any one of those with a spirited canter could actually end up as the leader.
It's not clear-cut at all.
Yeah, I think you're right.
This is what's so funny about this conference vote.
We were talking through on our programme in the last couple of hours as well, is you've effectively got a leadership challenge without an alternative leader in place.
And I actually cannot remember a single political contest going down the years that's ever been the case.
Even back to Thatcher, Heseltine, there was Heseltine in the wings, Major, Redwood, and all the Tory troubles sort of going forward.
Theresa May, Boris Johnson, was always sitting there ready and waiting.
So all I can say is if we do get a leadership contest out of all this, and it still is a big if, I'm a little bit on the offensive.
I think this is 50-50.
I would not put a single penny on this going either way at the moment.
But if we do get a leadership contest, it's going to be absolutely intriguing because what we'll have is the heart and soul of the Conservative Party poured out all over the floor, all over the walls of our TV studios and everywhere else, as they absolutely thrashed out to really not just define who's going to be leader next, but what it actually means to be a Conservative, what on earth the Conservative Party is supposed to look like and shape up towards going into a general election, which is come next Sunday, two and a half years away.
Next Sunday marks exact midway point in this parliament.
So, you know, all right, they've got two and a half years to go, but actually, electorally, that's not very much time at all.
It's not at all fascinating.
Thank you, Tom.
Let's bring in the panel.
Grace, how are you feeling right now?
Because obviously, you can't stand Boris Johnson.
You presumably will feel that much better about most members of the Conservative Party, to be honest.
And I think what Tom was just saying is interesting and is true.
You know, I am not 100% sure which way it will go.
It obviously does seem very close, perhaps closer than we would have thought earlier in the day.
But two weeks ago, I think it was, you and I were sitting in the studio.
We were discussing the Sioux Gray report.
And I think you asked me whether or not I thought that Boris Johnson was going to go.
And I said he should go, but I don't think that he will go.
You know, I don't think that he really knows what accountability means.
I think that he basically has been, you know, spent his career in environments where he's been able to get through anything.
And if he loses it, if he loses tonight, and it's interesting, only 157 or so Tory MPs have publicly declared their support.
That's at least 20 fewer than at the same stage with Theresa May.
So whether that's significant or not, we don't know, because we can't really trust them all.
But that is a pretty worrying indicator, I would say, if you're 10 Downing Street tonight.
Yeah, and what Tom was just saying about how there's no clear leader in place is a really important point.
And what Kate was saying about how most of these MPs see their relationship with Boris Johnson as transactional, obviously that's true for most any MP generally and their political leader.
The issue is that transaction goes both ways.
Yes, they need Boris Johnson and Boris Johnson also needs them.
The question that they have to then be asking is what's going to happen when Boris Johnson goes.
And as of the last election, the Conservative Party has been in this state of division, basically, between a group of MPs who believe it's their job to fight for the soul of the Conservative Party as this kind of free market, small states, austerity-driven project, and those who think, oh, actually, we need to kind of lose a little bit of that and go back to, you know, perhaps some more investment, get rid of all this austerity baggage and fight lots of culture wars in order to broaden our coalition.
Those two groups are going to go at each other in a very, very fierce way, regardless of what happens in this context.
I mean, we saw it today, Isabel, with Nadine Doris immediately getting into a massive public spat with Jeremy Hunt, raising some good points, I have to say, in her tweet storm about his own record as health secretary in failing to prepare the country properly for a pandemic.
But it was open civil war erupting on social media right at the heart of the Conservative Party.
This is going to be the problem for whoever tries to take over.
You've got to somehow bring all these factions together and you've got to still maintain the remain leave kind of cliques that are going on.
It's not easy.
You've got a potential recession, certainly surging inflation to deal with.
This is a bit of a hospital pass.
It almost always is, though, isn't it?
Trust Broken With Public 00:02:38
I mean, you mentioned the Brexit thing, which we all wished that we'd kind of left behind.
But you're absolutely right.
That is now going to become a real problem.
You know, we've already seen one of Boris Johnson's greatest critics, Tobias Elwood, runs the Defence Select Committee, reopening the question of whether or not the UK should rejoin the single market.
Now, I thought his timing on that was a little bit dangerous, given his agenda is to remove Boris.
Don't now bring in the Brexit thing, because it allows Downing Street to try to argue that, you know, this is all a big plot to unravel Brexit.
Jeremy Hunt, one of the key rebels, also a big remainer.
And I think that will, annoyingly, for everybody who just wishes that we, you know, this question had been resolved and Park, this is all going to bubble up again.
Yeah.
Sharon, what do you make of this?
Because at the heart of it, really, is Boris Johnson and his staff at Downing Street going partying, breaking brazenly their own laws, which everybody else had to follow.
And the reason I think it's cut through so powerfully with the public is that so many of them were not allowed to go and see dying relatives in hospital.
I know people, including some in my family, who couldn't go and see people as they died from COVID in hospital.
And then to find out the people making these laws were basically on the lash everywhere.
Well, it was like Caligula at number 10.
Right.
You know, puking, throwing wine up the wall.
God only knows what was going on.
But the thing is, he lied.
He lied, he lied.
And surely somebody in his position knows truth will always come out.
No matter how long it takes, it always comes out and you look worse.
So own it.
That was his big, big mistake.
Well, the point with Boris is just own it.
The toll where Boris is, he's lied through his entire career as a journalist and politician.
And he's always seemed to fail upwards.
So he got fired from the Times for inventing quotes.
He got fired, you know, under Michael Howard for lying about an affair.
And each time he's then become London Mayor and then he's become Prime Minister.
So the message he gets to himself is actually lying doesn't matter.
And I think that's what's brought him down here.
That's the past.
And the thing is, yes, he's quirky and he's this funny little character that England loved for a while.
You know, he's this funny little guy.
But the thing is, the guy has no vision.
What's the vision of the Conservative Party?
Where's it going?
Does he have any?
What's his long-term country?
Right, but don't we also want integrity in our Prime Minister's?
Well, of course we do, but that, come on, we're living in the real world here.
Past Lies Bring Him Down 00:03:32
Is it too much to ask?
Yes, everybody lies.
Everybody does what they have to do for power.
Power.
We all know what goes on behind the doors.
But the thing is, what are the situation that this country is in right now?
Do you take the devil you know or the devil you don't know?
Look, he's not going to last long term.
I would keep that nutter in.
No, I would.
I would keep him in.
The sad thing.
I would keep him in until there's a long-term plan for this country.
What are they going to do about the economy?
What are they going to do about this?
The issue, I think, is once trust is broken with the British people, very hard to then trust that person.
I'd use him.
I would just use it.
But to tell us how he's going to rescue the country.
If I was a Conservative MP, I would keep him in as well.
And the thing that I would be thinking as a Conservative MP would be, let Boris fight the next election.
Probably lose.
Okay, but it will be a hung parliament.
There won't be a kind of stable government for particularly long.
The Conservative Party get their brief period out of office.
They get to sort their stuff out.
They get to find a leader and they get to decide what they're visiting.
Let's take another look at Downing Street if we can.
See what's going on there.
Because it was irrelevantly quiet earlier.
It's still pretty quiet.
I guess they're all waiting, aren't they, for this earthquake to erupt in about 30 minutes?
That's when we're expecting the result from Sir Graham Brady, who's the chair of the 1922 committee.
We now believe that all the votes have been cast.
And we know from when Theresa May went through this, it takes about an hour to count them and then to prepare the results.
Here's Downing Street from above.
Still nothing happening.
It's like a weirdly eerie...
Oddly, no partying.
Can you notice?
There's no one out there on the lash tonight, is there?
No partying with the Prime Minister.
We're going to have a little break.
Come back and talk briefly about the Platinum Jubilee, which now already seems a distant memory of national unity and joy and celebration.
Didn't take Boris long to ruin that either.
We'll talk about that after the break.
We're continuing breaking news coverage from this dramatic night for British politics.
Welcome back to Pittsburgh.
And I'll sensors.
You're looking over the top of the houses of parliament tonight, where all hell is probably breaking loose as we await the result of the no confidence vote into Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
I'm rejoined by Talk TV's international editor, Isabel Oakshot, socialist author Grace Bakeley and the talks host Sharon Osborne.
