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UK MPs are expected to vote on the Privileges committee's verdict on whether Boris Johnson lied to Parliament over partygate on June 29. Tory MPs will NOT be whipped to back Johnson.
@Christopher Hope📝:
NEW 👀💥MPs are expected to vote on the Privileges committee's verdict on whether Boris Johnson lied to Parliament over partygate on June 29. Tory MPs will NOT be whipped to back Johnson. Will enough vote down any ban that might trigger a by-election? Get ready for🎇. 1/3
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NEW 👀💥
MPs are expected to vote on the Privileges committee's verdict on whether Boris Johnson lied to Parliament over partygate on June 29.
Tory MPs will NOT be whipped to back Johnson.
Will enough vote down any ban that might trigger a by-election? Get ready for :fireworks:
I am told the MPs have ignored that Johnson was reported to two police forces over more lockdown breaches which he denies.
But sources are "cagey" on the findings. It's a big three weeks for Johnson and his team. One MP says: "Boris has the fight of his political life."
Johnson supporters see the prospect of the Conservative parliamentary party uniting and voting down any ban on Johnson. Will they take it?
One MP ally told me: "It will be a free vote - it is a chance to unite the party."
This might be wishful thinking but it is possible.
I haven't been paying much attention to what happened to BoJo after he stepped down from PM. I see there's potential for a by-election; does that mean if MPs vote he'd be removed from his seat?
If he does get removed, is he banned from Parliament forever, or is he just removed for the current term and could be reelected in the future?
Sorry, I'm an American who's interested in UK politics, but I don't watch it closely. At least not since the Brexit days with Teresa May. Watching the Commons was surprisingly exciting then.
If MPs vote to sanction Johnson that would trigger a by-election in his seat. But he would be eligible to stand as a candidate in that by-election so could potentially, if successful, be re-elected right back to Parliament. There's nothing to prevent him from running again at future elections.
It wouldn't surprise me though if he declined to stand again (to avoid the risk of a humiliating defeat) and instead stood again in a safe(r) Tory seat at the next election.
A sanction would not immediately trigger a by-election in his seat: instead, if Johnson is suspended from the House of Commons for ten days or more it would trigger a local recall petition. For a recall by-election, 10% of constituents in Uxbridge and South Ruislip would need to sign the petition. With some concerted campaigning the threshold would be pretty easy to meet. It is not a given that Johnson would be suspended from the House of Commons for such an amount of time, however.
Thanks for the correction - you're quite right (although it's all academic now, given tonight's news!)
No worries! If he's found guilty, he'll be given a suspension long enough that he'd be forced into a byelection, one the Lib Dems will almost certainly win. He could always run and win again, but with the Tories doing so badly in the polls it's highly unlikely he would unless the party parachuted him into the safest seat imaginable, which it's unlikely they will do!
The Lib Dems wouldn't win the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election by any stretch of the imagination. Or the seat, really ever. It's a seat where Labour has performed well, which voted to leave the European Union and is already tipped to flip to Labour at the next general election.
The wider Hillingdon area is very unsympathetic to the Liberal Democrats and has a significantly higher proportion of motorists than the Greater London average - i.e. precisely the sort of people in London who wouldn't consider the Liberal Democrats for a minute - and in Hillingdon the Conservatives won 42,658 votes (62%) to Labour's 26,074 in the second round of the 2021 mayoral election, largely due to environmental policies from City Hall.
If Johnson's seat did go to a by-election, said by-election would be a de facto referendum on London's ultra-low emissions zone, and I suspect the Conservatives would be harder to dethrone than people may anticipate. The Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft has commissioned constituency polling which indicates that Johnson would triumph in any such by-election.
If the Lib Dems and Greens stood down it would be much tighter. I hate how often the centre/left parties split the non-Tory vote. I could barely care less which not-the-Tories party wins as long as it's not the bloody Tories.
Also if Labour don't plaster the entire constituency with posters featuring this image on the left side and this one on the right and "The Conservative PARTY" written underneath then they don't deserve to win.
Labour HQ are wary of making it seem that there's an official election pact, but it's possible that the Greens and Liberal Democrats would step aside or (more likely in the case of the Liberal Democrats especially) choose to not campaign. Labour pulling away funds and campaigners for the North Shropshire by-election, which the Liberal Democrats won, sets a good precedent for this.