Boris Johnson no-confidence vote: 3am to 5am Tuesday AEST

Will Boris Johnson be ousted as UK Prime Minister tonight? Can the left win the French legislative elections?

6:04am Tuesday AEST: Boris Johnson WINS the confidence vote by 211 votes to 148. Theoretically, he’s now safe from further challenge for a year, but this rule could be changed. In percentage terms, that’s a 58.8-41.2 victory for Johnson.

Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is a paid election analyst for The Conversation. His work for The Conversation can be found here, and his own website is here.

Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 committee, announced Monday morning UK time that at least 54 Conservative MPs (15% of the total number of parliamentary Conservative MPs) had sent letters to him expressing no-confidence in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s leadership.

A full vote of all Conservative MPs will be held between 6pm and 8pm Monday UK time (3am to 5am Tuesday AEST).  If Johnson loses, he will be replaced as PM once a new Conservative leader is elected.  If he wins, he’s theoretically safe for a year. Results will be announced soon after the vote finishes.

On May 19, UK police completed their investigation into Partygate and issued 126 fines, but Boris Johnson did not receive additional fines; he was fined once in April.  The Sue Gray report into Partygate was finally published May 25.

Parliamentary by-elections will occur in Conservative-held Wakefield and Tiverton & Honiton on June 23.  Wakefield was Labour from 1932 until the Conservatives won in 2019, while T&H has been Conservative since its creation in 1997.  A poll in Wakefield gave Labour a 48-28 lead over the Conservatives (47-40 to Conservatives at the 2019 election).

National polls currently have Labour leading by high single digits.  UK inflation has risen 9% in the 12 months to April, the highest in 40 years.  I believe this is far more important in explaining the Conservatives’ polling woes than Partygate, and I don’t believe another leader would be doing much better than Johnson with inflation this high.

French legislative elections: June 12 and 19

In April, Emmanuel Macron was re-elected as French president, defeating the far-right Marine Le Pen by 58.5-41.5 in the runoff.  Legislative elections will be held in two rounds on June 12 and 19.  There are 577 single-member seats with Macron’s Renaissance party currently holding a clear majority.

To win outright in the first round, a candidate must win at least 50% of valid votes and at least 25% of registered voters in that seat.  If no candidate wins outright, the second round will include the top two first round finishers and any other candidate who won at least 12.5% of registered voters (note: not valid votes). 

The candidate who wins the most votes in the second round is the winner.  In practice, the large majority of second round contests will have just two candidates as it is hard to qualify from third given relatively low turnout.  Third candidates can also be pressured into withdrawing before the runoff.

At this election, four parties of the left (the far-left La France Insoumise, the Greens, the centre-left Socialists and the Communists) have united into NUPES, and will field only one candidate per seat.  Most polls have Macron’s Ensemble coalition leading or just behind NUPES. 

In the second round, most votes of excluded candidates (right-wing mostly) would go to Ensemble over NUPES, so Ensemble would retain its legislative majority if these polls are correct.  However, support for the far-left Jean Luc Mélenchonwas understated in the first round of the presidential election.  Are the polls understating NUPES?

Other developments

At the June 2 election in Canada’s most populous province of Ontario, the Conservatives were re-elected with 83 of the 124 seats, with the left-wing New Democrats winning 31, the centre-left Liberals eight and the Greens one.  Vote shares were 40.8% Conservative, 23.9% Liberals, 23.7% NDP and 6.0% Greens, so 53.6% for the combined left became just 32% of seats owing to split voting under first past the post.

At the May 15 election in Germany’s most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the conservative CDU won 35.7% (up 2.8% since 2017), the centre-left SPD 26.7% (down 4.6%), the Greens 18.2% (up 11.8%), the pro-business FDP 5.9% (down 6.7%) and the far-right AfD 5.4% (down 1.9%).  With 5% required for a proportional share of seats, the SPD and Greens combined won 95 of the 198 seats, three short of the 98 needed for a majority.

At the May 9 Philippine presidential election, Bongbong Marcos, the son of the former dictator, won 58.8% of the vote, and his nearest rival won just 27.9%.

I have been writing articles pro bono for The Conversation since 2013.  They have now offered me a job as an election analyst that began June 2.  Note the update to the bio info that comes with every article I do here.

46 comments on “Boris Johnson no-confidence vote: 3am to 5am Tuesday AEST”

  1. The vote will close at 8PM UK time. Given there are fewer than 400 votes to count it will take only something like half an hour to an hour to count.

    The result will be announced at the end of the count. There won’t be any partial results released as the count progresses.

