A senior Tory MP has said he would “applaud” Boris Johnson if he resigned as prime minister in the wake of a report into lockdown parties in Downing Street.
Charles Walker, the vice chairman of the Tory backbench 1922 Committee, said there was now so much anger over what happened that Johnson should consider whether the country could heal better if he left No 10.
Walker stopped short of directly calling for Johnson to quit, saying he had got “many things right” such as the vaccines and lifting lockdown.
But in an interview with Channel 4 News he suggested that the situation may have gone too far for Johnson to recover.
“I think there’s so much grief and pain out there that if he was to say, ‘Look, I understand that I asked so much of the country and it needs to come to terms with that grief and pain and start the process of healing and if it could do that better without me in Number 10 then I shall stand aside’, that would show great courage on behalf of the prime minister,” he said.
“I would applaud him for doing that, but that is his decision.”
Earlier another Tory backbencher, Peter Aldous, the MP for Waveney, said he had submitted a letter to the chairman of the 1922, Graham Brady, calling for a vote of no confidence in the leader.
Aldous said that he did not believe Johnson would quit voluntarily and that the only way was to force him out through a confidence vote.
“After a great deal of soul-searching, I have reached the conclusion that the prime minister should resign,” he tweeted.
“It is clear that he has no intention of doing so and I have therefore written to the chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs, advising him that I have no confidence in the prime minister as leader of the Conservative Party.”
Under party rules there must be a confidence vote if 54 Tory MPs – 15% of the parliamentary party – submit letters to Brady.
However communities secretary Michael Gove supported the prime inister, saying this was not the time for a leadership contest.
“There’s not going to be a leadership contest. I’m going to be supporting the prime minister. I think he’s doing a brilliant job, and I will be behind him 100%,” he told the BBC.
“So no leadership contest. We don’t want one, we don’t need one.
Meanwhile Johnson committed to publishing “everything that we can” from the full Sue Gray inquiry into allegations of lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street.
The prime minister went further on Tuesday, to promise a fuller publication of the senior civil servant’s investigation once the Metropolitan Police probe has concluded.
There has been confusion over the extent of any subsequent report after Johnson refused to accept the demands of Tory MPs and Labour leader Keir Starmer during a Commons statement.
Asked at a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, whether he would commit to publishing the full inquiry, including the 300-plus images handed to investigators, the prime minister said: “Yes, of course we’ll publish everything that we can as soon as the process has been completed, as I said yesterday.”