My mother's just texted me.
So we're discussing the next Prime Minister tonight, and she is the voice of Middle England, I might add.
Please mention Rory Stewart.
He would be the only one in my eyes.
Avalis is not a member of the Conservative Party.
No, which in itself seems ridiculous.
Amazing.
I can't imagine that.
Rory Stewart's an incredibly impressive guy, and yet he doesn't factor.
Why?
Well, because he was a Remainer.
He's basically a lefty, that's why.
I mean, you know, he just doesn't really meet the core offer of being a Conservative.
Yeah, but if Middle England likes him...
Oh, yeah, but they like him like a kind of little pet.
I don't know.
Didn't he yomp across Afghanistan for two years?
So he likes all of that, but you know, yeah, not after he went to the middle.
It takes a bit of moral finance.
We've got some MPs that we've spotted from our helicopter.
We think they're MPs.
It might be completely random strangers who've decided to go down and gate crash the party.
Uninspiring Succession List 00:07:04
But there they all are.
They're all out there.
Obviously, obviously partying, which is what we expect from our politicians.
They'll all be plotting, not partying.
They'll be plotting out there on the river, trying to work out what's going to happen here.
And we're going to find out in about 25 minutes.
I want to turn briefly to the last four days of the Platinum Jubilee, Sharon.
Because aside from Boris Johnson being booed, which may well have been a tipping point for many MPs to press the button on him today with just no confidence, it was also interesting to me that the Sussexes got booed.
Harry and Meghan, what did you make of that?
Well, it wasn't a total boo.
It wasn't as big as Boris.
No, nowhere near.
Very unusual for a member of the royal family to get any booing at that kind of event.
Yes.
And they did.
But it wasn't anywhere near as bad as Boris.
You could still hear the cheers above the booze.
Put it that way.
I mean, should we read much into it?
I just got the feeling that they basically discovered on this particular trip that they've gone from A-list royals to C-list.
And that's how the royal family are now going to treat them.
They won't be on the balcony.
They won't be at the top events.
And they can come and go if they want.
But they're no longer going to be working A-list important royalties.
No, they have lost their importance.
They don't mean anything.
The country wasn't that overjoyed.
I didn't hear many people go, this is amazing.
I don't think the country really cares very much.
They didn't.
And the thing that I must say is the country didn't react one way or the other.
It was, oh, they're here, okay.
But the way they kind of came in and went was a huge signal that I don't think we'll see them here much.
What made me laugh, Isabel, was they arrived on a massive private jet from California, these two eco-wars constantly preach.
Well, it'll be, I mean, they've used it, it'll come out.
They've used Eltons a lot, they've used the Cloonies a lot, who knows, somebody, right?
But it's the utter hypocrisy, once again, preaching about carbon footprint, always using private jets every time.
Yeah.
And funny enough, it's the common link between all the people who got booed was hypocrisy.
The British public will forgive a lot of things, but they won't forgive brazen hypocrisy.
To be fair on them, they did actually keep a relatively low proceeding.
You know, you said they discovered their C-list.
I mean, they asked to be taken off the list.
You know, they wanted to be out of the working circulation.
So I think it could have gone worse.
You know, I don't think they overshadowed it.
No, no question.
Of course they didn't.
People took pictures of them, but they did behave quite well.
It made no impact.
They made no impact.
I just want to play a clip, first of all, of the this is the Queen on the last, the closing moments of the Platinum Jubilee on Sunday, because we weren't sure if she'd even make it.
She was there at the start.
I was by the palace when she came out on the Thursday.
It was an amazing moment.
And then she just sort of vanished from sight.
And we thought that maybe we wouldn't see her again.
And then you suddenly saw the flag moving on the palace roof and you realised, fantastic.
And then you thought, go on, out you come.
And out came the star of the show, the star of any show she's ever at.
And she came out and I just thought, if we can listen to a bit of the sound here, I just thought this was so moving.
It gives you goosebumps.
It really does.
You don't make it.
That was a scene.
And then, of course, the crowd had burst into God Save the Queen, which was incredibly evocative and emotional, I felt.
Isabel, I mean, it's hard to overstate the importance of this Queen to this country or the impact that we're going to have when she's no longer here.
Couldn't agree more.
I mean, I found, I'm not a massive monarchist, but I found the whole thing weirdly moving.
And it is because it sort of feels like it's a bit of a goodbye.
I know that sounds a little bit mawkish.
What's the last Jubilee that we'd better have for her?
In reality, she is not well.
We know that.
And, you know, when the palace says she's experiencing some discomfort, we know that really means she's in a very great deal of pain.
And I think when she does sadly pass, there is going to be a huge amount of national soul searching.
Yeah, I agree.
You know, she has held everything together.
Real concerns about the future of the Union and the Commonwealth.
I totally agree.
Grace, I know you're not a massive monarchist.
In fact, you spent most of the weekend according to your Instagram feed at a wild festival where you were painting your fingernails fluorescent green.
You're not a fan, which I thought was a tribute to what the Queen wore actually on the Sunday night.
Yeah, I wasn't sure.
Clearly I missed it.
I was ahead of time and coordinated.
But even as somebody who's not that into the monarchy, can you appreciate what this woman has done for the country?
I have basically no opinions about them as people.
I don't really follow the ins and outs of the monarchy.
I don't think I should have to follow what goes on within this family, this dynasty that kind of rules our country from behind the scenes.
What I do think, though, is that when the Queen does sadly die, we will enter into a national conversation about whether or not this is an institution that we should have as part of our constitution, as part of the way that our country works.
It is very strange that we have a family whose marriages, weddings, births, dramas, we're all constantly invested in understanding as though they're the kind of Kardashians or something, and that they're in charge of our politics, of our government, ultimately.
This is our head of state.
I think that when the Queen, who everyone loves and who's been in charge for a very long time, does go and we have this array of pretty uninspiring potential successes, people are going to start thinking.
Right, but you are missing, in my view, the rising superstar of the royal family.
And it's this little guy.
He is.
Louis.
He's amazing.
Whose facial expressions over the four days got increasingly hilarious and who clearly began to seize his moment.
And in fact, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge issued a statement tonight on Twitter thanking everybody and saying that we all had a fantastic time, especially Louis.
Don't you think, though, that it gave people confidence that this is the family that will be here after the Queen is missing?
And by the way, very deliberately, that last scene on the last night, and everyone was singing God Save the Queen, but she had chosen for that sort of iconic moment of the end of the picture that this was the family she, that this is now the streamline royalty.
These are the two next monarchs, potentially three next monarchs, and that's the way it works.
But the child has said for a long time that he's going to cut down the people who are actually on payroll and that represent the family.
It's going to be cold.
And the thing is, I think that the royal family brings so much to this country.
I mean, you look at all the people from all over the world.
They don't actually cost us anything.
Royal Family Under Threat 00:15:30
The merchants are not going to be able to do it.
The great committee is they cost us money.
I think if we were going to make a kind of coherent economic argument as to how we construct our head of state, we could probably make a better one for saying, I don't know, have a presidential system or have a Spanish.
What's that our own version of Joe Biden?
Well, I mean, no, it wouldn't be the same as that.
You would have a lot of people.
You would just be responsible for kind of...
We've got a hold of there for the moment, panel.
But the Sun's political editor, Harry Cole, joins me now live from the heartland of Westminster.
Harry, good evening to you.
What's going on?
Do you know the answer yet?
No one knows the answer.
They are currently tallying up the votes.
I don't quite understand why it takes an hour to count 360 odd bits of paper, but nevertheless, we should know very soon.
But I will say, the mood has gone a little bit flat here.
Some of those Prime Minister supporters who are looking chirpier this afternoon are looking a little bit glum right now.
Whether that means they are expecting bad news or whether they are just exhausted after hammering the phones remains to be seen.
And Harry, for you, what is the tipping point number where if he was to win the vote but get such a small majority, he would really be in terminal trouble?
Look, I think anything that's sort of close to the 180 figure is going to be very hard work for even the best spin doctors in the world to spin.
And I think anything really around 150, 140, even 130 rebels means that Keir Starmer can stand up every single PMQs for weeks on end and say more than a third of people behind you hate you and want you gone.
