Dozens of Tories unite to scupper plot against May

A plot to oust Theresa May collapsed into a shambles yesterday as Tory MPs and ministers united to condemn the betrayal of rivals seeking revenge.

Shortly before midnight on Thursday, former Tory chairman Grant Shapps publicly kicked off his challenge to the Prime Minister in a radio phone-in, claiming he had ‘around 30 names’ of MPs who wanted her resignation.

But within hours he faced humiliation and isolation as his promised support failed to materialise.

Dozens of his colleagues lined up to ridicule the ‘embittered’ ex-minister – with some accusing him of seeking to topple Mrs May in a bid to thwart Brexit.

A Sky News survey of 103 Tory MPs last night found only three who wanted the Prime Minister to go.

Having killed off the plot, a defiant Mrs May used her first public appearance since her party conference speech to say her leadership had the Cabinet’s full backing.

Speaking in her Maidenhead constituency, she said: ‘Now what the country needs is calm leadership, and that’s what I am providing with the full support of my Cabinet.’ Last night Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon urged the plotters not to revive any attempts to oust the Prime Minister, warning them they risked damaging her hand in Brexit negotiations.

The headline-hungry friend of Brussels

The party rebel Anna Soubry was first to call for the prime minister to consider her position on election night

Before all the votes had even been counted on election night, Anna Soubry was first out of the blocks calling for Theresa May to ‘consider her position’.

The staunchly pro-Europe ex-minister has rarely been out of the headlines since the Brexit vote – despite her Broxtoe constituency in Nottinghamshire voting Leave.

Following a series of threatened rebellions on key votes, in August she warned Mrs May she could quit the Tories unless the PM softened her stance on Brexit.

The 60-year-old, whose right to attend Cabinet was removed by Mrs May last year, has said it is ‘not impossible’ she would jump ship – but that she was not currently ready to do so.

Miss Soubry, who once described herself as ‘not a girl but a tough old bird’, began her career as a TV journalist on ITV’s This Morning before becoming a barrister. She was elected in 2010 and quickly promoted by David Cameron.

In 2013, she had to apologise to Ukip leader Nigel Farage after making lewd remarks about him. 

‘We are at a critical point now of the key negotiation for Brexit to deliver a successful Brexit for this country and I would urge all colleagues in Parliament to get behind the Prime Minister and the Cabinet so we get the best possible outcome for our country,’ he told ITV.

Mr Shapps broke cover on Thursday after he was named as the ringleader of a gang of MPs planning to send a delegation to Mrs May to tell her she must go, confirming his role on a late night BBC Radio 5 live phone-in. He said the plan had been for a group – including five ex-Cabinet ministers – to approach Mrs May in private with a list of names to avoid the ‘embarrassment’ of a formal leadership challenge.

In a series of interviews yesterday morning, he insisted support for a leadership election was growing among a ‘broad spread’ of Tory MPs. He told the BBC’s Today programme: ‘They are Remainers, they are Brexiteers. A growing number of my colleagues, we realise that the solution isn’t to bury our heads in the sand.’

Cameron Crony who has changed his tune

Ed Vaizey told the BBC that a number of his colleagues think May should go

A close ally of David Cameron and George Osborne, Ed Vaizey was the first to put his head above the parapet on Thursday when he told the BBC there would be a number of Tory MPs ‘firmly of the view’ Mrs May should go.

His intervention led to speculation he was doing the bidding of Mr Osborne, who has made no secret of his dislike of Mrs May’s leadership.

During the EU referendum the 49-year-old was given the task by Mr Cameron to try to persuade their friend Michael Gove to support Remain.

The Wantage MP was axed as culture minister as part of Mrs May’s bloodletting of Mr Cameron’s allies when she came to power. He now serves as a trade envoy for the PM.

After the general election, he said the campaign had been a ‘bit on auto pilot’.

But when asked if Mrs May was right to stay on, he said she was ‘clearly the best person to do that job’. By Thursday he had dramatically changed his tune. He said he saw no ‘way forward’ for her, adding: ‘There will be quite a few people who will now be pretty firmly of the view that she should resign.’ 

