Grayling defeated, Number 10 outwitted and Julian Lewis stripped of the Tory whip

Julian Lewis, a Conservative MP for more than twenty years and former chair of the Defence Select Committee, has had the Conservative whip removed after beating Chris Grayling to become the new chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee.

Downing Street had attempted to rig the race for chairmanship in favour of their man Grayling, and the Conservative majority in the committee made his victory look inevitable. The plot unravelled on Wednesday evening, however, when Lewis launched a sudden and successful bid for the role. Asserting its independence and enraging Number 10, the committee voted by five to four in favour of the bid by Lewis.

Lewis has been an MP since 1997. In the 1980s he was a leading critic of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Soviet Union.

Grayling, who was sacked from Johnson’s cabinet last year, has a reputation among his critics in Westminster for incompetence. As Secretary of State for Justice, he privatised parts of the probation sector in such a shambolic way that it was renationalised later. And as Secretary of State for Transport during the Brexit crisis, he awarded a £14 million ferrying contract to a company with no boats.

This week’s events mean he has been labelled the only man to lose a rigged election. One parliamentary source went further, telling The Sun’s Harry Cole: “Chris Grayling brought his same characteristic attention to detail in getting himself elected chair on the Tory majority committee than he has to his ministerial career.” It has since emerged he hadn’t even canvassed his fellow committee members.

The debacle raises yet another series of questions about the Prime Minister and his chief adviser Dominic Cummings. Most pertinently, why were they so eager in the first instance to install a candidate regarded by so many MPs as unsuitable?

It’s difficult not to link Number 10’s antics to the imminent publication of a long-delayed report into alleged Russian interference in British democracy, which was completed in October 2019. Number 10 refused to allow the publication of the report on the basis that an Intelligence and Security Committee had to first be formed to oversee it.

But some in SW1 have suspected the real reason is that the report will name and shame wealthy Russians who happen to be major Conservative Party donors. In such a context, a loyalist chairman could have blunted the impact. Embarrassing follow-up committee hearings, for instance, could have been avoided.

Downing Street dealt on Wednesday evening with Lewis in the way it has dealt of late with the media. Brutal force is the modus operandi. Boris and Cummings, who takes pride in his political power, have inflicted on the veteran MP the most severe punishment – not a suspension of the whip, but complete removal – as they did with the Brexit rebels last summer.

Next Number 10 may even seek to have Lewis removed from the committee altogether, via a motion in the Commons. A precedent was set for this by Jeremy Corbyn, who removed former Labour MPs Ian Austin and Mike Gapes from the Foreign Affairs Select Committee after they joined the Independent Group. Political parties have a right to their allocation of committee seats, and it may be difficult for Julian Lewis, now an independent MP, to lead one of parliament’s most powerful committees for long.

Number 10 has made its point and unnerved parliamentarians will heed Downing Street’s diktats for the time being. But as a long term strategy, subjugating the Conservative parliamentary party in this way does not look like a sensible idea.

Critics, and some worried supporters, may well urge Johnson to learn from the experience of the last Conservative prime minister to have a large majority: Margaret Thatcher. As Charles Moore writes so elegantly in his biographies of the Iron Lady, her biggest flaw was believing that the support of her parliamentary party was predicated on election victories, rather than on fleeting political narratives.

She was defenestrated by her own side just three years after winning her third consecutive term in office. In that time, there was neither a pandemic nor polls showing a majority for independence in Scotland.