Frightened Tory MPs continue to plot to oust Liz Truss amid anger at falling poll ratings and the threat of the ax falling on public spending, despite Jeremy Hunt urging them to rally behind her for the sake of the economy.
The briefings continued in earnest on Tuesday, with Graham Brady, chairman of the influential 1922 Committee, said to have received up to 100 letters calling on Truss to quit, increasing pressure on him to rewrite party rules to allow another confidence vote.
One minister admitted the situation was “bleak” while another, asked which colleagues still supported the prime minister, grimaced and said: “I’ll tell you if I find one.”
Several MPs said their campaigns were failing because they could not agree on which candidate to rally behind.
Some ministers said they did not see the need to resign as they could face a vote of no confidence. Although the threshold for letters is technically 54, as Truss is immune from a vote of no confidence for another 11 months, the actual number to oust her is half the parliamentary party – 179.
At its weekly meeting at 4pm on Wednesday, the Executive Director of the 1922 Committee is likely to discuss the issue of letters of no confidence.
The mood soured when a YouGov poll found more than half of Conservative Party members thought Truss should resign and a significant majority would support the crowning of a new leader by Tory MPs.
In a sign of “buyers’ remorse” over a politician once seen as a “common man’s favourite”, 55% of the party’s more than 500 members thought she should resign, while just 38% said she would it must remain in place.
Boris Johnson is the members’ favorite to take over, with 32% saying he should return to No 10 if Truss leaves, with Rishi Sunak on 23%.
The idea is dismissed as ridiculous by many Tory MPs. Johnson and Sunak are well ahead of other potential candidates, with Ben Wallace on 10%, Penny Mordaunt on 9% and Kemi Badenoch on 8%.
Tory heavyweight Michael Gove said it was a matter of when not if Truss was removed as prime minister, telling Britons to expect “a hell of a lot of pain over the next two months”. The former cabinet minister, who backed Sunak in the summer and was an early opponent of the disastrous mini-budget, said her economic plan was now “in tatters”.
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Asked after a speech if it was “no longer a question of if Liz Truss goes, but when she goes”, Gove agreed it was “absolutely right”.
He added: “The question for any leader is what happens when the program or platform on which you have secured your leadership is destroyed.”
Gove also joked that he had been Truss boss, which was “of course a role that is now a job-share between Jeremy Hunt and the bond markets”; and that “now we all know” why Truss was nicknamed “the human hand grenade”.
Tory backbencher Robert Largan compared her leadership to a “dustbin fire” and the Conservative Party to a blunder in a quirky article in the Glossop Chronicle that was widely interpreted as an allegory for the Truss premiership.
“It is sometimes argued that it is better to simply let the fire eventually burn itself out,” he wrote. “But the longer the fire is allowed to rage, the greater the danger to the integrity of the skip, as the metal begins to distort and lose shape beyond recognition, eventually becoming completely unusable.”
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