And you just wonder, in the run-up to an election, is that really viable for any Prime Minister?
And if he isn't there anymore, you know, all the betting today is quite interesting.
It's sort of spread across the board.
I was reading them out earlier.
Ben Wallace, the Defence Minister, he's ahead at the moment.
Is he somebody that you think could potentially come through?
Well, I think anyone in the cabinet is going to find it quite tough to distance themselves from Boris Johnson should he be sort of de-ceremonially ousted.
However, at a time of where we are in the electoral cycle and perhaps where we are with the situation in Europe with the war in Ukraine, perhaps it wouldn't be the first time that a Defence Secretary would be in the running.
That said, I think there'll be quite a few people on the Tory backbenchers who think, actually, you guys have stuck with Boris Johnson all the way through through thick and thin.
Maybe it's time for some fresh blood and look to the backbenches for an untested MP.
But I have to say, that's never happened really properly in British history.
If Boris Johnson does lose or wins by such a meagre majority that he's basically toast, what do you think, Harry, has been the thing that's done him in?
Look, I think there's two factors.
One, his handling the Partygate saga, as it now is, has been appalling.
I think if he'd come out early on and said, it would have been very painful, but come out and said, you know what, we didn't think it at the time, but we probably did break the rules and grovelled and grovelled, rather than sort of have it eekes out of him for months, I think would be an issue.
The other problem is to Boris Johnson, everyone thinks, oh, he's a relatively new MP.
He's only been on the front line for three years.
If you think back, he's actually been at the forefront of British politics for 17 years now.
And, you know, he has been a Marmite figure all the way through.
Even when he was Mayor of London, there were people that hated him.
Brexit obviously galvanised that Marmiteness around him.
And actually, you have to wonder, he's a very lucky general at times, but even a cat runs out of lives at night.
And to be honest, I rather like Marmite characters myself.
So I always think there's hope for Marmite.
I imagine.
Harry, thanks for now.
I appreciate it.
Entrepreneur Charlie Mullins has joined us in the studio.
Charlie, what do you make of all this?
Should Boris Johnson stay or go?
Well, I think he's going to stay.
I don't think the votes are going to go totally against him.
I think he's going to be very close.
But whether he's going to resign after that or not, but I think he's going to win this evening.
But should he go?
Of course he should go.
Why?
Well, because of the morally it's wrong what he's done there, and I don't think anybody's got any faith in him now.
And public have just had enough of it all.
I mean, I get that feeling.
When I saw the booing going on at St Paul's Cathedral, I just thought that was Middle England really saying, you know what, we're just done with you because it's been constant.
Yeah, well, I mean, you shout about the booing, but he was smiling at that.
He thought they were shouting out booze.
Right.
You know, you're right, Lot.
He thought they were saying boozy.
Yeah.
But, you know, I think that he's brought this on himself.
And what do all your friends and employees that you've spoken to make of it?
Oh, well, everybody's just sick and tired of it, and they just really want someone there that could be honest, someone they can trust, someone hopefully that can, you know, become a much better leader and win the next election.
I mean, if he stays, I don't think he's going to get out of Boardwith tonight, but if he does stay, I think it can't be far from him stepping down.
Evidently, he's got more people against him now than Theresa May.
And, you know, you know what happened?
Well, she stepped down.
And more importantly, what was it like performing Sweet Caroline at the Platinum Jubilee?
I done it quite bad, didn't I?
I thought you were great, Rod.
Yeah.
Funny enough, Rod Stewart came out with a great line the other day.
I'm just obviously comparing you to the great man because I'm sure you like the comparison.
But he was saying the other day that only he and the Queen, they've got one thing in common.
They've had the same haircut for 60 years.
I thought it was a great line.
Yeah, not quite 50 years from me, but are you a Rod Stewart fan?
Well, what do you think?
Well, of course you are.
You're right.
Of course.
Who's not?
I love Rod.
He's one of my favourite people in the world.
We're going to go to a break now and be back with more on the breaking news.
We're very close now, 12 minutes away from finding out Boris Johnson's fate.
He's doing what we're all doing.
He's looking at the TV screen, waiting and wondering.
Is he toast?
He could be gone tonight.
Pretty dramatic, so stay with us.
Well welcome back to Piers Morgan Censor.
This is inside the 1922 committee room.
This is where it's all happening tonight.
The 359 Conservative MPs have now registered their vote as to whether they have confidence in Boris Johnson.
That number includes Boris Johnson himself who had to decide whether he had confidence in himself.
We've been joined now by Pitts Cable, former leader, Liberal Democrats.
Great to see you.
Looking, I have to say, extremely rested, turned, full of energy.
Is that what happens after you stop being a leader?
Yeah, retirement.
What do you make of all this?
What's going to happen, do you think, in 10 minutes?
I'm a bit unfashioned, though, my views.
I think Boris will win, probably.
And I suspect his supporters brought this division on.
They could have waited a few weeks, but now is probably the best time to have it.
There's some bad news coming down the road.
By election, there was momentum building up against him.
So have the vote now, take it on.
And then he's got a year's grace, probably.
And, you know, we know he's a male.
You know, he's a politically very clever guy, great communication skills.
He can possibly turn it round.
Well, is the ultimate slippery issue?
Yeah, every time you think something is going to stick to him, off it slides.
And he just barrels on, which in a way is a political skill.
No, I would have some money on him, actually.
Would you?
Yeah.
Interesting.
Grace, I mean, he could.
He could just come through this stronger than ever, because, of course, if he comes through with a reasonable majority, he'll claim complete vindication.
He'll say party gate is now officially over.
The rebels have tried.
They will have to back off.
They're going to have to, you know, just suck it up for at least a year unless they change the rules, which I think is unlikely.
So Boris would live to fight another day.
That could happen.
It could.
And I think Boris himself has learned that he can basically come through almost anything.
He can lie, he can get attacked, he can come through scandals and survive.
I think partly that probably stems back to his upbringing.
You don't go to Eton and Oxbridge and come through the British establishment without knowing a little something about how to kind of come through scandals.
But I also think it is just the fact that he has come through so many now.
He seemed able to lie throughout his career.
He seemed able to...
I mean, really, if you look back over the last several years of the Conservative Party, of this government, it's not just been the Partygate scandal.
We've had the Greensill scandal, which in my opinion was far, far worse.
It exposed kind of corruption at the heart of the British state.
You had all this stuff about his wallpapers.
You had everything that was going on during the pandemic.
You've got now the massive cost of living crisis, which really should be what we're talking about.
And he has just been able to basically cast all of this off and consistently basically start culture wars, throw new stories onto the table, throw dead meat to journalists and say, let's fight about something rather than talking about the issues that matter.
And it could work again.
Isabel, I mean, is he basically our version of Donald Trump now, where truth isn't that important to his political success because people factor in that he's, you know, that he's pretty loose and free with it.
Well, that's sort of what Sharon was saying earlier.
But I think there's scales of lying, isn't there?
And, you know, this man is a pathological liar.
And at some point, I think the voters become repelled by that.
On the issue of the rules, the possibility of them being changed, that's not as distant as you might think.
There are an elections, elections coming up for the 1922 committee.
They actually have it in their gift to change the rules.
So that year that he's supposedly safe for, come September, that might not look quite so secure.
Well, let's go to Talk TV's political editor, Kate McCann again.
Kate, we're literally maybe four or five minutes away now from getting this result.
Are you getting any more feeling about where it may go or are we all literally in the dark here?
Well, everybody is literally in the dark because the only person who knows is Sir Graham Brady, who's the chair of the 1922 committee.
My understanding is that he was going to drop the Prime Minister a line just before he announces that result at nine o'clock so the PM can be aware of exactly what's happening.
I think it's fair to say, as Harry was saying to you just before, Piers, it's fairly jittery here.
Things have got a bit louder.
People have started to come to camera points to react to that vote.
But, you know, number 10 source is saying that the reaction of Deanna Davison, we were talking about her earlier on, the Red Wall MP who's said tonight that she is going to vote against the Prime Minister, she's going to vote no confidence, that that was a bit of a wobbly moment, that that has worried them slightly.
They are now very concerned about what other MPs might do, other so-called quiet MPs who haven't been as public about their views.