But he was angrily denounced by fellow Tory MPs – who said it was clear the rebels lacked the 48 MPs they needed to force a contest under the party rules, and questioned whether they could even muster as many as 30. Charles Walker, vice-chairman of the powerful 1922 Committee, dismissed Mr Shapps and his supporters as a ‘coalition of the disappointed’ who had been overlooked for promotion.

‘Grant has many talents but the one thing he doesn’t have is a following in the party. I really think this is now just going to fizzle out,’ he told the BBC. Nadine Dorries MP claimed Mr Shapps was part of a group of Remain-backing MPs – including ex-ministers Nicky Morgan and Anna Soubry – seeking to oust Mrs May as part of a bid to ‘delay and possibly destroy Brexit’.

Flip-flopping education chief sacked by Theresa 

Nicky Morgan has enjoyed being perceived as one of the awkward squad

Since being sacked from the Cabinet by Mrs May, Nicky Morgan has boasted that she is ‘revelling in being in the awkward squad’.

In June the diehard Remainer – who was nicknamed Ms U-Turn during her time as education secretary for her flip-flopping on key policies such as gay rights – demanded Mrs May leave No 10 by the end of next year to allow a different leader to complete Brexit.

‘Once that shape of Brexit is concluded, once those deals are very much on the table, the Conservative Party must not miss the opportunity… to think about who we want to be our future leader,’ she told the BBC’s Newsnight.

Mrs Morgan, who is now chairman of the Treasury committee, has been a frequent critic of the PM on Brexit and grammar schools. She also caused fury in No 10 last year when she took a swipe at the PM for wearing £995 leather trousers in a magazine photoshoot – despite owning a £950 handbag herself. 

Appearing later on Sky News, she added: ‘If Grant Shapps has 30 names then Diane Abbott is doing the counting.’ Environment Secretary Michael Gove said the ‘entirety’ of the Cabinet want Mrs May to carry on. ‘She showed an amazing degree of resilience and courage this week, of a piece with the fantastic leadership she has shown through the time that she has been Prime Minister,’ he said.

Allies of Boris Johnson also vehemently denied claims they had been ‘in cahoots’ with Mr Shapps.

Scandal-hit former whip who backed Johnson 

Andrew Mitchell was claimed to have referred to the prime minister as dead in the water and weak during a dinner

In the wake of June’s election, former chief whip Andrew Mitchell became the focus of attempts to oust the PM following claims he told a private dinner she was ‘dead in the water’, had ‘lost her authority’ and was ‘weak’.

But the Sutton Coldfield MP distanced himself from the latest plot on Thursday, telling students at the Cambridge Union that Mrs May deserved ‘respect’ for making it through her difficult conference speech.

Mr Mitchell is best known for the ‘plebgate’ scandal when he was forced to resign from the Cabinet in 2012 after swearing at a Downing Street policeman. He always denied using the word ‘pleb’.

Mr Mitchell is an ally of Brexit Secretary David Davis. Despite backing Boris Johnson in last year’s leadership contest, the former international development secretary was disappointed when Mrs May decided not to bring him back onto the front benches. He is thought to hold a grudge and has form for wielding the assassin’s knife, having been linked to attempts to oust Iain Duncan Smith when he was leader. 

Home Secretary Amber Rudd made a public appeal for Mrs May to stay on, saying the UK had reached a ‘turning point as a nation’. However she appeared to position herself as a potential leadership successor as she offered up her vision for post-Brexit Britain.

In an article for the Daily Telegraph following Mrs May’s chaotic conference speech, she hammered home several new Tory policies.

ANDREW PIERCE: Grant Shapps is a second rater driven by braggadocio, vanity and vainglorious self-promotion

There are giants in politics. And there are pygmies. Top of the league of the second category is Grant Shapps. But like so many of this type – and sadly, Westminster is full of them – they make up for lack of talent in braggadocio, vanity and vainglorious self-promotion.

Those ‘qualities’, combined with an awesome lack of judgment, have got him into terrible trouble in the past.

He was David Cameron’s surprise choice as Tory chairman in 2012. But his tenure ended in 2015 when he was demoted to an obscure post in the Department for International Development.

Grant Shapps, former chairman of the Conservatives, is a second-rater driven by vanity, writes Andrew Pierce

Cameron’s aides assumed Shapps would quit rather than endure such a public humiliation. But this was a man with scant self-knowledge and he took the job, convinced he would soon be summoned into the Cabinet.

