ANY move to re-install Boris Johnson as Prime Minister will end in disaster at the polls, former Brexit Secretary David Davis has warned.
He told GB News: “The hard truth of the matter is that he was very good at getting elected twice as the Mayor of London and he did a good job there and that that was of course true in 2019, but bear in mind, he’s been also quite lucky…
“I went around 17 swing seats in 2019 and the Tory party, stepping into council estates as you’d expect, and so I knocked on the doors and the first thing that came up wasn’t Boris Johnson, the first thing that came up was Jeremy Corbyn.
“They were terrified of the tax increases and the principles frankly of Jeremy Corbyn, quite a lot of them were worried on patriotic grounds.
“The second impact on results in 2019 was Nigel Farage. It was him pulling out the UKIP opposition in the Tory seats and it dropped away completely, the support when he did that.”
In an interview with Esther McVey and Philip Davies on GB News, he said: “Now Boris had an impact, of course he did, and any prime minister who wins an election has a right to claim some credit for it. But none of that’s true now.
“We dropped to 20 points behind – 10 points of that came under Boris, the other 10 points came under Liz Truss…supported by Boris’s supporters.
“If we came back now, in my seat, half the Tories that I’ve met on the streets of my seat have said to me we won’t vote Tory for as long as you’ve got Boris as leader. That was way back. And it’s still true.”
Asked if Boris Johson supporters would prefer to lose an election, he said: “I can’t read their minds but the sort of tenor of people talking about the May elections just coming up…it’s almost wishing for us to lose.
“There are thousands of Tory councillors out there that we should be supporting and bringing back. And when people start talking about May as this is a critical point, ‘we’re going to bring Boris back after May’, then it sounds like they’re wishing for it.
“That’s also very bad for the morale of Tory activists. I mean, my activists hate it.”
He added: “Let’s imagine for a second that we re-inserted Boris in there. You know, he’s got the Privileges Committee coming up.
“Even if he succeeds in persuading the committee that he didn’t deliberately mislead the House of Commons – I don’t think anybody now argues that whether he misled the house, the question is whether he did it deliberately, even if he succeeds, in that, the public are going to see two or three months of people trotting out to that committee, giving evidence, say we had this party and that party, when you couldn’t go to a funeral, when you couldn’t go to see your mum when she was dying, when you couldn’t get attend a wedding.
“All of those people will be looking at this in horror. So we’ve got two or three months of that coming up, then maybe a finding against him.
“If there’s a finding against him, that could be a disaster for him, because he might end up having a by-election in his own constituency.”
He said: “And then after that, you’ve got the investigations on how well the Covid crisis was run.
“To be fair to Boris, the mistakes that the British government made are the same mistakes that nearly every other government in the world made other than Sweden.
“But nevertheless, that’s going to be exposed, that’s not the backdrop for somebody who you want to bring in as a future prime minister.
“You’re lucky general may have become a very, very unlucky gentleman.”
