Stanley Johnson and the trouble with Green Tories

I have a theory about intra-Johnson family politics. Some time in 2017 or 2018 Stanley agreed to shut up about his opposition to Brexit if Boris dropped his climate scepticism and threw himself wholesale into green issues. A truce between father and son certainly seemed to emerge around that time, and Boris, the man who a few years earlier had written that wind farms ‘couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding’ was reborn an environmentalist.

If I am right, Boris sure kept his side of the bargain. But if so, Stanley evidently no longer feels bound to keep quiet about Brexit, or even to remain loyal to the party which his son once led and for which he once stood as a Westminster candidate. Johnson pere announced last night, on the eve of the election, that he intended to vote ‘tactically’ for the Lib Dem candidate in the seat of Queens Park and Maida Vale.