Voting has been underway for an hour and Conservative MPs appear to be in a strange mood.
No one, friend or foe, thinks tonight will end well. MPs awaiting the results are drinking on the House of Commons terrace, a spot that overlooks the river Thames and London Eye.
A handful of opposition MPs are also here to observe the spectacle.
Johnson’s allies believe he will win, but with a margin that is far from convincing and will not allow them to move on from the Partygate scandal.
Johnson-skeptics, meanwhile, are resigned to the idea that the Prime Minister will win and ultimately do more harm to the party.
They are annoyed that the vote is happening today rather than further down the line when potential replacements could be better prepared and the case for removing him more compelling, such as after the end of the month’s by-elections.
The margin of victory numerous MPs have said they are looking at is 80. Anything less than that and Johnson’s overall parliamentary majority is in peril.
Regardless, all sides seem to accept that things are bad and that turning around the fortunes of the Conservative Party will take more than Johnson surviving a vote among his own MPs.
Which, in the long run, means Johnson still has much to fix if he’s to save him premiership.
Six out of ten British adults say that Conservative Members of Parliament should vote to remove Prime Minister Boris Johnson from office, according to a new snap poll conducted on Monday.
The British market research agency Opinium surveyed 2,062 British adults ahead of Monday evening’s confidence vote.
The poll found that 28% of voters think Conservative MPs should vote to keep Johnson, while 59% think they should vote to remove him.
It also found that 58% of voters think that Boris Johnson’s leadership has been bad for the country, compared to 37% who think it has been good.
However, a majority of Conservative voters said Conservative MPs should vote to keep the prime minister, with only 34% of Conservative voters wanting him to go, according to Opinium.
The margin of error for the poll is plus or minus 2.16 points.
The Opinium poll regarding the confidence vote is consistent with previous polls that found a majority of Britons said the prime minister should resign over the “Partygate” scandal.
According to a May 25 snap poll from Savanta ComRes, 65% of Britons said Boris Johnson should resign over the findings of the Sue Gray report into llegal parties held in and around Downing Street during official Covid-19 lockdowns.
