Why Boris Johnson’s last hope is levelling up – Justine Greening

Anger, that rules were so blatantly broken by the Prime Minister – rules that he himself set, that the rest of us carefully followed sometimes at great cost, whether for our family, our jobs, or our mental health.

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And frustration that yet again, it feels like there is paralysis in Parliament that has become too familiar over recent years.

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This weekend, Conservative MPs will no doubt continue to take stock of what their constituents and their own party activists think about Boris Johnson’s leadership.

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Decisions on whether to continue with Mr Johnson at the helm of the Conservative Party or not are in flux.

It means the difficult days for Mr Johnson will continue.

Usually the key number that matters to any Prime Minister is their Parliamentary majority.

For Boris Johnson, even after this week’s defection to Labour of Bury South MP, Christian Wakeford, and the North Shropshire by-election loss, his majority is still an apparently healthy 74.

But for the time being the number that will matter to Boris Johnson is much lower.

It’s 54 – the number of MPs who need to send letters to the Parliamentary Party 1922 Committee expressing no confidence in the Party leader, to trigger a no confidence vote.

Under the Conservative Party rules, a party leader winning that vote cannot face another one for a year.

Yet, in practice, it doesn’t really work like that. Theresa May won her own no-confidence vote in December 2018, but still ended up announcing her resignation just five months later in May 2019.

The 54-letter threshold changes the entire dynamics of Parliament for the Prime Minister and Government.

Now every decision must be judged through the lens of avoiding reaching that figure.

In practice that new working ‘majority’ is even lower – it’s 54 minus however many letters have already been submitted.

It will feel like a wafer-thin majority premiership for Boris Johnson and his Ministers.

That’s not good news for Britain.

Because post Brexit and, hopefully, post Covid, Britain is at a crossroads on how it rebuilds itself going forward.

It has been a period of challenge like no other since the Second World War.

But even during that time of national peril, in Government, the ambitious ideas were still being developed that would shape modern day Britain – the creation of a National Health Service and welfare state.

And crucially those ideas were then put into practice. The big national crisis led to a big national response on what building a better, fairer country meant then.

That’s the ambition we need to see now for Britain.

Many first-time Conservative voters were voting for a Johnson Government to drive through an improvement in their long-term prospects that they felt had been talked about for years, decades, by grandstanding politicians but never actually delivered on the ground.

It’s vital that this Government still gets on with the task.

I haven’t found myself often agreeing with the Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, but I did when he said earlier this week that the real frustration in Parliament 
with Boris Johnson was his failure to deliver on promises about levelling up Britain.

And therein lies the route forward for the Prime Minister.

Get on with the job of levelling up, put real, long-term ambitious plans behind it and succeed.

In fact, that’s the only route forward for Boris Johnson – he raised those high voter expectations and he has to deliver.

Mr Burnham’s comments also underline another fundamental 
point. For all the political division, in reality ‘levelling up’ – freeing up people’s potential to succeed wherever they are and connecting them with fair opportunity – is something that everyone wants to see, whichever political party they find themselves 
in.

After years in opposition and a disastrous 2019 General Election 
under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour finally sees its chance for political gain from the Prime Minister’s self-inflicted crisis.

Having been in opposition and a Shadow Minister, I know the sense of relief to finally feel you are making some progress with regaining lost support from voters. For now, Labour can carp at the continued absence of the Government’s Levelling Up White Paper.

Mr Burnham’s observation is right, but what is Labour’s comprehensive plan on levelling up?

How does it propose to dramatically improve social mobility?

Important action to tackle today’s cost of living pressures families face shouldn’t get mixed up with the need for a longer term strategy to deliver equality of opportunity for Britain for the first time.

The political shenanigans we see continuing in Parliament, the hour-by-hour assessment of the Prime Minister’s fortunes – it matters to us all – but it’s the antithesis of what Britain needs.

How the questions over Boris Johnson’s integrity, judgment and leadership are ultimately resolved remains to be seen.

But however that takes place, we need to see Westminster focus not on the personalities under its own roof, but the British public outside and the priorities the rest of us have for our lives, our futures and our wider country.

Justine Greening was a Cabinet minister in David Cameron and Theresa May’s governments.

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