For a man who for so long set his sights on being Britain's prime minister, Boris Johnson came dangerously close on Monday to being ousted by lawmakers tired of defending him and faces a battle to win back the confidence of his party and country.
He survives, just, for now. But he is deeply wounded and even loyal lawmakers who backed him in the confidence vote say he must now change — return to the traditional ideals of the governing Conservative Party, foster unity and lead.
His inbox is daunting. British households face the biggest cost-of-living squeeze since the 1950s, with food and fuel prices rising while wages lag, and travelers are experiencing transport chaos at airports caused by staffing shortages.
The master of political comebacks might struggle this time.
Ed Costelloe, chair of the group Conservative Grassroots who backed Johnson in 2019, said he had got many things right, but had been brought down by the so-called partygate scandal over his breaches of COVID-19 lockdown rules.
"Once you face a vote of confidence, somehow you are doomed. After that, the vultures start gathering. I think he is in real, real trouble," he said.
Johnson won the vote 211 to 148, a worse showing than when lawmakers tried to oust his predecessor Theresa May, who won her vote but then resigned six months later.
Johnson's confidence vote was a brutal wake-up call for a leader whose mandate once seemed unassailable, after his promise to "get Brexit done" in 2019 won over voters in parts of the country the Conservatives had never been able to capture and helped the party secure its biggest majority in over three decades.
Since then, the list of reasons lawmakers have given for wanting Johnson gone have been as varied as they are many, cutting across usual factional lines and making the rebels somewhat uneasy bedfellows.
As reasons why the 57-year-old leader should resign, lawmakers cite anything from partygate, threats to break international law and the defense of rule-breakers at the heart of power to multiple policy U-turns, an initially slow response to COVID-19 and a general lack of respect for his office.
It was perhaps the lack of cohesion in Monday's rebellion that helped save him. But it has left him weakened.
Political survival is something Johnson, known widely as Boris, has made a career of, with former Prime Minister David Cameron likening him to a "greased piglet" who is hard to catch.
"My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters," Johnson wrote in a newspaper column in 2004.
In a speech to the party's lawmakers just hours before the vote, Johnson remained adamant he could win again.
"If you don't believe that we can come back from our current position and win again then you haven't looked at my own record or the record of this party," he said, according to a senior party source in the meeting.
Johnson spent Monday pleading with MPs to back him, with loyal lieutenants defending him in broadcast interviews. He also attempted to appease his critics within the party by promising tax cuts.
After the result, Johnson said it was time to get back to helping people with the cost of living, strengthening the economy and bolstering the health service.
"It’s an extremely good, positive, conclusive, decisive result which enables us to move on to unite and to focus on delivery,” Johnson told reporters. "I am certainly not interested in snap elections. We are going to bash on. We have a huge agenda and we’re going to get it done.”
Yet there’s no doubt the vote was a blow. It was triggered by at least 15% of Conservative MPs submitting letters of no confidence in their leader. In the end, 41% of MPs rebelled.
Under current rules, Tory MPs will not be allowed to hold another confidence vote for a year. However, it is possible to change the rules in order to hold another vote sooner.
"We now know that 40% of his MPs don’t even think he should be prime minister,” said Alice Lilly, senior researcher at the Institute for Government. "How on earth is the government actually going to get anything done? There’s absolutely no way this has drawn a line under it.”
Still, some have warned of underestimating Johnson, or Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, saying his ruffled appearance and distinctive mop of blond hair masks the discipline and ruthlessness he needed to get to this point.
But after years of weathering sex scandals, gaffes and missteps as London mayor, foreign secretary and now prime minister, Johnson, a relative loner in the Conservative Party, might be running out of road.
For some in the party, the rot set in when he defended former adviser Dominic Cummings when he broke COVID-19 rules early in the pandemic, enraging the country.
The following year he initially defended a Conservative lawmaker who had been found guilty of breaching lobbying rules, and a U-turn on extending free school meals to children from low-income families did little to improve the picture.
The final straw was months of a steady drip of stories about lockdown-breaking parties in Johnson's Downing Street that culminated in a report last month detailing fights and alcohol-induced vomit in the early hours at times when the rest of the country was obeying strict COVID-19 rules.
One former Conservative lawmaker was so incensed even before the report, they "crossed the floor," or went to join the main opposition Labour Party.
"Prior to leaving ... it was just embarrassing being asked to defend the indefensible for a PM who clearly has no morals," said Christian Wakeford, who joined Labour in January.
Conservative Grassroots chair Costelloe said the decision to back Johnson could be fatal in the long-term. "I am firmly of the view if he is still there in two years then we will lose the next election," he said.
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