Boris Johnson ‘not fit to be PM’ says Benedict Spence

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Partygate has come back to bite Boris Johnson following the revelation he did break his own rules to attend at least one party held in Downing Street during lockdown. But it would appear the Conservative Prime Minister is waging another campaign to kick the can even further down the road.

Mr Johnson has said MPs should wait until they have the “full facts” on Downing Street parties before an investigation is launched into whether he deliberately misled the House of Commons regarding his knowledge of the events.

He told reporters: “I’m very keen for every possible form of scrutiny and the House of Commons can do whatever it wants to do.

“But all I would say is I don’t think that should happen until the investigation is completed.”

He continued: “Politics has taught me one thing which is you’re better off talking and focusing on the things that matter, the things that make a real difference to the electorate and not about politicians themselves.”

In unsurprising fashion, Mr Johnson told journalists on Thursday morning that he will remain in post and lead the Tories into the next general election – and said people should focus on things that “matter”.

The public is split over whether the PM should resign, with a poll of 2,464 people showing 57 percent think he should stand down.

But as the Prime Minister tries to kick the scandal into the long grass, a former minister said: “I think Boris has got away with it. The most likely scenario now is that he leads us into the next election. But what happens then, no one knows.”

And it seems the reason behind this is Mr Johnson’s lacklustre Cabinet. As the Spectator’s Katy Balls writes, perhaps the “biggest reason” for Mr Johnsons’s survival is that “it’s a lot harder to imagine who a successor to Johnson could be after the sudden implosion of Rishi Sunak”.

The PM is clearly profiting from recent scandals surrounding the once impenetrable Rishi Sunak, whose wife benefitted from non-domicile tax status on her estimated £11.6 million a year income forced the family to make a tax U-turn.

This was swiftly followed by the news Mr Sunak would also be fined for attending the same party as Mr Johnson, and is considered to have put him out of the running to replace the Prime Minister.

Ms Balls writes: “For two years, the Chancellor was hugely popular and Labour found him a difficult opponent to attack. Now his enemies have a narrative they plan to push: that he stands exposed as a member of the out-of-touch global elite whose Green Card and wife’s non-dom status suggest he’d jet back off to Santa Monica in a heartbeat. “

And the rest of the cohort aren’t much more inspiring. Liz Truss is popular with the Tory grassroots for her Brexit negotiations but is still relatively unknown outside of political watchers – while some in the party are said to have an ‘anyone but Truss’ stance.

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Home Secretary Priti Patel suffers from overwhelming unpopularity not just with Tory voters but the wider electorate – and is dealing with even more backlash over her plans to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Even senior Tories don’t seem to have a clue regarding who could be a potential replacement for Mr Johnson.

One MP said: “Sajid [Javid] can’t run after admitting to being a non-dom in the past.”

Bloomberg’s Kitty Donaldson said: “Both the Tories and Labour are now working on the assumption that Boris Johnson will lead the Conservatives into the next election despite Partygate.”

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