  2. Jeremy Hunt PM?

    The Conservative party must now decide if it wishes to change its leader. Because of the situation in Ukraine this was not a debate I wanted to have now but under our rules we must do that.

    Having been trusted with power, Conservative MPs know in our hearts we are not giving the British people the leadership they deserve.

    We are not offering the integrity, competence and vision necessary to unleash the enormous potential of our country.

    And because we are no longer trusted by the electorate, who know this too, we are set to lose the next general election.

    Anyone who believes our country is stronger, fairer and more prosperous when led by Conservatives should reflect that the consequence of not changing will be to hand the country to others who do not share those values.

    Today’s decision is change or lose. I will be voting for change.

  3. The Canadian example demonstrates in a nutshell why the guy from Resolve polling endorsing FPTP is off his rocker. A horribly undemocratic system.

    Also – congrats Adrian!

  4. Disasterboy says:
    Monday, June 6, 2022 at 9:47 pm
    I wonder how government formation is going in NRW? Looks tricky.

    ____________________________
    No idea, but I did used to live there (Nord Rhein Westfalen) in the old West Germany in the 1980s. Fun fact!

  5. Is Boris Johnson the UK’s Scott Morrison? And fighting for survival on the back of getting Brexit done seems a bit dated. I suppose it worked for him once.

    Rees-Mogg claims remainers behind attempt to oust Johnson and that, without him, Brexit won’t be fully delivered
    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2022/jun/06/boris-johnson-confidence-vote-graham-brady-tory-mps-live?filterKeyEvents=false&page=with:block-629ddd738f084d9060b75acd#block-629ddd738f084d9060b75acd

  6. The Conservatives would be bonkers to get rid of Boris – but they do have a history of being bonkers at times.

    Plus many of the ‘party stalwarts’ are in the traditionally upper heel, conservative, ‘blue wall’ seats that were less pro-Brexit and where there is the biggest haemorrhaging of support to the Liberal Democrats.

    Whereas many of the newer MPs are in ‘red wall’ seats recently won from Labour and predominantly WWC and where the anger against the government is far more muted overall (though I believe there would be some kind of a swing against the government everywhere if an election were held tomorrow).

    There are two by-elections on June 23rd in just the kind of seats described above – an ostensibly ‘safe Conservative’ seat that the Lib Dems will win comfortably; and a seat won from Labour for the first time since 1932 on a fairly small margin – however, it (Wakefield) is closer to large urban centres than many ‘red wall’ seats and more suspect to anti-Boris swings than the lazy media would portray.

    That said, the swing against the government (to Labour) in Wakefield though big, will still be far lower than the swing against them than in the genteel seat of Tiverton and Honiton which the Lib Dems will win from 3rd place like they did in North Shropshire a few months ago.

    It doesn’t help the gov that both seats have been brought about by scandals with the previous MPs, which is starting to become a habit this parliament. . . one of whom faces jail pending an appeal.

  7. There is one other wild possibility here

    Boris Johnson loses tonight

    Durham Constabulary issues a Fixed Penalty Fine to Keir Starmer for Covid breaches imminently

    Simultaneous leadership elections for Conservatives and Labour

  8. The expectation from commentators on the BBC is that Boris Johnson will receive sufficient support to stay PM for now, but if he does win if there’s 100+ Conservative MP’s voting against him tonight questions on his leadership will just go on and on.

    Apparently Theresa May turned up to vote in a ball gown.

  9. @ChrisBurn_Post

    Exc: New polling by Survation for @38degrees puts Labour 23 per cent up in Wakefield and on course to win more than half the vote in this month’s by-election

    Lab 56%
    Con 33%
    Ind 3%
    REFUK 3%
    Lib Dem 2%
    Greens 2%
    Yorkshire Party 1%
    Britain First 1%

    Survey of 519 voters in Wakefield carried out between May 24 and June 1

    Lab + 16 and Con – 14 vs. 2019 GE

    4:41 PM · Jun 6, 2022·Twitter Web App

    ps Survation have been bragging on Twitter that they got the Hartlepool by election right in their seat poll

  10. Boris result to be announced 2100 local

    Public statements of support for Boris now total 162

    Someone on Reddit has pointed out that Theresa May had 180 pledges of support (of a much smaller caucus) at noon on the day of her confidence vote ….

  11. As one Tory MP supporting Boris tweeted about his fellow Tory MPs

    “They are a bunch of lying snakes. I don’t trust anything they say.”

    Well now he knows how the public feels about Boris and the Tories.

