Boris Johnson ought to have stayed as Prime Minister, Nadhim Zahawi says

A former Tory Minister has suggested it was wrong to oust Boris Johnson as Prime Minister as the Tory party faces a hammering at the general election.

Nadhim Zahawi said he wished he and his colleagues had “held our nerve” and stuck by scandal-hit Mr Johnson instead of forcing him out in July 2022. The ex-PM said he would go after a wave of ministerial resignations over his handling of the row over Chris Pincher, the former Deputy Chief Whip who had been accused of groping two men.

Mr Zahawi, who had just been made Chancellor at the time, said he told Mr Johnson “the herd was stampeding” and advised him to resign on his own terms as “they are going to drag your carcass out of this place”. But in an interview with the Sunday Times this weekend, Mr Zahawi has said: “I wish we had held our nerve.

“Many colleagues got spooked. If colleagues had stepped back and just realised Twitter was not the country, we’d have probably made a very different decision.” He admitted the constant change of Tory prime ministers had been “a bit of a shambles”.

Mr Zahawi was appointed Chancellor in July 2022 after Rishi Sunak resigned from Mr Johnson’s collapsing Government – but two days later joined the revolt and told Mr Johnson to step down. He ran to be Tory leader but failed to get enough MP backers.

Mr Sunak sacked him as Tory chairman last year after he was found to have breached the ministerial code by hiding the fact he was being investigated by HMRC over his tax affairs when he was Chancellor. He later agreed to pay a penalty to HMRC when the dispute was settled, but he again failed to declare this.

Mr Zahawi, who was Vaccine Minister during the pandemic, announced earlier this month he will stand down as an MP at the next election. He is due to publish memoirs about his childhood called The Boy from Baghdad: My Journey from Waziriyah in August.

The former minister was born in Iraq to Kurdish parents but his family fled Saddam Hussein in the 1970s and arrived in the UK when he was 11-years-old. He has described being bullied and racially abused by his classmates at a West London comprehensive, and not being able to speak English when he arrived.