Tory MPs to hold no-confidence vote in Boris Johnson this evening, Graham Brady says – live

The Conservative MP John Penrose has released an open letter to Boris Johnson announcing his resignation as the government’s anti-corruption champion. Penrose says his decision was prompted by the Sue Gray report, which he says implied Johnson broke the ministerial code over Partygate, and by Johnson’s comments on this in a letter to Lord Geidt, his independent adviser on ministerial standards, last week.

Here is an extract from the letter.

My reason for stepping down is your public letter last week, replying to your independent adviser on the ministerial code about the recent Sue Gray report into ‘partygate’. In it you addressed the concerns over the fixed penalty notice you paid, but not the broader and very serious criticisms of what the report called ‘failures of leadership and judgment’ and its conclusion that ‘senior leadership at the centre, both political and official, must bear responsibility for this culture’. You will know (and your letter to your adviser on the ministerial code explicitly says) that the Nolan principles of public life are absolutely central to the ministerial code, and that the seventh of them is ‘leadership’. So the only fair conclusion to dry from the Sue Gray report is that you have breached a fundamental principle of the ministerial code – a clear resigning matter. But your letter to your independent adviser on the ministerial code ignores this absolutely central, non-negotiable issue completely. And, if it had addressed it, it is hard to see how it could have reached any other conclusion than that you had broken the code.

And here is the full text of it.

In a letter to Conservative MPs Boris Johnson claims he has shown that he can be “trusted to deliver bold and innovative solutions to difficult and longstanding problems”.

He accepts that some of the criticism of him over Partygate was fair. But he says he has responded to that, and he claims that the party now has a “golden chance” to put the issue behind it.

I know that over recent months I have come under a great deal of fire, and I know that experience has been painful for the whole party.

Some of that criticism has perhaps been fair, some less so. Where there have been valid points, I have listened and learned and made significant changes.

And I will of course continue to listen and learn from colleagues about the improvements you wish to see.

But I cannot stress too much that we have a golden chance to put this behind us now.

With your support, I believe that tonight we have a great prize within our grasp. We can put an end to the media’s favourite obsession. We can get on with the job without the noises off.

And I am absolutely confident that if we can unite in the days ahead then in due course we will win again, repay the trust of the 14 million who voted for us, and continue to serve the country we love.

Johnson’s critics, of course, also argue that the no-confidence vote offers Tory MPs a golden opportunity to move on from Partygate.

Jeremy Hunt, the former foreign secretary who is one of the favourites to succeed Boris Johnson as Tory leader, has said he will vote against the PM in tonight’s no-confidence vote. In a statement posted on Twitter as a thread he said:

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.

Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, told LBC during his “Call Keir” phone-in this morning that, even if Boris Johnson wins the vote tonight, it will mark the beginning of the end for him. He told LBC:

I think the mood has changed. I think the public have made their mind up about this man. They don’t think he’s really telling the truth about many, many things – not just Partygate – but just the general sense that this man doesn’t really tell the truth, [he] can’t be trusted.

We’ve got a prime minister trying to cling on to his job and most people would say ‘your job is to help me through the cost-of-living crisis and you’re not doing it because you’re distracted’.

I think history tells us that this is the beginning of the end. If you look at the previous examples of no-confidence votes, even when Conservative prime ministers survived those, he might survive it tonight, the damage is already done and usually they fall reasonably swiftly afterwards.

There are 359 Conservative MPs and so Boris Johnson needs at least 180 votes to be sure of winning. But, as Starmer points out, a technical win is not necessarily a political victory, and the last Conservative prime minister to win a vote of confidence like this (Theresa May, on 12 December 2018) was out of office less than eight months later.

At the weekend Tim Shipman from the Sunday Times produced some benchmarks that would show whether or not Johnson is doing worse than May in 2018, John Major in 1995 and Margaret Thatcher in 1990. (The latter two are not exact parallels because they were facing a leadership challenge, not a no confidence vote.)

The Jesse Norman letter to Graham Brady calling for a vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson is one of the most damning yet published. (See 7.50am.) Much of it could come straight out of a Guardian editorial. Here are some of the main points.

• Norman says the government under Johnson lacks a “sense of mission” and that “sensible planning has been replaced by empty rhetoric”. He says:

You are simply seeking to campaign, to keep changing the subject and to create political and cultural dividing lines mainly for your advantage, at a time when the economy is struggling, inflation is soaring and growth is anaemic at best.

• Norman says the Sue Gray report revealed “a culture of casual law-breaking at 10 Downing Street in relation to Covid” and that it was “grotesque” for Johnson to claim he had been vindicated by it.

• Norman says Johnson’s plan to abandon parts of the Northern Ireland protocol would “economically very damaging, politically foolhardy and almost certainly illegal”.

• He says the plan to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda is “ugly, likely to be counterproductive and of doubtful legality”.

• He says the Channel 4 privatisation plan is “an unnecessary and provocative attempt to address a political non-issue during a time of crisis, at significant cost to the independent UK film and TV industry”.

• He says “no genuinely Conservative government” would have passed the ban on noisy protests in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act.

• He says Johnson is trying to implement in part “a presidential system of government that is entirely foreign to our constitution and law”.

• And he says that if Johnson were to remain in office a Labour victory at the next general election would be “much more likely”, which would be “potentially catastrophic for this country”.

But it is not all negative. Norman praises Johnson for his handling of Ukraine and Covid.

As prime minister, you have been dealt a very difficult hand with Covid and Ukraine, and you deserve great credit for much of the way in which the Government has handled these twin crises. Your recent visit to Kyiv was a conspicuous act of leadership.

Norman is married to Kate Bingham, who ran the government’s vaccine taskforce.

Some readers might wonder why Norman is only saying all this now. In a paragraph that is revealing about how No 10 tried to maintain the loyalty of MPs, Norman says that when he quit the government in last year’s reshuffle, Johnson floated the possibility of him returning, and being given a cabinet job, in the future.

Norman implies that he has only recently decided that he would find such an offer unacceptable. He says:

When I stepped down from the Treasury last September, you raised the topic of the next reshuffle, and we discussed the potential for me to run a department of state.

I have always been deeply committed to public service. But recent events have served to clarify the position this country is in under your leadership, beyond any doubt; and I am afraid I can see no circumstances in which I could serve in a government led by you.