Unsurprisingly, the call never came. On the contrary, he was forced to resign for his part in one of the most unpleasant episodes in recent Tory party history.

Shapps had played a key role in an initiative known as the ‘Road Trip’, which was designed to win marginal seats in the 2015 general election. Supporters were ferried to canvass voters in target Tory seats. It was the brainchild of Tory official Mark Clarke – known as the ‘Tatler Tory’ after being tipped by Tatler magazine as future Cabinet minister.

However, it was later discovered that Clarke had bullied a Road Trip activist who subsequently committed suicide. Clarke was also accused of ‘sexually inappropriate behaviour’ – ‘propositioning activists or trying to kiss them’ – and after the scandal was exposed he was expelled from the party and banned for life.

Although Shapps duly resigned as a minister, the father of the young man who killed himself said: ‘Grant Shapps has fallen on his sword… The Conservative Party brand is tarnished and needs a wholesale clear out. This is not the end of the story.’

While Shapps’s involvement was investigated and he was interviewed by the Electoral Commission during an inquiry into Road Trip’s excesses, he was not accused of any wrongdoing.

Even so, his Westminster career had hit the buffers. Shapps has been deeply embittered ever since. One MP colleague described him as among ‘a coalition of disappointed people who think their brilliant political talents have not been fully recognised’.

Grant Shapps edited his own online Wikipedia biography to alter his exam results and delete donors to his private office

And yet this was not the first time that this mountebank had embarrassed Tory party chiefs.

In 2012, Shapps was accused of having breached the code of conduct for ministers and MPs when it was revealed he held a second job after entering Parliament, something he had repeatedly denied.

The MP had been exposed as having used a pen name ‘Michael Green’ to run a web marketing company which told people ‘how to become filthy stinking rich online’ by buying his self-help books, which cost £150. There were photos of Shapps in 2004 at a conference in Las Vegas wearing the name tag of his alter-ego. He also posed in publicity material as a successful businessman in convertible cars and a private plane.

At the time he said he had used the pseudonym to separate ‘business from politics’ but he insisted he had never traded as Green after becoming an MP. He threatened to sue a constituent who suggested otherwise.

Shapps – who by now had got the nickname Duracell Bunny, for his dogged ability to keep going despite countless scandals – was embarrassed again when it emerged that he had edited his own online Wikipedia biography to alter his school exam results and delete the identity of donors to his private office.

He was also reported to the Director of Public Prosecutions over unflattering edits made to the Wikipedia entry of a Labour MP. The edits were blocked because of suspicions they were being operated by Shapps or ‘someone close to him’. Shapps denied the allegations. But such stories appalled Tory activists.

At first sight, Shapps, 49, was ideal Tory MP material. Born and brought up in Watford, he attended grammar school and is a cousin of Mick Jones, former guitarist of the punk rock group The Clash.

After getting a diploma in business and finance at Manchester Polytechnic, Shapps set up a printing firm in the US and became a self-made millionaire. He became an MP in 2005 and was made party housing spokesman in 2007. Throughout, his company HowToCorp continued to thrive with the help of ‘Michael Green’ and under the charge of his wife, to whom Shapps transferred ownership when he became a frontbencher.

Once an ardent Remainer during the EU referendum, Mr Shapps says he’s committed to Brexit

Although he says in private that he is a Thatcherite and Eurosceptic, nothing Shapps he has said in public testifies to this. An ardent Remainer in the EU referendum, he now says he is committed to Brexit.

As party chairman he was a passionate supporter of Cameron’s gay marriage policy. But his views were the polar opposite of most party members, leading to tens of thousands failing to renew their subscriptions over a policy they considered to be a pet project of the metropolitan clique who surrounded Cameron.

Shapps had largely disappeared from public view until the eve of this week’s Tory conference when he disloyally wrote an article calling on Theresa May to raise her game.

Three weeks previously, he had been asked on Radio 4, if he ever wanted to be Prime Minister.

He replied: ‘Yeah, everyone would want to do that in their right mind. I don’t think there’s any reason why I couldn’t do it.’

Most Tory MPs provide a million reasons why Grant Shapps could never do it.