Can Boris take back control?

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

News, Politics, Government, Daily News

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2021

⏱️ 22 minutes

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Summary

Last night Boris Johnson suffered the biggest rebellion of his Tory premiership. But, unlike his predecessor, he still managed to get his vote through with Labour's support. Nearly 100 Conservative MPs voted against the government's plans for vaccine passports.

Their reasons for rebelling varied. For some, they want to send a message to the PM that he cannot take his majority for granted. For others, it is about the principle of vaccine passports.

'Boris Johnson is proving to be a deeply illiberal Prime Minister. He’s turning into the sort of Prime Minister he used to warn us against when he was writing’ - Fraser Nelson

Katy Balls is joined by Isabel Hardman, Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth to discuss last night's rebellion and the booster vaccine program.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Coffee House Shots is sponsored by Crux, one of the world's leading boutique asset management firms specialising in Asian, European and UK investments.
0:10.6	We invest in the long term and our dedicated team of investment professionals have decades of fund management experience between them.
0:19.2	Visit cruxam.com for more information.
0:24.5	Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, Suspectators' Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Katie Balls
0:29.9	and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson, Isva Hardman and James Versafe. Last night, Boris Johnson
0:35.9	suffered the biggest Tory rebellion of his premiership.
0:39.4	Nearly 100 Conservative MPs voted against the government's plans and vaccine passports.
0:44.5	Fraser, do you think number 10 were caught off guard by the size of the rebellion?
0:48.4	Yes, I think they were, although I'm not entirely sure why.
0:51.2	I mean, the Spectator was flagging this several days in advance with our live list of rebels.
0:55.7	We got to 81. And obviously, if that's 81 prepared to go on the record. And by the way, we're not to wimp out of it either.
1:02.0	They pretty much all of them went through with it apart from two.
1:04.6	You're welcome to name them.
1:06.1	Well, one of them was Royston Smith, who's the Tory MP for Southampton-Nitchin.
1:22.6	Now, he actually, he wasn't on our list, but he actually DM'd us via Twitter to point us to the comments he given to his local newspaper, where he was saying that he has never supported vaccine passports and he still doesn't.
1:27.7	So going out of his way to contact us, he then votes for them and therefore does support them.
1:31.6	And they'll have to see if his local paper will update.
1:35.6	And then the other one was Robert Goodwill, who's MP for Scarborough Whitby.
1:41.0	Again, he wasn't on our list, but his people then put out a little statement, letting it be known that he was going to rebel. Gido Fogg's did a special
1:46.8	line praising him for exactly that. And in fact, no, he didn't rebel. He voted for the government.
1:52.5	So I'm not quite sure what happened to those chaps, whether they had a sudden change of heart.
1:56.9	But both of them went out of their way to say they were going to rebel and then didn't.
	...

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