In any case: the people to watch are not the backbenchers, or even the junior members of the ministerial payroll. Over the years, this column has recognised Syme’s Law, framed in Ronald Syme’s classic work of 1939, The Roman Revolution: “In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade.”  In this case, the oligarchy is the Cabinet, or, more accurately, the 29 people who, in addition to Cameron, Osborne and Nick Clegg, are full members or entitled to attend its meetings. It was the Cabinet that did for the Iron Lady in 1990, in an extraordinary series of one-on-one meetings (“treachery with a smile on its face”). They are the oligarchs who will decide Cameron’s fate – as, by the way, they always have been, since 2005 when he was elected Conservative leader and they were still the shadow cabinet.  What we are observing now is not a full-blown oligarchic mutiny but a loosening of the ties of loyalty: behaviour that does not presuppose certain electoral defeat in 2015 but presumes its likelihood. Some of this conduct is ideological: ensuring that differences of opinion with the pilot are recorded in the black box before the plane crashes.  Leading the charge is a Lib Dem, rather than a Tory. Vince Cable is now openly critical of the Coalition’s fiscal strategy. In an essay for the New Statesman, he calls for “greatly expanded” capital spending and, much more provocatively, argues that the “balance of risks” may have changed sufficiently since 2010 to justify higher public borrowing. In yesterday’s Guardian, he went even further, openly challenging Cameron’s ring-fencing of the health, international development, schools and defence-equipment budgets and warning that “if you keep going back to the same departments taking more than proportional cuts, you do disproportionate damage”. No less striking is his suggestion that “there is no absolute reason why we have to have a spending review” since it covers years beyond this Parliament and the lifespan of the Coalition. Which is to say: why bother, George?  Cable’s brutally timed Minority Report – the eve of the Budget, the weekend of the Lib Dem Spring Conference – follows Philip Hammond’s interview in The Daily Telegraph insisting that there is a “body of opinion within Cabinet that believes that we have to look at the welfare budget again”. Although Hammond’s budget for defence equipment is ring-fenced, the rest of his departmental expenditure is not. He speaks for many of his colleagues, notably Theresa May, in believing that more could be saved from Iain Duncan Smith’s £200 billion welfare and benefits bill. This fiscal row has become entangled with the question of leadership aspirations. IDS, a party leader who was deposed, squares off against two senior Tories who are weighing up their own chances of a run at the top job. I do not believe for a second that either Hammond or May is preparing for a leadership race before the election. But each is trying on for size the vestments of the dauphin, strutting a little more, displaying a little more independence and public confidence.  And each has a decent-enough claim to a place in the contest when it finally takes place: Hammond has the bearing of a calm but robust technocrat, capable of running UKplc. May has weathered three years at the helm of the Home Office, bringing down net migration, and proving that an über-moderniser can be tough on crime (“modern” never meant “Left-wing”). Each could be the oligarch who does to Boris Johnson what John Major did to Michael Heseltine in 1990.  There are others, too: Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt and – yes – Osborne, whose credentials would be transformed by economic recovery. Like the funny Pixar movie they sometimes play before the main feature, Adam Afriyie, the MP for Windsor, already has a proto-leadership campaign in place which lacks nothing but a serious candidate. His allies include Mark Field, MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, and Bill Wiggin, MP for North Herefordshire. Asked by an ally of the PM why he was so opposed to Cameron, a fellow Old Etonian, Wiggin replied that he had “just never liked him”. Honest, at least.  All this could take a head-numbingly long time. Leadership crises can last for years. When the contest itself is finally held, the Tory movement must make absolutely sure that Boris is eligible because there is nothing worse than a leadership contest from which a prime candidate is missing. Labour paid a terrible price for Gordon Brown’s absence from the 1994 race – 13 years of spin that the right man had been cheated out of the job. For this reason alone, it is essential that Boris become an MP before the contest. His non-eligibility would be a recipe for our old headline friend, “Tory turmoil”.  Despite all the gutless prancing around by this once-sturdy party, Cameron isn’t going anywhere this side of an election. What has happened is something more subtle but deeply significant. Bagehot called the Cabinet “a combining committee – a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens, the legislative part of the state to the executive part of the state”. It is the PM’s misfortune that this buckle is fast rusting through.
Oligarchies decide the fate of their leaders, and the Prime Minister faces one   now in the Cabinet