No dignified exit from deluded Team Boris
Dignified #Dignified
Appropriately it was Beating Retreat last night on Horse Guards. That’s the ancient ceremony where the massed bands of the Household Division parade, watched by, among others, an invited audience of thirsty politicians, their aides and journalists. As of last night, the prime minister was refusing either to retreat or to beat it.
Instead, Boris Johnson’s advisers and a diminishing band of ministerial supporters were running around Westminster trying to save his premiership.
In an indication of how hard the prime minister was finding it to adjust to the reality of what is happening to him, he told a gathering of Tory MPs that the resignation of the chancellor should really be seen as good news for the government because hiring a successor would make it easier to deliver tax cuts.
At Westminster, it felt as though a dam had been breached. Surely now, with MPs having had enough of the shambles and serial deceit, and a change of rules coming to enable a rerun of the confidence vote the PM won a few weeks ago, he would see that the situation merited a dignified departure? Last night, in classic Johnson style, he was giving it one last go at survival.
There was a mad scramble by a deluded Team Boris as they tried to identify a person, any person, prepared to accept the second most important political post in the country and risk being the shortest-serving holder of the office of chancellor of the exchequer. Nadhim Zahawi, promoted to the role, may find himself ejected by Johnson’s successor soon.
“It’s tricky to be offered the chancellorship now. It could turn into a springboard to be prime minister in a few weeks,” a passing MP pointed out. “Then again accepting it does mean endorsing the outgoing PM and this government. It’s not a good look.”
Elsewhere in the Palace of Westminster at dusk, MPs from rival leadership campaigns were already preparing to wave off Johnson, even if he had other ideas. Some rushed to identify the likely winner, presumably in order to back him or her.
“There is only one man it can be,” said one wise veteran MP, before naming two candidates, as a precaution. “It has to be Jeremy [Hunt],” said another. “Watch [Ben] Wallace, it cannot be Rishi, too many mistakes,” yet another told me. I had assumed this ambitious MP would be on Sunak’s leadership team. Not so, it appears.
If it sounds as though Tory MPs are treating this frivolously, those I encountered on a febrile evening in and around the Palace of Westminster were not. While the Conservative Party can be ruthless, its more sensible MPs and followers tend to know that removing a leader is an act of regicide with tricky consequences that echo down the decades.
Meanwhile, there were sightings of Michael Gove, who did for Boris the first time round in 2016 by warning the Johnson premiership would end in disaster.
Gove was not at Westminster. He was down the road at the opera last night watching a performance of Cavalleria Rusticana. Mascagni’s masterwork is set in a Sicilian village. It is, portentously perhaps, a tale of brutality, betrayal and revenge.
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