They thought they could rely on her.
Clearly, they couldn't.
It may well be more the same.
They're saying for what it's worth that a two-thirds result, so two-thirds of the party backing the Prime Minister, would be a pretty good result for them, but also admitting behind the scenes that anything lower than that, any less than two-thirds of MPs backing the Prime Minister is going to look very difficult indeed.
I think there are wild ranges when it comes to how this is going to play out for him, but anything 150, 180 is starting to look quite tricky.
I mean, I've got Vince Cable here, he's very bullish on Boris.
He's put money on him surviving and thriving.
Well, look, I think that that's probably fair.
I think Vince Cable's probably right.
The Prime Minister may well win this vote and he may well go on to move forward as the leader of the Conservative Party as the Prime Minister.
But I think there is a question now about whether this is the beginning of the end, because remember, those two by-elections loom.
They are not far away.
The promise he made today to his MPs in the 1922 committee, I'm a winner.
I can do this again.
If you back me, better times are still to come.
Well, if they lose those two by-elections, that's going to look very difficult.
And we've been talking all day long about the fact the 1922 committee rules say if he wins this vote tonight, he's safe for a year.
Well, I wouldn't bet money on that because the 1922 committee earlier this year discussed changing the rules.
So you could have two votes, one every six months.
They could well do that if they want to, because as I say, it's convention, not rules.
Vince Cable, I mean, you're a betting man and you would bet that he will survive this and carry on.
But should he is a different question?
No, from a national interest point of view, no.
I mean, for reasons you set out earlier, you know, you've lost the trust of the public, you've made laws and not followed them.
You know, you've treated the public as idiots.
I mean, I think for the whole issue of public standards and ethics, the answer is no.
But in terms of the Conservative Party, I mean, he may be the best bet they've got.
I mean, he should be holding this coalition together.
Should any serving Prime Minister who is fined by the police in this country for breaking his own lockdown rules, should any Prime Minister survive even that moment?
No, and you know, from the wider public interest, obviously the answer is no, but this is not what the vote's about.
I mean, they're choosing the best leader that they can produce.
And, you know, he does hold this Conservative coalition together.
It's not at all clear who can do better.
What happens if he survives this and then we discover that Sakir Starmer and Angela Raynor get fined by the police for what they did with the curry and the beers and they've already pledged to resign?
Well, he may well, and that actually, in a strange way, may help the Labour Party.
I mean, Stamba's done his work, he's detoxified it, he's got rid of the Corbyn Knights, and they may, and there are quite a few very talented people, mainly women, on their front bench who could be a bit more charismatic than he is.
So actually, that may not be a bad outcome for Labour.
So it could help the party.
We've got six seconds away now from nine o'clock.
We were told to expect the result at nine o'clock.
So here's Big Ben, right at the heart of our parliamentary democracy.
It is nine oh six seconds and there's nothing!
Come on, say Graham Brady.
You've tormented us all evening.
Where are you, man?
Maybe it's a tie.
Oh, Vince Cable raising the spectre of it being a tie, which would be unthinkable.
I have no idea what happens in that eventuality.
But the reality is we're now watching live scenes from Parliament and the 1922 committee.
We are waiting to hear the result.
People are back in.
This looks like Sir Graham Brady has got his result and we're about to hear it.
Let's go live and dislist him.
Good evening.
I can report as returning officer that 359 ballots were cast, no spoilt ballots, that the vote in favour of having confidence in Boris Johnson as leader was 211 votes and the vote against was 148 votes.
And therefore, I can announce that the Parliamentary Party does have confidence.
Well, there's the result.
It's 211 in favour of Boris Johnson, but 148 Conservative MPs voted against their own Prime Minister tonight, which I would say is an incredibly high number.
High Vote Against Leader 00:14:31
Let's go to Adam Bolton.
Adam, your take on that result?
Well, that's 58% of the votes in favour of Boris Johnson.
So that clearly is just a little bit better than Mrs. Thatcher when she was forced out on 55%.
But it's considerably worse than Theresa May, who got 66% of the votes cast.
And remember, Jacob Reese Mogg, the cabinet minister now, said then that that was not a vote of confidence, that she should resign.
It's also less than John Major got.
So this is a bad result for Boris Johnson.
Of course, he lives to fight another day.
And he probably of his predecessors, Thatcher, Major or May, is more inclined to try and fight it out.
But obviously, 148 is bad news.
I mean, we were hearing earlier on from the Boris Johnson camp that they were hoping to keep the number of rebel MPs below 100.
Well, they've failed by a factor of 50% on that.
So what happens next?
It looks like Mr. Johnson will struggle on.
It looks like there's going to be this issue of what happens to Keir Tharma and Angela Rayner.
If they resign, that will clearly put pressure on him, given his own behaviour.
Then we could have those by-elections.
And if he loses both of those, Conservative MPs will appear to have gambled on a loser.
And of course, at the end of this, if he's still there once the Standards Committee has looked into this, there's the whole question of whether he lied to Parliament.
So it looks to me as if we're going to get the continuing agony of Boris Johnson.
And it does seem to me that with a third of his party not backing him, more than a third of his party not backing him, 40% in fact, that he is heading towards a very difficult few months.
And it's very unlikely that he'll be able to move on and concentrate on all that government business his loyalists keep on telling us about.
But he will stay.
Right.
Just for recap then.
So 359 Conservative members of Parliament voted tonight and a vote of confidence in the Prime Minister.
Here's the result from Sir Graham Brady.
I can report as returning officer that 359 ballots were cast.
No spoil ballots, that the vote in favour of having confidence in Boris Johnson as leader was 211 votes, and the vote against was 148 votes.
And therefore, I can announce that the parliamentary party does have confidence.
Let's go to Vince Cable.
Vince, I mean, I would say 148 of his own MPs voting against him.
That's not a good night for Boris Johnson, surely.
No, it's not a good night, except he has survived.
And we know that this, very unlike the Theresa May dissidents who were united and knew what they wanted and were very organised and committed, his opponents in his own party are very fragmented.
There's no clear alternative.
So he has survived, and I would expect he will continue to survive.
It may be bad news for the country.
It's good news for Kier Stalmer and Ed Davy.
They've now got so much to go at.
They've got a wounded opponent now.
Ed Davies emerging as the sort of knight in shining armour of British politics, isn't he?
The only untouchable.
He's not been tarnished by party gate at all.
Well, indeed, yeah.
Isabel, give me a snapshot reaction to this result.
I think it's the worst possible result, actually, for the Conservative Party, certainly for the country.
A great result for the Labour Party, because this now, this agony, will go on and on and on.
Any idea that this has somehow put the issue to bed is absolutely for the birds.
Think of all those people that have publicly come out today within the Tory Party for the first time, blistering letters of no confidence.
You can't take that away.
They've put it in writing.
That's not going to suddenly kind of evaporate because there's been some kind of consensus.
There isn't a consensus here.
It's just a majority and not a good one at that.
Grace, you know, it seems to me, if you were using a shipping analogy, that the boat has been hold and we're just not quite sure how quickly it's going to tumble to the bottom of the ocean.
Yeah, I mean, I think, as I said before, Boris could quite easily, well, easily, but he could conceivably stumble through this.
He could protect himself.
He could basically just carry on as though nothing has happened, get to the point of the next election, be confident in the fact that there's no clear successor to replace him, that as Vince was saying, that his opponents are not united.
Whether or not this does actually end up being good for the Labour Party is, I think, a big question here, because we're going to have effectively several years of non-government.
It's like all the news is going to be confined to what's going on within the Tory Party and then the stuff that they chuck out to keep us busy chatting whilst they go about their business.
The question is, can Labour construct a narrative about where we should be going?
Because Kier Starmer has not done that effectively thus far.
So unless he can actually say, what should we be doing right now?
Where should we be going as a country?
How should we be solving the cost of living crisis?
Then it's not actually going to benefit Labour.
We could end up going back to a situation like we had before 2018 of just hung parliaments and constant kind of procedural.
I mean, if you are Labour, though, you might be thinking to yourselves, let's just keep Boris there because that might be the best chance we ever win the election.
Joining me again is talk to his political editor Kate McCann, who's with Tory MP and forest supporter Mike Wood.
