BoJo’s Ex-Girlfriend Warns of ‘Absolute Hell’ for UK Prime Minister Amid Looming Tory Revolt

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s ex-girlfriend Petronella Wyatt has argued that he is in a mess and even in the “wrong job”, after rebel Tory MPs turned on him following the 6 June confidence vote that BoJo survived with a narrow margin.

Speaking to ITV's Good Morning Britain on Wednesday, Wyatt, who once had a four-year affair Johnson, described Johnson as a person with a “very soft core”, and admitted that he was “on the ropes” after him being bashed by Conservative rebels.

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3 June 2022, 15:10 GMT

The 54-year-old daughter of a Labour peer insisted that BoJo would not be enjoying the current chaos engulfing him and the Conservative Party.

“First of all, he doesn’t enjoy when people dislike him or don’t have faith in the Johnson product, and secondly he only enjoys chaos when it’s of his own making and he can control it. He can’t control this,” she asserted.

Wyatt referred to Johsnon as being “surprisingly thin skinned, surprisingly sensitive” and “easily upset by criticism or the thought that people dislike him”.

Referring to reports about Tory rebels’ drive to topple the PM despite his survival of the confidence vote, BoJo’s ex-girlfriend said she thinks “this will be absolute hell for him in private”.

“I don't think he's just sitting down with a stiff drink and feeling ‘well, everything will be alright, I'll tough it out’. He's a bit of an enigma. I think people have the wrong impression of him - they think he's a hard shell and a hard man when he's surprisingly vulnerable,” she insisted.

Wyatt also claimed that Johnson’s instincts were “basically decent” but that he was “his own worst enemy” due to being “very much a people pleaser”. She alleged that it led to “all sorts of problems in government, because he makes promises he can’t keep, he makes enemies of MPs”.

The 54-year-old then suggested that BoJo was in the “wrong job” as PM, asserting that he would be happier outside of Downing Street if he'd instead pursued a “quiet” life of writing.

She apparently referred to the fact that prior to entering Number 10, Johnson signed a £500,000 ($627,000) deal to write a biography of William Shakespeare. Exactly on the day Johnson became PM in July 2019, however, publisher Hodder & Stoughton admitted it had no plans to publish "Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius" for the "foreseeable future".

BoJo Survives No Confidence Vote

Wyatt’s interview comes after Johnson survived a no confidence vote on Monday night, but saw 148 of his Tory MPs (41%) attempt to boot him out of Number 10.

Johnson was quick to praise the “good” results of the vote, pledging to “get on with the job” and “deliver on what the people of this country [the UK] care about most”.

The Guardian has, meanwhile, reported that Tory rebels are poised and ready to go ahead with efforts to try to Johnson from office, with some of them “implacably opposed” to Johnson’s premiership. The newspaper cited unnamed sources as saying that the government whipping operation to make wavering MPs back Johnson ahead of the confidence vote had been “appalling” and seemed to collapse due to Monday’s “rebellion”, which purportedly means that the PM was now on “borrowed time”.