‘Who’s for the game, the biggest that’s played, the red crashing game of a fight?’ Jessie Pope’s paean to the glories of war might equally be applicable to the internecine slaughter of the Tory party as its MPs gear up for yet another brutal leadership battle. But in war you can only be killed once; in politics many times. And few know that mantra better than the two leading contenders to become PM: Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. Both men a thing or two about political mortality: Johnson was forced out in July and Sunak lost to his successor in the subsequent contest.
This time though, the leadership contest rules have changed: no whacky racer fringe candidates this time as the threshold for nominations has jumped from 20 to 100. So, with only three candidates mathematically able to hit that number in a party of 357 MPs, Tory big beasts have an unappetising choice of who to back.
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