The July–September 2022 Conservative Party leadership election was triggered by Boris Johnson's announcement on 7 July 2022 that he would resign as Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, following a series of political controversies. Liz Truss was elected to replace him.
In the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election, Johnson was elected to succeed Theresa May after she had been unable to secure a majority for her Brexit withdrawal agreement. After having lost his working majority to defections and his own suspensions of rebel Members of Parliament, Johnson called a general election on a platform of completing the UK's withdrawal from the European Union. In that general election, the Conservative Party won their biggest majority in Parliament since 1987, and Johnson was able to pass a revised version of May's withdrawal agreement.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, Johnson and his government had instituted public health restrictions, including limitations on social interaction, that Johnson and some of his staff were later found to have broken. The resulting political scandal (Partygate), one of many in a string of controversies that characterised Johnson's premiership, severely damaged his personal reputation. Johnson won a confidence vote by Conservative MPs in June 2022. The situation escalated with the Chris Pincher scandal in July 2022, and between 5 and 7 July, more than 60 government ministers, parliamentary private secretaries, trade envoys, and party vice-chairmen resigned in what was the largest mass resignation in British history. Many previously supportive MPs called for Johnson to resign. This brought about a government crisis, culminating on 7 July, when Johnson announced that he would resign as party leader. Johnson also announced that he would remain as prime minister until a successor was elected.
Voting took place between 13 July and 2 September. Following a series of MP ballots, the list of candidates was narrowed down to Liz Truss, who served as Foreign Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities under Johnson's leadership, and Rishi Sunak, who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer until 5 July. On 5 September, Truss was elected to lead the party, and assumed the premiership on 6 September. In her victory speech, Truss thanked Johnson and stated that her new government would cut taxes and deal with the energy crisis. Truss later resigned after just 50 days in office amid an economic and political crisis, which made her the shortest-serving prime minister in British history. Truss was subsequently succeeded by Sunak, after he won the leadership contest to replace her.
Background Brexit and the 2019 leadership election
In the aftermath of the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, David Cameron resigned the office of prime minister and was succeeded by Theresa May. As prime minister in the aftermath of the referendum, May began to negotiate a withdrawal agreement with the EU. After triggering Article 50, a legal process that started the UK's formal departure from the EU, she called an early general election, aiming to secure a larger Conservative majority to support her proposals for Brexit. However, the result of the election was a hung parliament, with the Conservatives losing their majority. To continue governing, May negotiated a confidence-and-supply agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). In December 2018, the Conservative Party triggered a vote of no confidence in May. She told Conservative MPs that she would resign after the UK's withdrawal from the EU, and before the next election. She survived the vote with 200 Conservative MPs voting for confidence and 117 voting for no confidence. The leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, called a vote of no confidence against May in the House of Commons, which she survived by 325 votes to 306. May was unable to pass her Brexit withdrawal agreement through several Parliamentary votes, and announced her resignation in May 2019.
Ten Conservative MPs were nominated in the 2019 leadership election and they were: former Foreign Secretary Johnson, who had served as foreign secretary under May before resigning from her cabinet, foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt, environment secretary Michael Gove, health secretary Matt Hancock, the government chief whip Mark Harper, Home Secretary Sajid Javid, Leader of the House of Commons Andrea Leadsom, work and pensions secretary Esther McVey, Brexit secretary Dominic Raab and Development secretary Rory Stewart. The candidates went through sequential ballots of Conservative MPs until two candidates remained: Hunt and Johnson. Hunt and Johnson went to a vote by Conservative Party members, which saw Johnson elected with 66.4% of the vote to Hunt's 33.6% when the result was announced by the chairman of the 1922 committee, Dame Cheryl Gillan, at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster on 23 July 2019.
2019 general election
As prime minister, Johnson initially had a majority of a single vote. He lost this when the Conservative MP Phillip Lee crossed the floor on 3 September 2019 to join the Liberal Democrats, accusing Johnson's government of "aggressively pursuing a damaging Brexit in unprincipled ways". Twenty-one Conservative MPs voted to allow the House of Commons to consider a bill tabled by the Labour MP Hilary Benn that would require Johnson to seek an extension to date of the UK's withdrawal from the European Union from 31 October 2019 to 31 January 2020 if Parliament had not approved a withdrawal agreement or voted to allow the UK to leave the EU without a deal. Johnson removed the whip from the twenty-one MPs in what The Daily Telegraph described as "one of the biggest parliamentary bloodbaths in history". Shortly afterward Amber Rudd resigned from Johnson's cabinet and left the Conservative Party in protest, and Johnson's brother Jo Johnson resigned as a minister and announced that he would stand down as an MP.
