By Justin Madders

MP for Ellesmere Port

THE public purse will have to cough up more than half a million pounds to fund three by-elections for seats in the House of Commons.

That will be the cost of elections forced by the resignations with immediate effect of disgraced ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson alongside his long-term devoted supporters Nadine Dorries and Nigel Adams.

And by my maths that brings the number of Conservative MPs who have announced they will not be fighting to hold their seats at the next General Election to more than 40. In many cases they are effectively quitting before being pushed out of office by the electorate.

In some respects these by-elections will be potential indicators of what might occur in the General Election – likely to take place at some stage during 2024 – in differing parts of the country. Boris Johnson’s seat in Uxbridge and South Ruislip is in outer London, Nadine Dorries has quit her seat in leafy Mid-Bedfordshire while there will no doubt be a good Yorkshire tussle in Selby and Ainsty. And the parties are already up-and-running with the aim of being first past the post.

Boris Johnson claimed he was driven out of Parliament by a "witch hunt" mounted by the Privileges Committee whose members have been investigating if he has misled the House of Commons over the infamous Partygate saga during the pandemic.

Details of exactly what is in the long-awaited report will be known after this column has been written, but the former PM is making serious allegations of improper conduct by a House of Commons committee made up of mostly senior Members of Parliament which has an in-built Conservative majority.

If the punishment meted out by the committee is to exclude Boris Johnson from the Commons for 10 days or more, then his local electorate would have had the chance to force a by-election. So he has saved them to bother, triggering claims that he is guilty of ‘cowardly’ behaviour.

There is also intense speculation that he might re-emerge one day in a safer Conservative territory as Uxbridge and South Ruislip is already high on the Labour list of winnable target seats.

As for Nadine Dorries – known for taking part in ‘I’m a Celebrity’ in Australia without getting permission from the Tory whips to be out of the country during Parliamentary sessions – it would appear she is highly miffed by apparently missing out on a peerage move to the House of Lords.

While Nigel Adams, it would seem, is no longer interested in trying to further the Conservative cause now that Boris Johnson is longer in the hot seat and Rishi Sunak has taken his place.

All this points to the Conservative Party being in disarray but this mess sullies the whole of Parliament. By Boris Johnson calling the seven-person Privileges Committee a “kangaroo court” and claiming that members of that committee wanted to "drive him out of Parliament" he has undermined the bipartisan nature of that Committee. It should be noted that at no point previously did he object to its composition and with a majority of Tory MPs on it, he cannot credibly claim it is a witch hunt against him. It is to be hoped that now he has departed Parliament, we will see an end to the type of politics where lying is second nature to some.