By-election news latest: Boris Johnson loses backing of more Tory MPs after disastrous defeats

Britain did not abandon Commonwealth countries during the coronavirus crisis, Boris Johnson has said.

After admitting that the UK could always have done more, he said the country had played a “pretty remarkable” role in distributing vaccines around the world.

“I think that is a great, great thing,” he said.

Tory infighting has accelerated after the party’s defeat in the Devon and Yorkshire by-elections yesterday.

Conor Burns, the minister of state for Northern Ireland, said he was “disappointed” that Oliver Dowden had quit as Conservative party chair following the disappointing result.

Responding to former Tory leader Michael Howard’s call for Boris Johnson to resign, Mr Burns said: “I would simply say I will give the same loyalty to my party leader and my prime minister as Lord Howard expected of me when he was party leader.”

The British government must not commit “economic vandalism” by unilaterally scrapping parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol, Sinn Fein has said.

A bill that will remove checks over the Irish Sea – checks the UK government agreed to under the Withdrawal Agreement – will receive its second reading in Parliament on Monday.

Speaking on Friday, John O’Dowd, Stormont’s infrastructure minister, warned the Tory party against the move, saying it was unpopular in Northern Ireland.

“The attack on the protocol through this piece of legislation is an attack on international law. More importantly, it’s an attack on our business community, workers and families who are benefiting from it,” the Sinn Fein politician said.

“What Boris Johnson and others plan to do on Monday is economic vandalism and it should be stopped and stopped now,” he added.

Former health secretary Matt Hancock has rushed to the defence of his party leader.

Amid fresh questions about Boris Johnson’s future in No 10, the Tory MP said his colleagues needed to “pull together” and work towards the next general election, which he admitted would be “challenging”.

Boris Johnson’s hold on the premiership is tonight in peril, amid signs that support for his leadership within the Conservative Party is ebbing away in the wake of a pair of disastrous by-election defeats.

As Labour seized back the totemic red-wall seat of Wakefield and Liberal Democrats overturned a record by-election majority to take “true blue” Tiverton & Honiton in Devon, one MP who backed Mr Johnson in a confidence vote less than three weeks ago told The Independent that he and others could no longer support the prime minister.

The prime minister has defended his government’s attempts to send asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda.

After noting the ongoing legal challenges against the move, Boris Johnson said: “I’m confident that we will be able to go ahead and develop a solution that I think who’s time has come.”

Speaking from the Rwandan capital Kigali, he added: “You’ve got to find a way of breaking the mode of people smugglers, people smugglers, people traffickers are doing a profoundly evil and dangerous thing and you have to find a way of stopping that.

“I’m confident that it will produce value for money.”

Further to my earlier post on the same subject, here’s a video of Boris Johnson speaking out against the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade:

An unnamed Tory MP has said Boris Johnson must go because the by-election results cannot simply be “written off as just midterm blues”.

The politician, who spoke to PA Media on condition of anonymity, said: “When we suffered by-election losses during the Cameron years for instance, it was taken on the chin because the government back then was actually doing Conservative things.

“Their economic policy, for instance, was far more conservative than today’s literally 80-seat majority Conservative government. People in the party held their nerve because there was a long-term economic plan, which Cameron and Osborne were competent at selling.

“That’s why a loss in Tiverton and Honiton can’t just be shrugged off. It precipitates electoral disaster, which can only be avoided by replacing Boris Johnson with the better leadership the Conservative Party needs and deserves.”

Boris Johnson’s departure from No 10 looks like a foregone conclusion, writes Andrew Grice.

The resignation of Oliver Dowden as Conservative Party chair is more significant than the party’s double defeat in Thursday’s by-elections in Tiverton and Honiton and Wakefield. It matters because someone in the cabinet has finally had the courage to stand up to Boris Johnson.

Read the full article here: