He added he had “no interest” in a snap election,but stopped short of explicitly ruling it out.
It is a worse result for the Conservative leader than the previous no-confidence vote in December 2018 for his predecessor,Theresa May,who won by a margin of 200 votes to 117. She resigned just six months later.
All 359 Tory MPs,including Johnson,were given a vote in secret on a simple yes/no basis on whether they had confidence in the leader.
Johnson swept to power in July 2019 following the resignation of May on a platform of delivering Brexit,uniting the country,and defeating Jeremy Corbyn. Just five months later he secured an 80-seat landslide victory on the promise to “get Brexit done”,inflicting Labour’s worst post-war defeat on Corbyn in the process.
At a meeting with backbenchers before the vote,Johnson appealed to MPs with promises of tax cuts and a major economic package next week. He warned them there was no one with an “alternative vision” after Jeremy Hunt,a potential leadership rival,said earlier in the day that he would vote to remove the prime minister.
In an earlier letter to Tory MPs,Johnson promised to use Conservative principles to take advantage of new freedoms,cut costs,and drive growth.
“We will cut the costs of government. We will cut the costs of business. And we will cut the costs of families up and down the country,” he wrote.
The backbench rebellion had grown in the past 10 days,with a one-page memo widely circulated as to why they believed there was a change needed in the leadership.
“The damage done to trust in Boris Johnson is such that popular policies are falling flat with the public (e.g. cost-of-living measures),” the memo said. It said he had been dubbed the “Conservative Corbyn”,a reference to the former Labour leader who had become a drag on the ticket.
The group entered the vote lacking the confidence that there were enough MPs willing to remove Johnson,and declared that,should he win narrowly,his authority within the party “would be destroyed”.
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There had been no declared challenger for the leadership,something his enemies believed may have helped the prime minister hold on to his job.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Johnson had presided over “a culture of law-breaking at the heart of government”.
“Conservative MPs made their choice tonight. They have ignored the British public and hitched themselves and their party firmly to Boris Johnson and everything that he represents.”