  12. Boris Johnson wins confidence vote by 211 votes to 148

    Sir Graham Brady, chair of the Conservative 1922 Committee, says 359 votes were cast. There were no spoilt ballots.

    Confidence in Boris Johnson: 211

    No confidence in Johnson: 148

    That means more than 40% of Tory MPs voted against Johnson

  13. Nicholas Watt
    @nicholaswatt

    One of those long faces included a strong supporter of the PM who said of the rebels: I could throttle some of my colleagues. They want to hand our country to a coalition of Labour, the SNP and the Liberal Democrats. It will be votes at 16 and then who knows what will happen?

    8:20 PM · Jun 6, 2022·Twitter for iPhone

  14. It’s great when they complain about a possible (and it’s no more than that) Lab / SNP/ Lib Dem coalition when it was the Tories that were actually in one with the Lib Dems for 5 years! Not just confidence and supply but a full on coalition agreement with Lib Dem ministers

    SNP won’t join in a coalition with Labour because they just don’t vote on England & Wales only issues and that’s been a long time position and like Sinn Fein not taking their seats that’s not going to change.

  15. “Over the weekend the whole country celebrated the queens platinum jubilee, it was a tribute to 70 years of decency, humility and respect, a reminder of our common cause to build a better country, for ourselves, our children and our grand children, it is grotesque that the very next day, the conservative party has chosen to throw that sense of duty and those values on the bonfire, the choice in British politics tonight is clearer than ever before.” Sir Kier Rodney Starmer, Labor party leader and the next UK Prime Minister.

  16. Exactly the result I expected, just more of the same, no moving forward, the worst possible result for UK politics until the final implosion.

  17. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson wins confidence vote and will remain as prime minister
    Conservative members of Parliament have voted to keep Johnson as the party leader with 211 MPs expressing confidence in his premiership. A total of 148 MPs voted to remove him as leader. Under party rules, Johnson’s leadership cannot be challenged in a confidence vote for a minimum of one year, though he could still be pressured to resign of his own accord.

    This is a good thread for all the politics journos and their comments:

    https://twitter.com/i/events/1531536721027878912

  18. Shrodingers Cat @ #7 Tuesday, June 7th, 2022 – 6:42 am

    “Over the weekend the whole country celebrated the queens platinum jubilee, it was a tribute to 70 years of decency humility and respect, a reminder of our common cause to build a better country, for ourselves, are children and our grand children, it is grotesque that the very next day, the conservative party has chosen to throw that sense of duty and those values on the bonfire, the choice in British politics tonight is clearer than ever before.” Sir Kier Rodney Starmer, Labor party leader and the next UK prime Minister.

    Not to mention that Boris Johnson epitomises the antithesis of the Queen’s character.

  19. Johnson “wins” with less of the vote than Theresa May got before quitting and less than John Major got before getting the pants thrashed off him by Blair.

    I suspect the main thing keeping him in place is that the Tories would ask themselves who’s even there who could come in as leader and save the furniture after Boris is removed?

  20. BOJO is politically dead man walking. Ms. May won with better percentage and still resigned after 9 months. BOJO is one of them revolting against her after resigning as Foreign Secretary on the eve of her Confidence vote.

  21. Shrodingers Catsays:
    Tuesday, June 7, 2022 at 6:42 am
    “Over the weekend the whole country celebrated the queens platinum jubilee, it was a tribute to 70 years of decency, humility and respect, a reminder of our common cause to build a better country, for ourselves, our children and our grand children, it is grotesque that the very next day, the conservative party has chosen to throw that sense of duty and those values on the bonfire, the choice in British politics tonight is clearer than ever before.” Sir Kier Rodney Starmer, Labor party leader and the next UK Prime Minister.

    Sir Kier Rodney Starmer, Labor party leader and the next UK Prime Minister! Will Sir Kier survive once police hand him fines on COVID breaches? A Sir being elected as Labour party PM? I don’t think so.


  22. Cronussays:
    Tuesday, June 7, 2022 at 6:45 am
    Exactly the result I expected, just more of the same, no moving forward, the worst possible result for UK politics until the final implosion.

    Cronus
    According to Chief Banker of Bank of England, the current economic conditions in UK are ‘Apocalyptic’.


  23. C@tmommasays:
    Tuesday, June 7, 2022 at 6:59 am
    UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson wins confidence vote and will remain as prime minister
    Conservative members of Parliament have voted to keep Johnson as the party leader with 211 MPs expressing confidence in his premiership. A total of 148 MPs voted to remove him as leader. Under party rules, Johnson’s leadership cannot be challenged in a confidence vote for a minimum of one year, though he could still be pressured to resign of his own accord.

