Boris Brought Back? Next PM Must Call An Election
Johnson and Truss should have called a vote instead of trying to cling on.
Good morning and welcome back to Heaver News. I did say yesterday was likely to be dramatic and indeed it was.
The Liz Truss car crash came to an abrupt end and now we are set for a snap leadership election.
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New PM Requires Election Win
The downfall of both Boris and Truss lies in their reluctance to call an election. As I have previously written about, Johnson calling a snap election to let voters decide his fate was the only way he could have stopped being ousted.
Truss could have tried to secure an electoral mandate for her tax-cutting plans but instead bottled it, abandoned her agenda and was swiftly ousted.
With so much having gone on in Westminster, there is now increasing public support for a General Election, even from Conservative voters.
YouGov now find 63% of Brits are in favour of a vote compared to fewer than a quarter now opposed. 38% of Tory voters want an election too, as do 47% of Brexiteers.
However, some Conservative MPs look set to back the old boss on the basis that he won a mandate in 2019 and therefore wouldn’t need to call an election.
The dramatic return of Boris Johnson now looks likely. The bar of 100 Conservative MPs required to back a candidate is so high that it looks like only three candidates have any hope of clearing it: Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt and Boris Johnson.
At time of writing Johnson is actually leading on the tally of MPs. The trusty Guido Fawkes spreadsheet reveals 52 MPs backing Boris, 41 supporting Sunak and Mordaunt trailing with 17 backers.
I still think that the Conservatives are now so divided internally that the next Prime Minister will need to try and win an election to gain authority over the party.
Of course being an effective campaigner and election winner has often been seen as Boris Johnson’s biggest asset. Could we see him return as PM, call a snap election and seek to instantly defeat Starmer’s Labour Party?
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