I am Piers.
I have to add, just on those numbers, you were having a really interesting chat there with Adam about them.
Remember, there were around 174 people on the payroll, so who were essentially paid or had an advantage to backing Boris Johnson?
If you take a look at those numbers with the number who have eventually supported him, that only is around 35 additional.
Now, that's not great for the party.
So as you say, let's ask Mike Wood about that because he is here with me.
Mike, you obviously do support the Prime Minister.
You can't be very happy with these numbers, are you?
Well, I think I said beforehand that I thought that anything more than 210 would be a solid result.
211 is obviously in line with that.
It's a majority.
The party rules say that in order to replace a leader, you need a majority voting to have no confidence.
Instead, it's a clear majority saying that they have confidence in Boris Johnson to remain leader of the Conservative Party.
And now he does need to get back to focusing on those important issues facing the country and the world at the moment.
It's a pretty whopping number, though.
It's well over a third, higher than most people expected.
The party were saying this morning they wanted to keep it under 100 rebels.
They haven't managed that by a long shot.
How on earth is Boris Johnson going to bring people back together now?
Well, Kate, you were here at the time of the last leadership election.
You remember on that fifth ballot when it was blindingly obvious that Boris Johnson was going to be in the final two.
He still only got 51% of Conservative MPs.
He got 160 Conservative MPs voting for him in that fifth ballot at a time when he was clearly going to be in the final two.
So he's built a further 51 who've supported him tonight on top of the numbers.
That's good, isn't it?
The Prime Minister says that he's had a good pandemic, he's made all the big calls, right?
It's not really great to only have added that number of MPs and when over a third of your own party still think he's the wrong man for the job.
Well no, I think it's clearly over half have voted that they want him to remain as leader of the Conservative Party and as Prime Minister.
There are really big issues facing the country at the moment that go well beyond some of the issues that have obviously been raised over the last few weeks.
We need the Prime Minister to be supporting people with the cost of living, as he has been doing.
We need him to be continuing to lead the Western world in resisting Russian aggression in Ukraine and we need him to be focusing on helping our businesses, our schools and our NHS to rebuild after the COVID pandemic.
That's the important work.
All the things that we're elected to do in December 2019, we need to build on that progress, remind people why they voted for a Conservative government with a clear majority.
And I know that Boris Johnson is the best leader of the Conservative Party to deliver on that and the best person to lead the country going forward.
Mike Wood, thank you very much.
There you go, Piers.
That's the arguments of Conservative MPs tonight.
Mike Wood at PPS there.
Now Producer Victoria is just going to nip in and get Anne-Marie Trevelyan who is the Trade Secretary mic'd up.
So if you want to have a quick chat to her because what's really interesting now is this number of MPs, this scale that was above what the party was really hoping to see, 148.
That means that the next couple of days and the next couple of weeks are going to be really difficult for the Prime Minister.
We saw a hint of that today.
He was talking in the 1922 committee about a potential announcement on tax cuts, about focusing on policy going forward.
But I think things are going to get very difficult for him now.
And Anne-Marie Trevelyan joins us here.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan, you are the Trade Secretary.
You're in Boris Johnson's cabinet.
How does it feel tonight to know that that many of your own MPs don't support him?
So I'm glad that we are the other side of the vote.
I know that the Prime Minister spent all day listening to those colleagues who had those concerns and he will have heard from them where those areas of policy were that they feel he needs to focus on.
And as you say, there are some really big areas of policy that we want to drive forward, both in the energy revolution, infrastructure investments, but really importantly, tackling the cost of living crisis and making sure that we bring forward policies that make a difference to all our constituents day in and day out.
There is so much to do.
Obviously, we were elected on a very broad manifesto in 2019, the challenges of COVID and the emergency situation that we actually were.
And the Prime Minister led not only the UK in delivering a vaccine but the world in finding solutions, demonstrating that he has that incredible capacity to push through in really hard situations.
I know that tomorrow morning he will be drawing together all those thoughts and really putting forward a package of measures and policy direction which are going to help the UK really move forwards at pace.
I'm really excited about it.
So does that mean tax cuts next week then?
I wouldn't dare speak on behalf of the Chancellor Kate.
that would be an absolutely death sentence for anybody but I hope very much that we will see the Treasury looking across the piece and broadly forwards how we can drive forward.
What is a Conservative, a clear Conservative policy framework always, which is to make sure that we leave as much of our hard-earned cash in the pockets of those who've earned it.
That's always been a Conservative philosophy and we need to make sure that we pay down some of the costs we've had to pick up through COVID but I know that the Chancellor and Prime Minister will want to drive that forwards in due course.
I know that you're here in support of the Prime Minister.
I know that you're going to say that he's doing the best job and that he can move forward from this, but the reality is going to be really, really difficult.
Do you honestly believe that Boris Johnson can bring this fractured party back together and fight the next election?
Yes, I really do because he has always demonstrated that when we're in really difficult circumstances where there are many, many competing forces, he has an extraordinary clarity.
He has an ambition, he has a bold perspective and he has a confidence in the British people which is reciprocated from them.
And I know that going forwards now, this is passed, this vote is passed, he will want to pick all that up and drive forward, make sure that we are delivering for all those who voted for us back in 2019.
Anne-Marie Trelyan, thank you so much for joining us tonight.
Sophia, it's interesting to hear the views of the cabinet and the fact that Anne-Marie Trelyan is saying now that Boris Johnson has the confidence of the country, but he doesn't necessarily have the confidence of all of his MPs.
I think it's going to be a watch and wait and see how he makes it through the next couple of weeks.
Yes, I think it certainly is.
Thank you, Kate.
Let's bring back Adam Bolton.
Adam, quick question.
Given the scale of rebellion here, you know, 42%, I think it is, of Conservative MPs have voted against the sitting Prime Minister.
Could a senior cabinet minister with leadership ambition break ranks and resign?
And what pressure would that put on Boris Johnson if that was to happen now?
Well, I suspect if they were going to do it, they should have done it today rather than after the result.
It's possible that members of his cabinet might go to him and say, look, the game's up.
We haven't got the support of two out of five, or you haven't got the support of two out of five of your parliamentary party.
But it has to be said there's absolutely no sign that they are going to do that because what Mr. Johnson has done very successfully going through all the way back to Brexit and then his own leadership has managed to govern in a relatively determined way with a very narrow margin of support within the country or within his own party.
And it looks like he's going to continue to do that.
And frankly, I can't think of the person in the cabinet who's going to stand up and not want to go in his flipstream.
I mean, the closest we came to it today was Jeremy Hunt saying he wasn't going to support him.
And I mean, I think it's worth remembering that the day started not just with knowing they were going to get a vote, but also with the former Treasury Minister, Jesse Norman, writing not about the parties, but about current policy and describing current Boris Johnson policy as grotesque, illegal, ugly, provocative and unnecessary.
So they're obviously a significant minority, and we must stress they are a minority within the parliamentary party, who are extremely unhappy with the direction of government and who, having come out in the open now and shown that this number of MPs don't like what the Prime Minister is doing, I think they will feel just as the pro-Brexit rebels felt during the Theresa May time,
that they have open licence to rebel on any government policy they don't like.
Right, and significantly, I think, with Mr. Norman and his excoriating letters, he's married to Kate Bingham, who was Boris Johnson's saviour with the COVID vaccine programme.
So this is about as ferocious as friendly fire gets, I would think.
Adam, thank you for now.
Rebels Lose The Fight 00:02:23
Well, just to remind people who are tuning in, 359 Conservative MPs have voted tonight about whether they have confidence in Boris Johnson.
211 said they do.
148, 42% of Tory MPs no longer have confidence in their Prime Minister, which is a pretty startling number, albeit Boris Johnson has won the vote.
So we'll be back after the break with more analysis and more reaction on this big breaking news tonight.
Stay with us.
Well, welcome back to Piers Morgan on Centre, an extended version of the show tonight to cover the big breaking news on Boris Johnson and this vote of no confidence.
Well it turned out there was a vote of confidence in him, but not as big a vote as he would have liked.
So here's the result.
I can report as returning officer that 359 ballots were cast.
No spoiled ballots.
