“At least three current candidates would be worse than Boris,” he argued. “At least one is crazier than Truss, clearly unfit to be anywhere near nuclear codes. At least one a spad sh—–. Chances of improvement dangerously close to 50:50!”. He later added: “Sorry, correction, I was told by Cabinet ‘at least 2 spad sh—–s’!” It would be very Westminster for Boris to accept the bullet of lies about sex/searching and SW1’s inability to deal with it, only to be replaced by someone who will really piss him off!” Whether there is any truth to the allegations is beside the point – the various candidates’ enemies are already sharpening their knives and whoever is running would do well to clear out any skeletons from their cupboard now. A Downing Street source summed things up like this: “You’re going to have a circus. a clown show. What is going to happen in the next 72 hours is going to be a highly intense live fire exercise where various people will be jumped, pushed, propelled and shot. It’s going to be a messy business.”
“The herd stops”
After surviving controversies over partygate, wallpapergate and the Owen Paterson affair to name just three, no one could have predicted that it would be a scandal that didn’t even involve the Prime Minister that ultimately brought him down. On June 30 Chris Pincher resigned as deputy leader after admitting he had “embarrassed myself and other people” after “drinking too much” and allegedly fondling two men at the Carlton Club in Piccadilly, the Conservative’s de facto private Party. common room. Not for the first time in political history, it was not the incident itself that caused the dominoes to topple, but the way Downing Street misled the public about Mr Johnson’s prior knowledge of Pincher’s behavior before promoting him . Having claimed Mr Johnson was unaware of any allegations against Mr Pincher at the time – a line parroted by ministers as they were sent for TV and radio interviews – Number 10 continued to change its story until Monday , admitted Mr Johnson had, in fact, been personally informed of previous similar allegations, but that they had been “resolved”.
