BORIS Johnson has been branded delusional by some of his own MPs after saying he was planning to serve at least three terms as Prime Minister.

The statement, made to the media at the Commonwealth summit in Rwanda, would mean Mr Johnson was still in Downing Street in the 2030s.

It came just days after he suffered the worst by-election night of any Prime Minister in 30 years with the loss of two seats, one to Labour and one to the Liberal Democrats.

The LibDems overcame the biggest byelection hurdle in British history to turn a Tory majority of more than 24,000 into a LibDem one of 6,144 in Tiverton & Honiton in Devon.

Labour also regained the former Red Wall seat of Wakefield in West Yorkshire.

There was evidence in both pro-Brexit seats of tactical voting against the Conservatives.

In the wake of Thursday’s defeats, Tory party co-chairman Oliver Dowden quit saying somebody had to take responsibility and the party could not go on with “business as usual”.

He pledged his loyalty to the party - but conspicuously omitted any support for the PM.

Former Tory leader Lord Howard said it was time for Mr Johnson to go as he had lost his ability to win votes.

The losses followed a string of scandals centred on Mr Johnson’s own conduct, including Partygate, with law-breaking in Downing Street during the Covid lockdown.

However Mr Johnson refused to shoulder any responsibility for the byelection losses, suggesting they were predictable mid-term protests about the cost of living, and said he was not about to undergo any kind of “psychological transformation”.

Mr Johnson survived a confidence vote by Tory MPs three weeks ago, and so would normally be shielded from another vote for a year.

However his internal critics are looking at changing the rules to have one sooner.

Asked in the Rwandan capital, Kigali if he would like to serve a full second term as prime minister, Mr Johnson said: “At the moment I am thinking actively about the third term and you know, what could happen then.

“But I will review that when I get to it. 

“We’ve embarked on a massive project to change the government, of the constitution of the country, the way we run our legal system, the way we manage our borders, our economy.

“All sorts of things we’re doing differently. 

“We also, at the same time, are embarked on a colossal project to unite and level up … It’s going to take time. And I want to keep driving it forward.”

One former cabinet minister who initially backed Mr Johnson as PM told the Observer the remarks were “completely delusional”, while a Red Wall MP said Mr Johnson was “showing increasing signs of a bunker mentality, and that never ends well”.

Speaking today to reporters at the G7 summit in Germany if those comments were delusional, Mt Johnson said: “What I’m saying is this is a Government that is getting on with delivering for the people of this country and we’ve got a huge amount to do.

“In the immediate future we’ve got to get people through the current global inflationary pressures, the post-Covid, Ukraine-exacerbated inflationary pressures that people have got, the energy price spikes that we have got.

“But at the same time we have got a massive agenda of reform and improvement, a plan for a stronger economy, whereby we have to reform our energy markets, our housing markets, the way our transport networks run, our public sector – we’ve got to cut the cost of Government.

“We’ve got to make sure we grow our economy by reducing the burden of taxation on business and on families and have better regulation.”

He said the “golden rule” was to “focus on what we are doing”, including addressing the cost of living, the “massive” plan for a stronger economy and “making sure that the UK continues to offer the kind of leadership around the world that I know our people want”.

Asked this morning whether Mr Johnson was serious about serving three terms, Northern Ireland Secretary Brand Lewis told the BBC’s Sunday Morning said: “Yes.”

He said it was a positive thing that the PM was looking at long-term reforms.

Earlier, he told Sky News that suffered “a bad set of results” on Thursday.

Asked if he agreed the Tories had taken a major beating in Tiverton and Honiton, Mr Lewis said: “Yeah, they were a bad set of results for us. That does happen sometimes mid-term. There’s no denying it was a set of results we’ve got to look carefully at and learn from.”

He added: “What we’ve got to do, as has happened before, where we’ve seen by-election results go one way and then a following general election go a very different way, you can’t extrapolate… a by-election result into a general election result.

“It’s been proven time and again to not work that way.”

He said Mr Johnson was “the right person” to lead the Tories into the next general election.

“I think he’ll do that successfully.”

He added: “What we’ve got to do… is make sure that we are not just learning for those results, where of course what we saw was a lot of people who previously voted Conservative this time stayed home.

“We’ve got to make sure by the next general election we’re motivating those people to come out and vote for us.

“I do think Boris Johnson is the person who can do that. He’s proven that time and again, where people have written him off, both before London elections and before in the 2019 election, and then we’ve been able to come back and win, and win successfully. And I think he’s got the ability to do that.”

He said Mr Johnson’s desire to look “long term” on leadership “has got to be a good thing”.

Asked about the Prime Minister’s suggestion that he is thinking about the prospect of a third term, Mr Lewis said: “What I see there is somebody, and this is what I see when I work with the Prime Minister every day… somebody who has got that drive and enthusiasm for what we want to achieve for our country.

“And I think seeing that kind of zest, and let’s be frank, somebody who is enjoying doing the job and wants and has got plans for the country that he wants to deliver, having that ability to look forward, I think is a good thing.

“We often get criticised in politics when we look short term, at just the next day, the next election, the next vote.

“Actually we’ve got somebody as Prime Minister who wants to be looking long term at how we structurally improve our country for generations to come. That has got to be a good thing.”