That the vote in favour of having confidence in Boris Johnson as leader was 211 votes and the vote against was 148 votes and therefore I can announce that the parliamentary party does have confidence.
Well I'm joined now by former Conservative MPs Anne Whitticomb and Anna Subry who join me now welcome to you both and Whitticomb your response to this result.
Well, I now hope very much that the rebels will accept that they've lost and not do what otherwise they might do, which is to continually rebel on votes in the Commons, make his life difficult.
They've got he's got a year.
No Obvious Successor Yet 00:03:42
He's got a year's grace, and that will bring us almost to the gates of a general election, and it's crucial now that the party puts this behind it and pulls itself together.
If you ask me Piers, will they do that?
Frankly, I wouldn't bet on it.
No I mean you've got to say though if 42% of Conservative MPs have no confidence in a Conservative Prime Minister why on earth would anyone want him to stay to fight an election?
I mean he's going to get completely shellacked isn't he?
The Labour Party will be running that result every two minutes.
Well every everything as I've said just depends now what the reaction not of Boris's but of the party is.
Kier Starmer doesn't have to oppose at the moment.
He can just sit there and watch us lose because that is what is happening.
And as I say it is down to the party.
They've lost.
Yes there was a large vote, a much larger vote than is comfortable for having no confidence, but they have lost and the party's got a straight choice.
If it wants to win the next election then it's got to go cohesively over the next two years and if it doesn't it will lose and it's no good then blaming Boris can blame the rebels.
Anna Soubry, I mean when Theresa May went through all this several years ago she actually won a much bigger percentage of the vote two-thirds I think it was and she was still gone within a few months.
Boris Johnson has not even scaled the dizzy heights of Theresa May's numbers.
What does that mean for him?
Oh, this is a big blow.
Big blow.
And remember, you know, credit to Boris Johnson because he's been the leader in 2019 when he got that big, huge majority, biggest majority since the days of Margaret Thatcher.
And yet, in a really short period of time, because of course we've had two years of the pandemic, so it's not been normal times, he now finds himself in this position.
And I think he's toast.
There's no way back for him.
But when you say that when you say that, just to clarify, how does he become toast?
Because this is, if you have any time for Johnson at the moment, you will have voted in favour of him.
And there will have been Conservative MPs who would have given him, if you like, the ballot, the benefit of the doubt.
But have such a huge number, especially on your back benches, because there's this thing called the payroll.
That's people who've got government jobs who you would expect to be loyal to the Prime Minister because they're members of his government.
It's those backbenchers, and you know, they go right across the party, the different wings of the party.
And so slowly, more and more people, you know, it's natural.
They want to be on the winning side and they will see the winning side as not being Boris Johnson.
And remember, we haven't even had the two by-elections that are due on June the 23rd, both of which are going to be really bad news for Boris Johnson.
So he's now contaminated by the stench of impending political death, and everyone will be keen to avoid it.
But Anne Whitticom, if it's not Boris Johnson, as people keep asking, then who should it be?
Who do you think would make a good leader of the Conservative Party and therefore right now a good Prime Minister?
Well, I think one of the reasons that he has retained the confidence of the party or of the majority of the party is that there obviously is no successor, but no obvious successor, nobody waiting in the wings as he was when Theresa was under pressure.
Lost Moral Authority 00:14:54
But as I say, you know, there are two ways to lose the election.
One is to actually just fall apart, which is what is going to happen if they go down the Anna Soubry course and just make his life difficult.
If they fall apart, they will lose the election.
The other way to lose it is quite simply to have the wrong leader at the wrong time.
And as far as the party is concerned now, it's got to decide that it's got to make Boris the right leader.
They're only there because he was the right leader.
He still can be, but he's got to get a grip, Piers.
He's got to get a grip, not only on the party on Downing Street, on his operation, on just the shambolic nature of his.
The trouble is, you know, I interviewed him.
Here's the trouble.
I'll come to Anna on this.
I mean, I interviewed him for GQ years ago, and I said to him, you know, Boris, he wasn't even London Mayor then.
I said, look, I always tell people who think you're just a buffoon that beneath the buffoon exterior lies a brilliant, calculating, ambitious political mind.
And he looked at me and he said, well, Piers, you really must consider the possibility that lurking beneath the buffoon exterior is a complete buffoon.
And the trouble is, I think, for Boris Johnson, is the buffoon act.
I think a lot of people are sick of it because they're suffering financial hardship.
They see the hypocrisy over the party gate.
And they're just like, you know what?
I'm just done with having a buffoon, a guy who lies, you know, every day of his life.
No one can trust him.
And you can kind of skate through a political career like that when times are good.
But when times are hard like they are now, I just think it's unsustainable.
Well, the fact is he's got the confidence that you're going to be able to do that.
Sorry, and I'm sorry.
Both your names begin with the same three letters.
I'm going to go to Anna Soubury on that one to avoid confusion and then come back to you, Anne Whittigam.
What?
Piers, what can I say?
Because you're absolutely right.
And look, I'm not involved in politics anymore.
I don't live in London.
I live in the East Midlands, which is where I was born and bred.
And seriously, genuinely, people are feeling exactly what you've just said.
They're just sick and tired of Boris Johnson.
And it's all well and good for people like Anne Whittigam to say, oh, he needs to change this.
The problem is Boris Johnson.
If the Conservatives want, which they don't, to lose the next election, keep Boris Johnson, if they want to win the next general election, the only hope they have is that they get rid of Boris Johnson.
But I agree with Anne, the alternatives are pretty ghastly too.
What a mess the Tory Party's got itself into.
And it's primarily got itself in that mess because too many of the good people were basically turfed out by Boris Johnson and his crew back in 2019.
It's a very different party to the one that even when Anne was in in the House of Commons.
It's shifted to this nationalist, populist right wing and it is dreadful and it's bad for our country.
All right, final word to Anne Whittigam.
Yes, there is a choice now.
Carry on trying to get rid of Boris, carry on being factionalised, carry on being divided, carry on with all manner of antics in the House of Commons and lose the next election, or just now calm down, accept the result and get on with it.
I just wish they'd get on with it.
Do you know what I wish is I wish, well, I just wish we had more people like you in the House of Commons, the pair of you, because you're always very lively, very smart takes on these things.
So I just wish that.
That's what I personally wish.
But thank you both for joining me.
That's nice.
Thank you.
Well, I'm redrawn by my panel.
And Esther Krack has joined us, the Conservative commentator.
You're not happy.
Why?
I'm horrified.
I think this is just a terrible decision.
I think this is a stain on the Conservative Party that's just never going to go away.
I know Anne was saying that, you know, the party must be united now or lose its next general election.
I don't think there is a Conservative Party that can win with Boris at the head of the next general election.
I personally would not vote for Boris.
I would rather vote for Green.
I would actually rather vote for Britain.
Did you vote for him last time?
Yes, and I'd actually rather vote for this chair I'm sitting on than to vote for him.
I'm so disgusted.
He represents everything I dislike about politics right now.
The lack of integrity, the lying, the arrogance.
It's just horrible.
And if you're an actual decent Conservative MP and you're getting horrific letters from your constituents saying, I can't believe this is what your party's chosen to do.
I can't believe that you are my MP and you're backing this man.
It's horrible because there are people in politics that genuinely want to do good.
And you can't do good with someone like this at the head.
I mean, he should have a sense of dignity and resign, really.
And we've been saying this, right?
He should, but he won't.
And the fact that, you know, obviously the vote was still significant in the form of the minorities who are not happy with him.
But I don't think this is enough.
He should leave.
Isabel, here's the interesting thing about Boris Johnson: however grim it always looks, somehow he wriggles out.
You know, my oldest son's been tweeting away in the last two hours, jubilant that he's won, loves Boris because he ended lockdown before most other countries, you know, at the end of this last year.
Thinks that we've got this completely overblown.
He's a great character and we should all be queuing up to thank him.
I mean, you are a very special family, Piers, full of unique characters.
Needless to say, I don't agree with him, but it's interesting.
But I think a lot of young people have a, I mean, the polls today showed there's a generational issue about Boris.
Young people find him a bit of a love and don't really care about party gate, probably because most of them are breaking the rules themselves.