    This is a good thread for all the politics journos and their comments:

    https://twitter.com/i/events/1531536721027878912

    Yes he survives but can he recover?
    What is AUKUS deal worth, which was formulated by 3 deeply unpopular leaders?

  24. Ven @ #13 Tuesday, June 7th, 2022 – 8:06 am

    Shrodingers Catsays:
    Tuesday, June 7, 2022 at 6:42 am
    “Over the weekend the whole country celebrated the queens platinum jubilee, it was a tribute to 70 years of decency, humility and respect, a reminder of our common cause to build a better country, for ourselves, our children and our grand children, it is grotesque that the very next day, the conservative party has chosen to throw that sense of duty and those values on the bonfire, the choice in British politics tonight is clearer than ever before.” Sir Kier Rodney Starmer, Labor party leader and the next UK Prime Minister.

    Sir Kier Rodney Starmer, Labor party leader and the next UK Prime Minister! Will Sir Kier survive once police hand him fines on COVID breaches? A Sir being elected as Labour party PM? I don’t think so.

    It’s an automatic honorific conferred on the Director of Public Prosecutions, which Keir Starmer used to be.

  25. Ven @ #31 Monday, June 6th, 2022 – 11:06 pm

    Sir Kier Rodney Starmer, Labor party leader and the next UK Prime Minister! Will Sir Kier survive once police hand him fines on COVID breaches? A Sir being elected as Labour party PM? I don’t think so.

    Stop mischief making Ven 🙂

    There is no ‘survive’ about it, Keir Starmer has stated categorically that he will resign if Durham Police issue a fine. He has even stated he will go if they only issue a caution as that would still mean he had been adjudged to have broken the rules

    I have a strong feeling myself that Durham Police will issue fines

  26. I wondered last night if Boris Johnson was the UK’s Scott Morrison. Just as with Australia’s now former PM, the casual air of untruth sits easily with him. (Or how, as another Australian politician put it, he “earnestly rearranges the truth”.) The gas lighting feels familiar. As does the entrenched self confidence. In terms of “delivering” as governments like to frame it, the UK PM’s covid response was remarkably similar to the Aus PM’s in initial lethargy, callousness, and hindsight. And if Brexit is framed as foreign relations, there’s another similarity to explore. And now this morning it seems there’s still another similarity. B.Johnson is relying on his victory in the previous election. Who knows? He may win again. But he’d be wise to ask FPM Morrison how that tactic can fail. And as a group the British Tories could ask their Australian equivalents a similar question regarding reliance on a deeply unpopular PM.

  27. As I said last night, he won’t survive with numbers this bad. Members of cabinet will now be sounding out support and once they are confident that they have some backing and there is something else goes wrong they will resign, causing a crisis and it will be on again. The grace period is only as good as the rule, which can be changed by the party. I give BoJo until the end of Summer.

    The intelligent buffoon act (which I personally have used at times in my life) only works as long as you look loveable. Once the love is gone, which it has with Boris, all you have is a person who looks like they are behaving foolishly but the joke is no longer about them but about you.

  28. BSF
    I said earlier English people secretly wish they could live a life like BOJO does i.e. a life where he does whatever he wants without any consequences for his actions and with no accountability for his actions. He committed political and personal debauchery without facing any adverse consequences.
    Although people Tut Tut about his actions, he survived because they wish they could survive like him.
    And the support Murdoch rags he could cover up a lot of his actions.

  29. A storm in a “Teacup” over a Chrismas Party ?.
    Get Real !.

    According to Chief Banker of Bank of England, the current economic conditions in UK are ‘Apocalyptic’.?

    You could say that about most Countries !.
    When you think about it, the Human Animal is pretty pathetic !.

  30. Ven – You over judge the power of the Murdoch press. It’s days are numbered and its websites can’t compete with other plus the BBC (hence the constant rage about the BBC by the Murdoch family).

  31. Amusing to read some of the comment above, presumably from non-UK residents (fair enough, you can only judge on the info you do have).

    The result was shocking with 148 MPs choosing the self-destruct button and voting for weakness and division, and as such it is impossible to be sure how things will develop.

    I say ‘impossible to be sure’ because any ‘regular’ Conservative PM in the UK would resign on those numbers. It’s similar to Maggie Thatcher’s, after which she resigned. It’s considerably worse than John Major’s in 1995, which left him a clear run (at being a lame duck PM for another 18 months!). It’s also worse than Theresa May’s at 200 to 117 and she resigned after 6 months.

