In My View: Helen Hayes, MP for Dulwich and West Norwood

After months of speculation and scandal after scandal, last week Conservative Members of Parliament finally held a vote of confidence in Boris Johnson as Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative party.

148 Conservative MPs voted against Boris Johnson, with 211 supporting him. It is hard to say which statistic is more shocking – that four in 10 of his own members of Parliament don’t have confidence in Boris Johnson or that, after all that has happened, almost six in 10 still do.

This was a worse result than Theresa May, John Major and Margaret Thatcher before him achieved in similar confidence votes, but it also shows how out of step a majority of Conservative MPs are with the British public, two thirds of whom want to see lying Boris Johnson gone from the top of our government.

I am a co-chairwoman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Adult Social Care, and throughout the first two waves of the Covid-19 pandemic, I met weekly with representatives from care providers, care homes and people who rely on care, so that I could take up their concerns directly with the Government.

These weekly meetings were a shocking insight into the shortages in Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), the inadequate funding, lack of Covid testing, the struggles with covering for sick colleagues and the desperately sad deaths of both care home residents and staff.

When Ministers said that they had thrown a ‘protective ring’ around care homes, the care home providers I spoke with said that simply wasn’t true.

The care workers that I spoke to knew the rules that the Government had imposed, understood why they had to be imposed and stuck to them at all times.

Not a single nurse or doctor that I spoke to when I visited King’s College Hospital was under any doubt about the rules and why they needed to stick to them, even when it meant really difficult decisions for patients.

And when Conservative MP Michael Fabricant falsely suggested that teachers and nurses might have held secret parties like the Conservatives did repeatedly at 10 Downing Street he was rightly pilloried for slandering our front line workers who had put everyone else’s needs above their own day in, day out for months on end.

Conservative MPs have now made their choice, which is to support a failing and flailing Conservative Prime Minister who isn’t fit to govern and if he had an ounce of decency, respect or responsibility would have stood down voluntarily many months ago.