Boris's new MPs are the masters now... and they won't let him forget it

POWER. It’s the lifeblood of Westminster. Like mercury in a petri dish, it ebbs and flows according to pressures exerted on it. Over the last two weeks, SW1’s mercur y has shifted, and dramatically.

- Tom Newton Dunn

For months, it rested almost exclusively at the Prime Minister’s end of the dish. The all-conquering Tory chieftain had slain Dominic Cummings and the Vote Leave tribe, and then knocked off the Cabinet ministers he no longer liked with a brutal reshuffle.

By Tory conference at the start of October, the emperor was imperious — and was acting like it. Boris Johnson didn’t know it at the time, but resentment with the emperor’s rule was building, especially with the 2019 intake.

“Boris couldn’t give a shit about Parliament, he’d rather none of us were here,” one frustrated new intake Tory MP told me. “We were promised it would no longer be a tight circle after Dom. But now it’s just a circle of one.”

The 2019 intake, made up substantially of Red Wall MPs elected in former Labour seats, had also begun to get nervous. As one Tory strategist put it this week, they’re now “half way over the hill” to the general election in 2024. Yet they feel they still have scant little levelling up to sell to their voters.

So with the Owen Paterson debacle, they struck. The 2019ers led the coup against Downing Street’s defence of the indefensible, the Old Guard Tory who was bang to rights over corruption.