Is Boris Johnson a dead man walking? With Andrew Marr
The New Statesman | UK politics and culture
The New Statesman
4.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 June 2022
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has won a vote of confidence from Conservative MPs. But 148 members voted against him, leaving a split party. In this special episode of the New Statesman Podcast, recorded at the Tate Britain just down the road from the Palace of Westminster, Rachel Cunliffe interviews the political editor Andrew Marr on where this development now leaves Johnson and the country.
They discuss how this is good for the opposition but bad for government, why there is no coordinated plot among the Tories to remove Johnson, and why his days in office must now surely be numbered.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Rachel. And I'm Andrew. And we're recording the New Statesman |
| 0:06.0 | podcast in the tape written just round the corner from the House of Parliament, |
| 0:10.0 | where last night Boris Johnson survived a vote of no confidence. |
| 0:22.0 | Well, it's the morning after the night before. I'm joined by Andrew Mar, |
| 0:26.0 | New Statesman's political editor, to go through what happened. |
| 0:30.0 | Andrew, 148 votes against Boris Johnson, 214, take us to the numbers. |
| 0:36.0 | What does this mean? Well, the numbers could not be better for the opposition |
| 0:40.0 | for the Labour Party and the Lib Dems and the SNP, because they guarantee |
| 0:44.0 | a long-running continued divisive split inside the Conservative Party. |
| 0:48.0 | There's going to be more scrapes, more crises day by day, week by week and month by month. |
| 0:54.0 | The opposition simply has a point of finger at the government at the moment and go, |
| 0:58.0 | ah, ah, ah, it is terrible, I think, for the country. |
| 1:02.0 | Boris Johnson is leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, |
| 1:06.0 | but he does not really have any longer an effective parliamentary majority for most of what he wants to do. |
| 1:12.0 | There are now two groups in the Conservative Party and we can see from the numbers how big they are. |
| 1:16.0 | There's one group which can call almost the Brexit Boris Party, |
| 1:20.0 | which are the placeholders, the ministers, all those who feel even as bad benches |
| 1:26.0 | that they owe the reason they're in Westminster is because of him, |
| 1:30.0 | and a few ideologues, a few Brexiters, and they are the 211. |
| 1:34.0 | And then there's the other party, which is inco-ate and disorganised, |
| 1:38.0 | but consists of all the people who, for one reason or another, perhaps because he sacked them, |
| 1:44.0 | perhaps because they don't like Brexit, perhaps because they're outraged, |
... |
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