Lib Dems to table no confidence vote in Government

Sir Ed Davey greeted by Tory ‘dinosaurs’ at a celebratory Lib Dem rally in Winchester – Stefan Rousseau/PA

The Liberal Democrats are to table a motion of no confidence in the Government in an effort to force a June election.

Sir Ed Davey’s party is demanding a vote on Rishi Sunak’s administration after a strong showing at the local elections in which the Lib Dems won more seats than the Conservatives.

The draft text of the motion reads “that this House has no confidence in His Majesty’s Government”.

By convention, if a prime minister loses a vote of no confidence in his or her government, they would have to ask the King to dissolve parliament, triggering a general election.

However, even if all opposition parties supported the motion, including many former Tory MPs sitting as independents, the Government is certain to win any vote in the Commons because the Conservatives have a working majority of 47 and a backbench plot to oust Mr Sunak was abandoned last week.

At least 24 Tory MPs would need to vote for the motion for it to pass and the Government to lose the vote.

A group of disillusioned Tory MPs and their advisers on Friday gave up on their efforts to topple the Prime Minister following the re-election of Ben Houchen, the Tory mayor of Tees Valley, in spite of broadly poor local election results.

Lord Houchen won re-election as Tees Valley Mayor – James Hind / Alamy Live News

In a statement on Monday, Sir Ed said: “These local elections showed the country has had enough of Rishi Sunak and his out-of-touch Conservative Government.

“The Conservatives were pushed into third place for the first time in a generation as Liberal Democrats swept the board in former true blue heartlands. Yet Sunak continues to desperately cling on to power, holed up in Downing Street until the bitter end.

“Conservative MPs need to wake up and smell the coffee, and back giving the country the election it so desperately wants and needs. The longer this appalling government stumbles on, the worse it is for the NHS, people’s living standards and our environment.”

It is unclear how likely the motion is to be selected by Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the Commons, or whether the Labour Party would back the Liberal Democrat motion.

A confidence motion in a government was last voted on in July 2022, when MPs voted by 349 to 238 in favour of Boris Johnson’s administration to give him seven more weeks in Downing Street before his successor took charge.

The vote had been tabled by Mr Johnson’s government itself in response to an attempt by Labour to hold a further confidence vote on his premiership. He had survived a ballot of Tory MPs weeks earlier in the aftermath of the Downing Street parties scandal, only for his premiership to be brought down by the fallout of the Chris Pincher affair.

The last government to lose a vote following a confidence motion was James Callaghan’s Labour administration in 1979, which forced a general election five weeks later.

A motion of no confidence in the Government differs from a no confidence vote in Mr Sunak, which would be triggered by 52 Conservative MPs – 15 per cent of the parliamentary party – writing no confidence letters to Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee.

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