Sir Graham Brady will have decided the timing for the no confidence vote – between 6pm and 8pm tonight – after consultation with the PM.
Brady said some Tory MPs calling for no confidence vote specified it should only happen after Jubilee celebrations over.
This is about as early as humanly possible – it had been reported that the vote was likely on Tuesday or Wednesday .
Sajid Javid, the health secretary, has been doing interviews on behalf of the government today. He told BBC Breakfast it was “likely” that there would be a no confidence vote in Boris Johnson.
He said: “My understanding probably isn’t much more than yours because you’ll probably know, or many of your viewers will know, that to have what’s called the vote of confidence requires at least 54 of my colleagues to write into Sir Graham Brady, to ask for one.
“Now, will that happen? I don’t know. That’s that’s a decision for my colleagues. I think it’s likely that something like that will happen. But it’s not something that I could tell you definitively.
“But it’s not what I think actually the country needs. I hope there isn’t – you have to be prepared but I think that what the country wants is for the government to get on and focus on the job at hand, which we are.”
Related: Confusion as PM dubbed ‘Conservative Corbyn’ and Lab figure calls Corbyn ‘sanctimonious’
