It was ‘the knife of the long knight’, joked one social media wag about the bid by the unfeasibly tall Sir Simon Clarke to oust Rishi Sunak from 10 Downing Street. So lanky was he as a youth that Clarke was nicknamed ‘stilts’ in his schooldays. Conventional wisdom at Westminster will tell you this morning that his attempted coup is nonsense on stilts as well. Certainly, there has thus far been a notable lack of colleagues replicating his call for Sunak to stand down.
And yet, in recent years Westminster conventional wisdom has often got things wrong. Just because there is no sign of Clarke’s media-based revolt catching fire right now, even among the small group of Tory MPs who joined him in voting against Sunak’s legislation on Rwanda last week, it does not follow that it will have no impact.
Sunak is obviously not the Tory best-placed to fend off the Farage-ist threat on the Tory right-flank
Some observers have already spotted a curiosity in the article in the Daily Telegraph at the heart of his onslaught.
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