David Davis, who has previously called for the prime minister to resign, has urged against changes to the 1922 committee’s rules.
There are suggestions the influential backbench group could change its rules to allow a further vote of confidence in Boris Johnson in less than a year since the last.
This comes after further MPs spoke out against Johnson’s leadership following last Thursday’s two by-election defeats, and his claims to reporters over the weekend that he intended to remain prime minister “until the mid 2030s”.
The former Brexit secretary said this morning that “the rules are the rules” and that the year period before another vote could be called should be kept..
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Davis said that whoever was in No 10 would face “really difficult decisions” on economic issues as growth stagnates and inflation surges.
Inflation soared to 9.1 per cent in the UK across May, hitting a new four-decade high.
This morning Yael Selfin, chief UK economist at KPMG, warned of an approximately 50 per cent probability of a “mild recession”.
The major global accounting firm warned that UK growth could slow to 3.2 per cent this year, falling from 7.1 per cent across 2021. They also said it could near-halt at 0.7 per cent in 2023.
While he said his own perspective on Johnson’s premiership remained unchanged, he stressed: “Do you want a leader, whoever it is, looking over his shoulder every month at this tax increase or whatever?
“So no, I don’t want the rules changed. I don’t think they will change either so he has got to use the year he has to prove to us that actually he can deliver on the promises we gave at the 2019 election which was low tax,” he went on.
He said the “biggest” thing that needed to change in government was its attitude towards tax.
Davis said that he “campaigned in 16 Red Wall seats and in Wakefield. I got the same question, the same thing every time: ‘We expect you to be a low tax party, we are not seeing it that way anymore’.
“We have got the highest tax take in history last year, the Treasury traditionally underestimates massively the amount of tax it gets and we have got two big problems, cost of living, really serious, best way to deal with that for working families anyway is tax,” he added.
“Well, the hard truth is we have lost two years out of the Parliament and people understand that I think.
“There is a question of priorities here. Obviously you want to build more hospitals and we will and we are, obviously we want to build more railway lines, you name it, the infrastructure across the board.
“But the simple truth is there are priorities in everybody’s life and for most of the people in the Red Wall seats and indeed seats like mine, I am from the north, the first issue is paying the bills and if the government is stopping you doing that, that is a real problem for a Tory government.”
“And stagflation. Best way to deal with that is growth and we won’t get growth if we tax like this.”
