Boris Johnson has arrived back in the U.K. as the Conservative Party gears up to select Britain’s next leader, following the dramatic implosion of Liz Truss’s premiership.
The former prime minister returned from holiday in the Caribbean on Saturday, with 6,800 people following his British Airways flight across the Atlantic on tracking site flighttrack24 at 4.10am ET.
Johnson is widely expected to run again for the Tory Party leadership, which could potentially restore him to 10 Downing Street less than two months after he was forced to leave.
However, his divisive candidacy risks splitting his party, with one former Conservative Minister telling Newsweek that “nothing’s changed” since July when Johnson was forced to quit by his own ministers who were “fed up with his lies and dissembling.”
Penny Mordaunt, a former Defense Secretary, has announced her intention to run while Rishi Sunak, the former Chancellor who Truss beat to become PM in September, has passed the 100 Tory MP threshold to run, according to his allies.
To enter the race potential candidates must show they have the backing of 100 Conservative MPs, out of a total of 357.
MPs will vote on any candidates who reach this threshold until just two are left, with party members making the final decision next week.
The high threshold has been deliberately chosen to speed up the election after the party spent two months selecting Truss over the summer.
Currently, according to data from respected U.K. politics blog Guido Fawkes, 120 MPs have said they will back Sunak, making him the first to hit the 100 MP threshold.
Johnson is in second place, with 71 MPs in support, followed by Mordaunt on 25.
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During the last leadership election Sunak described Truss’s plans for massive unfunded tax cuts, which ended up tanking the pound and forcing her Chancellor to resign, as “fantasy island” economics.
Johnson faces a privileges committee probe over whether he lied to Parliament during the so-called partygate scandal, which saw him fined after attending his birthday party during lockdown in breach of coronavirus laws.
If the committee concludes Johnson deliberately mislead the legislature he could be suspended and potentially forced to fight a by-election, raising the prospect of fresh Conservative leadership turmoil.
Speaking to Newsweek Edwina Currie, a former junior Tory minister and current President of High Peak Conservatives, said it would be a mistake for her party to pick Johnson again.
She commented: “He resigned when 55 of his ministers quit in a three-day rout in July, fed up with his lies and dissembling. Nothing’s changed – he was even lazing in the Caribbean last week when he should have been voting in Parliament.
“There’s no magic in politics for the next few years in Britain – post-Covid reconstruction, the costs of Putin’s war, all require calm wise heads at the top. And his is not one of them.”
Sebastian Milbank, online editor of British politics focused magazine The Critic, told Newsweek Johnson is likely to win if the vote goes to Conservative Party members.
He said: “Purely as a move to calm the markets, Sunak is the obvious choice, as reflected by the over 100 MPs supporting him. But from an electoral perspective Boris is the only leader with a proven track record, and a democratic mandate, and if he gets through to the final round of voting, he seems bound to win with the members over the unpopular former chancellor.
“For all the farce of going back to Boris, he is also the only person who can frame the failure of Truss’s agenda as a vindication of his own leadership and approach. Everything now depends on whether Tory MPs will vote tactically to keep Boris off the final ballot.”
However, Milbank warned a second Johnson premiership would leave his party dangerously divided.
He commented: “Should he win, Boris will be leading a divided party and a country caught up in a political and economic crisis that he is in large part responsible for causing.
“Key former allies and supporters, including Lord Frost and his former chief of staff Steve Barclay have called on him not to run and are backing Rishi Sunak instead.”
During Truss’s final days before resigning the Daily Star, a tabloid U.K. newspaper, ran a livestream to see if she could last longer in office than a lettuce.
