On the surface, Jeremy Corbyn’s pitch to become caretaker prime minister of a government of national unity after overthrowing Boris Johnson looks like a messy failure. The Liberal Democrats have said they won’t back him, two of the Tories who he wrote to have backed away too, and the Independent Group for Change (which he didn’t write to) have said this evening that they will ‘not support nor facilitate any government led by Jeremy Corbyn’.
Instead, everyone is talking about the possibility of a government led by Ken Clarke. The former Tory chancellor today said he wouldn’t object to taking over if it was ‘the only way’ to stop a no-deal Brexit. But he also showed quite how relaxed he is about, well everything, when he revealed that he hadn’t been following the news for the past fortnight and so had no idea that everyone was talking about him as a possible national leader.
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