PMQs today: Boris Johnson to face MPs as threat of no confidence vote looms

The prime minister is set to face an increasingly angry chorus of his own MPs, with reports the 54 letters which would launch a no confidence vote in the PM could be received on Wednesday.

Reports on Tuesday night suggested MPs furious at the Prime Minister’s handling of the partygate scandal engulfing Westminster had been angered further by Mr Johnson’s insistence that nobody had told him a party at Downing Street would break rules he himself had set.

And that especially those in the 2019 intake, many of whom have slim majorities after votes were “lent” to them during the last election, were preparing to submit their letters to the chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench MPs, Sir Graham Brady.

Sir Graham Brady (PA)

But a number of newspapers reported that the plot to oust Mr Johnson was far wider, as the PM will attempt to reassure his party when he appears in the Commons for Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday.

The Pork Pie Plot

An expected announcement that Plan B measures to stem the spread of coronavirus will be lifted next week is likely to please some backbenchers.

But MPs from the former so-called Red Wall were said to have met on Tuesday to discuss Mr Johnson’s future in a gathering nicknamed the “pork pie plot” or the “pork pie putsch”, and one told The Daily Telegraph the 15% of letters needed to trigger a challenge could be reached on Wednesday.

Mr Johnson, who was reported to have spent Tuesday evening in his Commons office meeting with potential rebels, apologised multiple times in a major broadcast interview for “misjudgments that were made”.

But he stuck to his defence that he had thought a “bring your own booze” party held in the No 10 garden on May 20, 2020 had been a work event and he had not been warned about it in advance.

(PA)

Mr Johnson’s former chief aide Dominic Cummings threw that into doubt on Monday as he said he would “swear under oath” Mr Johnson was told about the bash.

But asked if he had lied to Parliament over the parties as he visited a north London hospital, the PM told broadcasters: “No. I want to begin by repeating my apologies to everybody for the misjudgments that I’ve made, that we may have made in No 10 and beyond, whether in Downing Street or throughout the pandemic.

“Nobody told me that what we were doing was against the rules, that the event in question was something that… was not a work event, and as I said in the House of Commons when I went out into that garden I thought that I was attending a work event.”

Mr Johnson said he “can’t imagine why on Earth it would have gone ahead, or why it would’ve been allowed to go ahead” if he had been told it was anything but a “work event”.

Boris Johnson 'needs to' resign

Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner said Mr Johnson “needs to go”.

“I think he’s trying to take the British public for fools. He’s not sorry that he clearly attended a party, knows it’s against the rules; he’s sorry he got caught for it,” she told the PA news agency.

“I think people are incredibly frustrated.”

But she added: “He won’t, of course, and now it’s up to his MPs to do the right thing.”

Prime Minister's Questions will start at its usual time of 12pm today and is expected to run for around half an hour.