    However, the circumstances and characters involved are vastly different.

    Vox pops in Northern – particularly N-E England being shown by the BBC yesterday were showing surprisingly high levels of support for Boris on the street. Actually it wasn’t just the North – his own seat, semi-marginal even in his landslide, had a good bit of support. And those that said they couldn’t vote for him didn’t appear to be ex-Boris voters anyway.

    There’s a reasonable chance that polls are underestimating his support from ‘ordinary’ people who don’t participate much in political polling and the like. There is some evidence to back this up in the relatively respectable results in the North in May’s local elections.

    More to the point, this is Boris! In spite of everything, he is fairly teflon and won’t carry the demeanour of a lame duck like Theresa May.

    He’s not conventional and has the ability to bounce back even now, especially if he works his socks off over the next few weeks and limits the scale of the by-election defeats to eg 10-15% in both seats – better still, somehow avert defeat in Tiverton and Honiton but I can’t see how that happens.

    Perhaps most significant of all – as he pointed out last night, Boris actually got more support in votes / % of votes from his MPs than he did when standing for leader in 2019. He was never popular with many of them and is a marmite character (in a more charming way than Trump though some similarities) and always will be.

    They held their peace – those that hadn’t been booted out of the party – after he delivered a decisive election win in December 2019. But now that they see an opportunity, the old grudges come out cos’ he’s not really one of them. He’s an urbane, liberal pragmatist – who wholeheartedly backed Brexit and helped it win. He’s also extremely knowledgeable and brilliant on foreign policy. In short, he’s a contradiction that is really hard to define – which is probably why the opposition are making a hay day of things like integrity because it’s harder to pin scary policies or anything on him.
    There’s bits of him his own MPs could like but he’s far too unpredictable for their rural, genteel, cricket-playing laid-back conservatism.

    The other urbane liberals in the party might have been great with him but really don’t like him because of his support for Brexit.

    He might lose them seats down south but he’s still a hit in old Labour areas up north.

    But in summary, getting 211 votes was better than it looked taken in context – although it was shocking because it was so much worse than expected.

    The next 72 hours will be crucial I think – do the siren voices of party stalwarts fade away, or do they gather momentum? – and what will they be trying to achieve when Boris will basically never resign?

  32. Response to my comment re next UK prime minister;

    re fines, if he is fined I look forward to his defense of the fine in court, if you have been following along the police actions re covid fines have been inconsistent at best, there have been some victories and setbacks re Sarah Everard vigil [1]

    re Sir, tradition means something, Sirs, Kings, Queens, all part of a shared British identity, something that holds the country together, Baroness Warsi is a really good example of this [2]

    re A Sir being elected
    There is a cost of living crisis in the UK that has to be experienced to be believed, Dickensian is the understatement, no European totalitarian regime survives widespread hunger in its population re USSR, we have already seen one conservative MP cross the floor to sit with the ‘Sir’ I would not be surprised to see more as the famine become more wide spread. Working as a relief teacher in inner London schools before the pandemic I observed the children had to request toilet paper as the hungry kids were eating it all to try and get some relief from the hunger pains. God knows what its like now. [4]

    [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-60707646, https://www.itv.com/news/london/2022-06-01/four-prosecuted-for-breaking-covid-laws-at-vigil-for-murdered-sarah-everard, https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/partygate-lockdown-fines-boris-johnson-number-10-analysis-b1001171.html

    [2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13537110701872444,
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayeeda_Warsi,_Baroness_Warsi
    [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-60054968
    [4] https://news.sky.com/story/the-food-bank-that-ran-out-of-food-because-people-can-no-longer-afford-to-donate-12628996

  33. My sense is that brits have viscerally turned against BoJo but are far from convinced with Labor. Starmer and co benefiting from obvious outrage but havent really offered much compelling.

    A Tory change to a steady competent leader would give them every chance of defending what is a pretty big majority. My sense is that a Jeremy Hunt would fit that bill, but a rightwing lightweight like Liz Truss is more likely. Ben Wallace is the dark horse name doing the rounds, i dont know much about him

  34. Brits haven’t turned against Boris.

    Upper / upper middle class England has. It’s much less pronounced outside of that although there will always be examples.

    Scotland always was, and Wales has more generally this time too.

    It’s basically a media / opposition conspiracy that has taken hold rather well. The upcoming by-elections will see heavy defeats IMO as the main opposition in each floods the streets / letterboxes to reinforce these messages.

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