Boris being Boris, he has managed to rule something out without actually ruling anything out at all. As Isabel noted this morning, the Mayor of London has said he will not stand for Parliament before 2015, and will remain in City Hall as promised until 2016. Which is not the same as ruling out standing in the 2015 election.
The latest Boris v Osborne twists have allowed speculation about a post-Cameron age to rise to the surface again, and having spoken to Tory MPs over the last few weeks, it is obvious that said speculation is never far from their lips. 2015 is still a white-knuckle fight, but that’s not to say plans are not afoot were it all to go very wrong for the PM.
‘There is no vacancy, but when the starting pistol is eventually fired I suspect Boris will be a contender along with up to ten other candidates,’ Mark Pritchard, the backbench troublemaker from The Wrekin tells me.
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