My money is on a Tory majority — but Boris losing in Uxbridge

As the general election reaches its conclusion, could this year have one last constitutional sting in its tail? There ’ s a chance we could wake up on December 13 with a Conservative majority, but no Boris Johnson in the House of Commons as Prime Minister.

Over the past four weeks, Peter Kellner has taken TheArticle readers through the process of how the Conservative Party could win a 40-seat majority. The tactic has been to attack pro-Brexit seats in the Midlands and the North. This was meant to be where the Brexit Party stuck it to Labour, but as Alistair Burt has written here, it looks as if the Conservatives have bypassed Farage and done it themselves.

In doing this, the Conservatives have made a rod for their own back in metropolitan southern seats which are pro-Tory but heavily Remain. A quick scan through these at-risk constituencies draws our attention to Uxbridge and South Ruislip and its sitting MP, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. His majority in 2017 was only 5,034 votes.

The electorate of Uxbridge voted Remain by 57 per cent in the 2016 referendum. The blues of Uxbridge are more George Osborne’s “Evening Standard Conservatives”, rather than Boris Johnson’s “Telegraph Tories”. It’s clear Boris will lose votes in protest against his role in Brexit; the question is how many? If it was just about Brexit, Boris would cling on, but at the local level there’s more at play in Uxbridge than just Leave or Remain.

Uxbridge is home to Brunel University and has a student population of over 10,000. Labour has been canny by putting up the 25-year-old Ali Milani as its candidate, who until 2017, was President of the Union of Brunel Students. He ’ s got deep roots in the University and, along with Momentum pouring in hundreds of boots on the ground, is bound to get a far higher left-wing student vote out than they did in 2017.

The constituency has two particular issues which the Labour Party has ruthlessly exploited. Uxbridge stands almost in the shadow of Grenfell Tower. The Conservatives handled this tragic disaster badly, and that was before Jacob Rees -Mogg’s idiotic comments at the start of the general election campaign. This would have played out in few constituencies worse than Uxbridge. The constituency is also going to be negatively affected by the expansion of Heathrow — remember Boris ’ s infamous pledge to lie down in front of the bulldozers to stop the airport’s third runway? His conversion to driver-in-chief of those same bulldozers has played terribly in Uxbridge. Hence his hints this week that the third runway might not happen after all.

For obvious reasons Boris has been largely anonymous in his own constituency during this campaign; he ’ s gone fishing in the north. This has all added to a feeling of an absent landlord taking his Uxbridge tenants for granted. YouGov have the constituency as a probable Conservative hold but, when things on the ground make an area unique, polling data can be misleading by pushing national trends onto local distinctiveness. Bookmakers can give a far more accurate understanding of local anomalies and Paddy Power rates Uxbridge as one of the top five most likely constituencies to change hands on polling day.

This all means it looks very dicey for Boris being re-elected as MP for Uxbridge.

So, what happens if we wake up on Friday 13th with a Tory majority, but no Conservative leader sitting in Parliament? The most likely scenario would be for the 1922 Committee (the Conservative Parliamentary Party) to select an acting leader. Boris could force a by-election by chucking an MP from a safe seat under a bus. This process would take a minimum of six weeks, be humiliating, but not ultimately fatal for Prime Minister Johnson. Those six weeks would also be a very long time for the likes of Dominic Cummings to hold on to his power base at the heart of government.

What we can ’ t discount, in such a situation, are some of Boris ’ s rivals from the last ill-tempered Conservative leadership contest launching an extraordinary coup to topple him in his moment of victory. It’s far-fetched, but not implausible, that Sajid Javid or Michael Gove could strike for the leadership while Boris finds himself isolated and out of Parliament. This would be an apt constitutional crisis at the end of an extraordinary year.