Tory grandee Lord Heseltine: Theresa May must sack Boris Johnson
3 min read
Theresa May must sack Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson if she is to have any hope of reasserting her ailing authority over the Conservatives, a party grandee has declared.
Lord Michael Heseltine said sacking the top Tory would be a “high risk policy” but insisted the Prime Minister had to unite her Cabinet to save her administration.
It comes after the Prime Minister hinted that Mr Johnson could be demoted in a reshuffle in a bid to flex her muscles in the wake of a damaging Tory party conference.
Mr Johnson repeatedly challenged Mrs May on Brexit in the run-up to the disastrous event last week, before making a major diplomatic gaffe at the annual get-together.
Lord Heseltine - who challenged Margaret Thatcher for the leadership and served as deputy prime minister - said had to teach Mr Johnson a lesson.
“I think that if she wants to reassert her authority she would have to sack him but of course it’s a high risk policy because he’ll be on the backbenches and he won’t go quietly,” he told Radio 4's World this Weekend.
He added: “I think Mrs May has an almost insoluble problem because she’s got a deeply divided Cabinet, a deeply divided country and deeply divided party.
“And she’s got Brexit, which is going to cast increasing shadows over the next couple of years as the saga of negotiation unfolds.
“That’s her problem but certainly… how can a government survive with that sort of dialogue in the background?”
He noted that Mrs May could tell her MPs to back her or risk a general election which could “throw the whole Brexit thing into chaos”. And he added: “Whichever way she turns she’s boxed in.”
In her first interview since Wednesday's speech which led to a plot to oust her being revealed, Mrs May suggested her Tory colleague could be removed from his job.
“It has never been my style to hide from a challenge and I’m not going to start now,” she told the Sunday Times.
“I’m the Prime Minister, and part of my job is to make sure I always have the best people in my Cabinet, to make the most of the wealth of talent available to me in the party.”
But after backing the Prime Minister in a WhatsApp group of Tory MPs this week the Foreign Secretary has come out today with a full-throated cry to support her.
“Are we really going to be stampeded myopically over the edge of the gorge, with an election that no one wants?” he wrote in the Sunday Telegraph.
“‘Quo quo scelesti ruitis?’ as Horace put it at the beginning of a fresh bout of Rome’s ghastly civil wars and which roughly translates as: ‘What do you think you are doing you nutters?’”
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