And then you get everyone over 50 who was abiding by the rules pretty much, who made a lot of sacrifices, maybe couldn't see dying friends and relatives, who really feel very strongly about it.
Well, I mean, under 50s don't tend to particularly vote conservative, so I'm not sure how much their sort of ambivalence is going to really work in favour of the Tory party anyway.
I mean, I watched, Esther, what you said there play out at an event on the Isle of Wight over the weekend, which is a very, in theory, a very Tory constituency, a big, big safe seat for the sitting MP.
And I watched a live audience in front of a recorded programme.
The hostility towards Boris Johnson was spilling over into hostility to the sitting MP, who, on the face of it, has done nothing to deserve that.
And that is what they're going to continue to get.
And that's why this is not going to go away.
Because I don't think that voters are suddenly going to say, this is all fine now, you know, let's all pull together.
I suspect that Boris Johnson will try and do a reshuffle pretty soon.
One has been looming for a while.
He will try to regain his authority by moving the pack around a bit.
Will it work?
Not getting even sick of people saying that the country doesn't really care about this, we want to move on.
How dare you tell this country what we care about?
This is a man who locked us down, who told us we couldn't leave our houses to do certain things.
We weren't able to go to weddings, weren't able to see dying relatives.
And he blatantly broke those rules himself.
And we're being told that we don't actually care about that.
That's obscenely offensive.
What it means is you don't care that politicians put laws on the rest of us and then completely ignore them.
If you don't care about that, I'm not sure what you do care about.
You basically don't care about the rule of law.
Funny enough, I interviewed the recently deposed Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, today, and had a long interview with him, which we'll air later in the week.
But what was really interesting was he blames corruption in Pakistani politics for what happened to him and how he got unfairly done in.
He's going to obviously try again, I think, to get his power base back.
But he was very interesting about the rule of law in the UK and the system that we have for holding politicians accountable.
I don't know if we've got the clip, have we?
Okay, we're getting the clip.
But I find it very interesting talking to him because you're thinking in somewhere like Pakistan, corruption is rife.
They don't have a system like our...
We've got it here.
This is Imran Khan today.
A Prime Minister having a drinks get-together after work would not even have made news here.
In one way, this is one thing which I feel that the reason why British parliamentary system works, whereas apart from non-Anglo-Saxon countries, it doesn't work because of the very high level of moral standards you expect from your leadership.
In Pakistan, you know, the vote of no confidence against me, which took place, the whole country knew that the going rate to buy my parliamentarians was a million dollars.
Unless we raise our level of morality to what you have in Britain, parliamentary democracy will not work.
I thought it was really interesting.
We're going to come back after the break.
And Grace, I'll just pick up on what Imran Khan said there.
You're watching extended breaking news coverage of the Boris Johnson no confidence vote.
Turns out that some MPs have confidence in him and some of his MPs don't.
So he's won, but it may be a pyrrhic victory.
Stay with us until last time.
Welcome back to our breaking news coverage of the Boris Johnson confidence vote which he has won.
359 Conservative MPs voted.
211 voted to have confidence in him continuing as Prime Minister.
148, a large number, voted against him, but he has survived.
And joining me now is SNP's Westminster Leader Ian Blackford.
Mr Blackford, your response to this vote.
My heavens, Piers, I have to say I'm astonished at the scale of the rebellion against the Prime Minister.
148 MPs, a far worse result than, for example, Margaret Thatcher faced when she faced her difficulties or Theresa May faced.
And when you think about it, this is a Prime Minister that can now only count on the support of one-third of the members of the House of Commons.
You know, I think anybody else in the position that Boris Johnson is in today would recognise that the game is up.
He's lost the moral authority to lead.
He's lost the support of a sizable percentage of his own party.
He doesn't have the support of the House of Commons.
He's a man that I believe has abused the office of Prime Minister with his behaviour.
And the sooner he goes, the better.
If he's not going to go tonight, I suspect that the pressure on him is going to mount over the coming period.
I mean, we know Boris Johnson, and he's very unlikely to go voluntarily.
And the mechanism for removing him has now been attempted and he would argue has failed.
The rebels have tried, they didn't get enough.
He's won.
He lives to fight another day.
How will the system stop him continuing?
Well, first and foremost, Piers, when you've got a situation, I mean, you and I understand how important loyalty to the leader is in a parliamentary party.
But when you've got more than 40% of your own colleagues are prepared to vote against you, that is not a good look.
This is going to make it extremely difficult for him to command the support and trust of his own party, never mind the House of Commons.
It's a lame-duck Prime Minister and one that we know is going to face very challenging circumstances and by-elections in the weeks to come.
So this is not going to go away.
The Tory Party will have to find its own mechanism.
But of course, we have the Privileges Committee as well.
I believe that the Prime Minister has not just lied to the House, he's broken the ministerial code, and we'll have to wait and see what happens.
But this is not over.
There are many hurdles for the Prime Minister to get through.
We all know that he's had an ability to escape the clutches of those seeking to hold him to account.
But in the end, this will end in the removal and the failure of Boris Johnson's premiership.
I mean, give me an honest answer, Mr. Blackford.
Is it at the stage now where you'd almost rather keep him in his position because he's so damaged?
No.
Well, I understand why you say that.
I understand why many people would say that, Piers.
But at the end of the day, I think this man is a disgrace to the office that he holds.
Yeah, I get the point that some people would argue that for us, electorally, he's an asset.
But I believe that this man is damaging our democracy to such an extent.
It's in nobody's interest to keep him in power.
When you've got a Prime Minister that broke the law, the first Prime Minister in history, everything that's gone on with his behaviour, and his behaviour will not change.
He treats Downing Street, he treats Parliament as a personal plaything.
We should be talking about what's happening with the cost of living crisis.
We should be talking about Ukraine.
But it always comes back to this man, Boris Johnson.
Ian Blackford, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you, Piers.
Well, we have a reaction now from Sakir Starmer.
He's the leader of the Labour opposition party.
This evening, the Conservative Party had a decision to make to show some backbone or to back Boris Johnson.
The British public are fed up, fed up with a Prime Minister who promises big but never delivers.
Fed up with a Prime Minister who's presided over a culture of lies and law-breaking at the heart of government.
Fed up with a Prime Minister who is utterly unfit for the great office that he holds.
Well, strong words there from Sakir Starmer, the opposition leader, because he himself is caught up in an ongoing police investigation into whether he broke lockdown rules with beers and curries.
And he's already said that he, along with his number two, Angela Rayna, if they are fined by police, as Boris Johnson was, they will resign.
So we're into pretty uncharted territory.
Just bring back the panel.
Isabel, I mean, strong words from Kier Starmer.
If he does not get fined by the police, he's in a very good moral position on this, I guess.
If he does, though, he's gone.
He is gone.
And as Ian Blackford was saying, there are a number of hurdles still for the Prime Minister.
I don't happen to think those hurdles actually count for anything because I don't think it matters what any report says now, what any committee finds.
This is a Prime Minister that is always going to try and keep on brazening it out, which he's sort of managed to do fairly successfully so far.
But, you know, he's in a really, really difficult position now in terms of his legislative programme.
Right.
I mean, Grace, he is.
But we do know he's not going to leave voluntarily.
And we know he's one of those guys that just barrels on through and hopes for stuff to happen, which then distracts all our attention.
He's got a track record of this.
Yeah, I mean, this is how he's governed so far.
It's been government by distraction, government by spectacle.
This is the thing that he's, you know, we're just hearing from Anna Subry that she thinks that he's transformed the Conservative Party into this nationalist populist project, which, yeah, is all about fighting culture wars.
And he's done so relatively successfully.
Government By Distraction 00:09:57
The big challenge that Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party now as a whole face is that there's a reason beyond Boris Johnson, you know, as a person that some of these MPs have rebelled.
And that is that they are concerned about the future of the Conservative Party as a free market, low-tax, austerity-loving party because they see that their coalition has expanded.
They've, you know, won some MPs in the north of the country where people rely on government spending, as we all do, rely on public sector spending to keep the economy afloat, to create jobs, to boost investment.
And there are a lot of MPs now, many of whom are in the running for leader of the Conservative Party, who think that all that is terrible.
It's a betrayal of Conservative principles.
