Boris Johnson is due to quit as UK prime minister on Thursday after a dramatic two days in which more than 50 members of his government resigned, demolishing his political authority.
Two senior government officials told the Financial Times Johnson is expected to make a statement at lunchtime when he will announce plans to remain as a caretaker prime minister until the Conservative party conference in October.
“The prime minister will make a statement to the country today,” said a Number 10 spokesperson.
Johnson spoke at 8.30am to Sir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 committee of backbench MPs, a meeting in which the prime minister said he had concluded that he should resign in the interests of the party and the country.
The pound jumped 0.5 per cent against the dollar, from $1.193 to a high of $1.199 as investors reacted positively to Johnson’s expected resignation.
Johnson’s decision to quit marks the end to a political career in which he helped lead the successful Vote Leave campaign to exit the EU in 2016 but also took the Conservative party to a historic general election victory in 2019.
The final straw appeared to come on Thursday morning when his newly appointed chancellor Nadhim Zahawi called on him to quit.
“Prime minister, you know in your heart what the right thing to do is, and go now,” Zahawi wrote. “The country deserves a government that is not only stable, but which acts with integrity.”
Zahawi only became chancellor on Tuesday night — just hours after the resignation of his predecessor Rishi Sunak.
His comments made him the second minister to call publicly for Johnson to go while remaining in office. Suella Braverman, attorney-general, also urged the prime minister to quit, while a stream of a resignations from government continued. More than 50 members of the government have quit this week.
Brandon Lewis, Northern Ireland secretary and once a loyal Johnson supporter, said on Thursday morning he was quitting and that the government was no longer being run on the basis of “honesty, integrity and mutual respect”.
Michelle Donelan, who replaced Zahawi as education secretary on Tuesday night, also resigned. “I see no way that you can continue in post, but without a formal mechanism to remove you it seems that the only way this is only possible is for those of us who remain in Cabinet to force your hand,” she wrote.
Lewis was among a group of loyal ministers who pleaded with Johnson to quit with dignity on Wednesday, as parliamentary support bled away and his government disintegrated.
Johnson responded that he had “a mandate” from the British people and refused to quit. He sacked Michael Gove, one of the senior ministers who had advised him to step down; a Number 10 aide called Gove “a snake”.
Lewis was the fourth cabinet minister to resign from Johnson’s cabinet. Guy Opperman, pensions minister, and Helen Whately, a Treasury minister, also quit on Thursday; she said “there are only so many times you can apologise and move on”.
Damian Hinds, security minister, quit just after 7am, while George Freeman, science minister, resigned shortly afterwards, condemning “the chaos in Number 10, the breakdown of Cabinet collective responsibility, the abandonment of the ministerial code, the defence of impropriety”.
Whitehall insiders said Johnson had been struggling to fill the vacancies.
Bernard Jenkin, a leading Brexiter, said on Thursday that Johnson should not act like Donald Trump in the dying days of his premiership.
Johnson told cabinet ministers on Wednesday that he had a direct mandate from almost 14mn voters at the 2019 election, suggesting he did not derive his power from his majority in the House of Commons.
In response to news of the resignation, Sir Keir Starmer, Labour leader, said that Johnson was “always unfit for office” but added “we don’t need to change the Tory at the top — we need a proper change of government.”
Additional reporting by Nikou Asgari