Johnson sought an early general election, but was initially unsuccessful as a majority of MPs wanted to remove the possibility of the UK leaving the EU without a deal. After Benn's bill became law despite Johnson's opposition, he agreed an extension to the UK's withdrawal date and negotiated revisions to the withdrawal agreement. He went on to put forward the Early Parliamentary General Election Act 2019, which passed and resulted in the 2019 general election. The Conservative Party won a majority of eighty, with 365 seats. This was its largest majority since that of Margaret Thatcher in 1987, and the largest share of the vote since Thatcher's 1979 victory. They gained seats in the north of England that had been held by the Labour Party for decades.
COVID-19 pandemic and Partygate
Less than two months after the 2019 election, cases of COVID-19 (which was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020) had spread to the UK. The BBC wrote "The UK's failure to do more to stop Covid spreading early in the pandemic was one of the country's worst public health failures, a report by MPs says." A legally-enforced lockdown was announced on 23 March, banning all non-essential travel and contact with other people, and shutting schools, businesses, venues and gathering places. People were told to stay at home except for essential purposes and to keep apart in public. Those with symptoms, and their households, were told to self-isolate, while those considered at highest risk were told to shield. In late March, Johnson himself tested positive and was hospitalised with the disease. Johnson's government responded by enacting emergency powers and widespread societal measures including several lockdowns, and approved a vaccination programme that began in December 2020. While reception for Johnson's leadership during the crisis was mixed, the Conservative Party consistently, if narrowly at times, lead in the polls during the pandemic. However, the Conservatives' polling lead began to falter in November 2021 following the emergence of the Owen Paterson scandal, with Johnson backing an effort to overturn a parliamentary suspension that had been recommended after Paterson was judged to have breached rules relating to paid advocacy. While Johnson subsequently described his actions in supporting Paterson as a "total mistake", the incident dropped the Conservative Party to being roughly level with the Labour Party; the Conservatives would thereafter never regain a consistent polling lead for the remainder of Johnson's premiership.
Beginning in December 2021, the media reported that there had been social gatherings by the Conservative Party and UK government staff during public health restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These included an occasion in which Johnson and the spouse of the prime minister of the United Kingdom Carrie Johnson were pictured with seventeen staff members having cheese and wine in the garden of 10 Downing Street during the first COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom, which the prime minister's official spokesperson later said was a "work meeting". Johnson admitted attending "socially distanced drinks" organised by Martin Reynolds, Johnson's principal private secretary, during the same lockdown. Johnson said he thought it was a "work meeting", while Dominic Cummings, who was an adviser to Johnson at the time, said that he had warned the prime minister against it. There were other events reported involving Johnson and his staff. An inquiry into the allegations was begun by the cabinet secretary Simon Case, but after it was reported that his own office had held a party in December 2020, the inquiry was passed to Sue Gray, another senior civil servant. There was negative reaction against Johnson from Conservative MPs, with some calling for him to resign. Johnson said "nobody said this was something that was against the rules" and that he took "full responsibility for what took place". Johnson, his wife Carrie, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak all received fixed penalty notices from the police.
Conservative Party rules mean that a confidence vote is triggered by 15% of MPs sending letters to Graham Brady, who chairs the 1922 Committee. There were reports that the threshold would be reached imminently in January 2022. The Guardian reported that several Conservative MPs were waiting until Gray's report into the alleged parties before deciding whether to send letters to Brady. The Conservative MP Christian Wakeford defected to the Labour Party on 19 January 2022, saying that Johnson and the Conservative Party were "incapable of offering the leadership and government this country deserves". The New Statesman reported that some Conservative MPs were delaying sending letters to Brady after Wakeford's defection demonstrated that division in the Conservative Party benefitted Labour. Around the same time, the Conservative MP William Wragg said that his party's whips were using blackmail and threats of withdrawing funding in MPs' constituencies to secure their votes. Another Conservative MP, Nus Ghani, said that a whip had told her that her practice of Islam was discussed when deciding to fire her from her ministerial role in 2020. Wragg and Ghani were vice-chairs of the 1922 Committee, which was said to be considering reducing the period after an unsuccessful vote of no confidence before which a new vote could be triggered from twelve months to six months. The Times reported these as all being serious threats to Johnson being able to remain in his position.