We need to go back to cuts, cuts, cuts.
We need to, you know, shrink the state, which by the way, is never actually about shrinking the state.
It's about cutting spending for the poor and cutting taxes for the rich, and get the Conservative Party back to its kind of Thatcherite, very unpopular position on a lot of these things.
That's not going to work electorally, but there are a bunch of MPs who are very, very committed to it.
Esther, just quickly before we go to the break, if it's not Boris, who should it be?
I mean, do you see anybody in the Tory ranks who you think exudes integrity, honesty, decency, the kind of things many people feel sorely lacking?
I'm not that hopeful, but you know, the standard is so low.
I mean, the bar is in hell, right?
So I think literally Cucumber would have more integrity than Boris at this point.
I don't really buy the excuse that there's no one else.
Find someone else, right?
Find anyone else and put them through the ranks because you cannot have this man.
I mean, I see Ben Wallace, for example, or Tom Tugenhat, people like this.
Personally, when I listen.
Well, Penny Morden, maybe as well.
I listen to people like that, and I think I hear people who appear to have integrity.
I don't know enough about them to really assess it, but I don't think this option, there's no one out there who can restore trust.
I don't think it's true.
I think the bigger issue is not just a single person.
It's about the party and the principles that underpin the party and the vision for the party.
The current Conservative Party has no vision.
It's not very conservative.
Most of the current MPs wouldn't even fit into Blair's government, right?
Because they'd be too left-wing.
So, I mean, there's literally that, okay, so there's free marketeers who want to go back to austerity, basically.
And that's a battle for the soul of the party.
That would be an interesting, actually, political discussion to have.
Got to leave it there for the break.
We'll be back with a statement from Boris Johnson and also the shadow Justice Secretary, David Lammy, will be here live after the break.
Stay with us.
Well, welcome to Downing Street Live here.
I'm joined by the shadow Foreign Secretary, David Lamy.
Mr. Lammy, thank you for joining me.
Boris Johnson's calling this a very positive result, very inclusive result.
Time to move on from Partygate.
It was all the media's fault for overspinning it, etc.
Your response?
I mean, come on, Piers.
He's done worse than Margaret Thatcher did in 1990, worse than John Major did in 1995, worse than Theresa May in 2018.
All of those prime ministers went on to lose office.
Yes, they staggered on, wounded, badly wounded.
He's deeply wounded, deeply thought.
Most of his backbenchers are not with him.
That's what these numbers demonstrate.
How can you go on to properly govern a country in a time of a cost of living crisis, huge rising inflation, real concern across the country?
How can you do that realistically?
I think everyone knows the game is up.
Unfortunately, the Conservatives should have taken the mantle and got rid of him tonight.
They haven't done that.
And so he limps on, but badly wounded at a time when the country desperately needs proper leadership.
We could be in an extraordinary position where your own leader and deputy leader end up being fined by the police for the beer currygate night.
And they've already announced if that happens, they will resign.
But Boris Johnson, who's already been fined by the police, carries on.
Well, look, this isn't a question of integrity.
It's a question of being trustworthy.
We've been raising this in the Labour Party for months and months precisely because the electorate, when we knock on their doors, have been saying they don't trust this guy for his rule breaking.
How are they now meant to trust him to fix the economy and solve the cost of living crisis that we've got?
Of course they don't trust him.
Keir has been absolutely clear that of course he would resign if he received a fine.
I've got to say, as a lawyer, I've looked very closely at the evidence.
I've spoken to other lawyers.
He's not going to be fined.
I don't actually think this should have been reinvestigated in the first place.
But there we go.
He's been clear about where he stands in the ground.
Whatever you say about him, his integrity is beyond reproach.
What we've got here is a prime minister, and people can't believe him.
And that's the fundamental problem.
Whatever you thought of Margaret Thatcher, whatever you thought of David Cameron, whatever you thought of John Major, there wasn't this essential question of trust and lying in office.
That's the test that Boris Johnson has consistently not met.
And that's why his backbenchers have deserted him tonight.
I mean, in a way, I've asked this question a few times in the last few minutes, but does Labour even want Boris Johnson to leave Downing Street now, given how damaged he is?
It's not the fact that 148 of his own MPs have lost confidence in him, one of the best vote winners you could possibly wish for.
Well, look, you might say that, Piers, and I understand why you might say that, but in a sense, I think this is beyond the partisan issue now.
It's way beyond that.
It's this fundamental question of trust and integrity in office.
I've got the great privilege of being shadow foreign secretary.
In the last few weeks, I've been in Australia, New Zealand, I've been in Washington.
And look, people consistently raising the integrity of this guy.
What's going on?
They've seen the rule breaking.
You know, they're seen as vacillations over a period of time.
The breaking up rules like the Northern Ireland Pro, it's damaging.
It's damaging for our image publicly out there in the world.
That's why we need to move on with a new Prime Minister and the Conservatives really should have got rid of him tonight.
David Lamory, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you.
Well, in his statement, Boris Johnson says it's a convincing result, a decisive result.
And what it means is that as a government, we can move on and focus the stuff that actually matters to people.
I'm grateful to colleagues.
I'm grateful for the support they've given me.
And of course, I understand that what we need to do now is come together as a government, as a party.
And that's exactly what we can now do.
Isabel Oakshot, your reaction to Boris Johnson's jubilance tonight.
I was dreading his statement.
It was always going to be those words, wasn't it?
It's cringe.
I can't, honestly, it's just, I want to wince at all of those words because none of them are true.
And, you know, he knows that, doesn't he?
I was just thinking when we were listening to David Lammy there of a scenario under which Keir Starmer did have to resign.
Has he actually said he wouldn't rerun?
I don't know what the Labour rules are on that, Grace.
Well, I mean, he quite clearly could rerun unless he decides to use that opportunity or people decide to use that opportunity to try and change the membership rules again or the voting rules against the leadership that wouldn't potentially put on the Conservative Party, wouldn't it?
If you had a leader of the opposition and his deputy potentially resigning on a point of integrity.
And then restanding.
Well, maybe the best thing that could happen to the Labour Party, because if anything, there would be a party of integrity.
The Conservatives can't even say that now.
Potentially, actually, Keir Starmer standing down and Boris Johnson standing down at the same time wouldn't be a very good thing for the Labour Party.
It would actually also allow us to do what Boris Johnson has allegedly said he wants us to do, which is focus on the issues that matter.
Rather than going back and forth about who's dead, who's alive, you know, who stabbed who in the back, we could have a genuine conversation about how to tackle the cost of living crisis in this country, which is actually what people I think up and down the country are most concerned about.
We're literally seeing people unable to heat their homes, unable to pay for food, and we've got this clown in office diverting attention away from those struggles.
So maybe that is what we need, because clearly the leader of the country doesn't have an answer to those problems.
And to be honest, at this point in time, I don't have confidence that the leader of the Labour Party has the answers that we need to be able to do.
I want you all to have confidence now in your predicting skills.
Who thinks Boris Johnson will still be Prime Minister and Tory leader by September when the Tory Party conference takes place?
Isabel?
Just, yeah, I think he will be, but not into the next election.
Great.
I think he will be, and I potentially think that he'll be fighting the next election.
I think he'll be gone before the end of this year.
You do?
Yeah, absolutely.
I've got a feeling in my body.
If not, you will see me at Downing.
She'll be like, get out of here.
Well, I think what may happen.
You've got to remember the double whammy of two by-elections on the same day is quite unusual.
And if the polls are right and the Tories get completely taken out in both of those by-elections, that would put a lot more heat on him than there already is already.
I think you have to remember that this is bigger than Boris Johnson.
As I've said multiple times today, this is an ideological question that the Conservative Party has to resolve.
And fundamentally, they can't resolve it while they're in government.
I think that's an issue.
Got to leave it there.
Thank you.
You've been a brilliant panel.
Thank you very much, indeed, for being with me all night.
It's been a fascinating night for British politics.
Boris Johnson has survived, but maybe only for now.
He's claiming, of course, total victory, which is what he would do.
But there are many people in his own party who think, not so fast, Mr. Bond.
That's it from us tonight.
Good night.
And remember, wherever you are, and this particularly applies to you, Prime Minister, keep it It uncensored.
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