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Louise Thomas
Editor
Rishi Sunak was warned he was losing his grip on his own MPs after he was hit by a mass strike in the last days of his premiership.
In a sign of the pressure Mr Sunak was under before he shocked Westminster by calling a snap general election, the then prime minister was told the situation was unsustainable.
On a single day Conservative whips received a request from around 200 Tory MPs – well over half of the parliamentary party – to be slipped, or excused from voting, a former senior Downing Street insider said.
The phrase refers to allowing MPs to miss a whipped vote, often by “pairing” them with an opposition MP also away from Westminster that day.
The former No 10 insider said that Mr Sunak’s government had only lost one Commons vote during his time in office.
But he said that as hundreds of Tory MPs sought to duck out of votes, the prime minister was warned the situation was unsustainable.
The Tories won an 80-seat majority in 2019, leading to suggestions the size of the victory might guarantee the party 10 years in power.
But the Tories began to haemorrhage MPs following the Partygate scandal which engulfed Boris Johnson‘s administration and Liz Truss’s disastrous ‘mini-Budget’.
A series of by-election defeats and defections eventually cut its lead over the opposition to just 38.
But that figure was misleading – as Tory MPs went on strike in protest at Mr Sunak’s leadership or snubbed Westminster altogether to stay in their constituencies and try to fight to save their job at the looming election.
In the end, his shock decision to call an election meant Mr Sunak suffered just one Commons loss, when Tory MPs rebelled to defeat their own government over compensation for victims of the NHS infected blood scandal.
They voted to force ministers to speed up payments, by 246 votes to 242 after 22 Conservatives voted against the whip.
At the time the Haemophilia Society said that Mr Sunak “should be ashamed” he had been forced “to do the right thing”.
The Independent revealed last week that the prospect of hundreds of thousands of voters suffering a steep rise in their mortgage bills pushed Rishi Sunak to call a snap general election.
The former prime minister feared the wrath of homeowners forced to pay an average of £240 more a month.
Households would have to pay even more in many of the so-called “blue wall” Conservative seats in the south of England Mr Sunak was desperate to save.
But the early poll failed to avoid disaster– as the Tories crashed to the worst general election defeat in their history.
The date of the election came as a shock after the then prime minister spent months saying it would be held in the second half of the year.
He even used an appearance on ITV’s Loose Women to tell people that their summer holidays would not be affected.
But he stunned Westminster by using the last possible day to announce an early summer poll.
The decision left many of his own MPs seething amid warnings they had not had enough notice to build up local war chests and develop winnable campaigns.
