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Boris Johnson was well ahead in the parliamentary stage of the contest for the leadership of the Conservative party, gaining 126 of the 313 votes by MPs in the second ballot, with Jeremy Hunt second at 46 (and Dominic Raab knocked out). He had declined to take part in a Channel 4 debate, and was represented by an empty podium before an audience purporting to be floating voters. The most memorable metaphor of that debate concerned bin bags. Rory Stewart said: ‘I was trying to cram a whole series of rubbish bins into the rubbish bin.’ He had meant to say ‘a whole series of rubbish bags’, but the point was that unrealistic Brexit promises resembled his dustbin experience. Johnson did appear later on a BBC debate, with Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Rory Stewart and Sajid Javid, and all seemed to assent to an inquiry into Islamophobia in the Conservative party. Chris Froome, the cyclist, crashed into a wall at about 40 mph, fracturing a femur, hip, ribs and his neck.
Heathrow Airport announced its ‘masterplan’ to build a third runway by 2026. South Western Railway staff went on a five-day strike over the role of guards. Chuka Umunna, who left the Labour party to join Change UK, joined the Liberal Democrats and was appointed their Treasury spokesman; Change UK applied to the Electoral Commission to change its name to the Independent Group for Change. Michal Szewczuk, 19, from Leeds, was jailed for just over four years and Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, 18, from west London, given an 18-month detention for terrorism offences as part of a group called the Sonnenkrieg Division promoting racialist attacks. Two more boats, containing 40 migrants, including children, were intercepted off Kent, bringing to 794 the number of migrants in small boats found in the Channel since last November.
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