Tory leadership contest 2019

I’m not sure we learned terribly much this from the rather noisy BBC debate this evening. Each Tory candidate had rehearsed the answers so well that they sounded like pull-string dolls at times.  If you watched Ch4’s debate on Sunday – conducted along the lines of its old Fifteen-to-One gameshow – you’ll have heard many of these lines before. Michael Gove strong on his own reforming record and Corbyn-baiting, not so strong on the economy. Sajid Javid a bit more willing to use his biography as strategy, at one point having his rival candidates agree to an inquiry into Islamophobia in the Tory party (although I’m not sure how far

At the hustings held by the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs this evening, the question wasn’t who was going to win but who should be sent to put Boris Johnson through his paces before he wins. Word is that Team Boris is lending about 15 votes to Jeremy Hunt, who he’d most like to go up against – either today, or in later voting rounds. Boris is understood to have over 120 supporters now – more than the next three put together – so he could lend 40 votes to Hunt if he wanted. But he is more likely to keep the number low so the vote-lending isn’t obvious.

The Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, dropped out of the leadership race last week and had been mulling whether to support Michael Gove (odds: 25/1) or Boris Johnson (1/5). In the end, he went for Boris. In an article in The Times, he says more. Here’s an edited extract. Central to my outlook is that we need to be optimistic about our country, take an optimistic view of human nature, and get this country moving forward with energy and vim. Because I care about people’s chances in life, I also care deeply about the best way to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister. Boris has run a disciplined campaign and is almost certainly going to

And then there were six. The Conservative leadership contest already feels interminable – and, let’s face it, it’s been going since the day after the 2017 election. And yet it’s only this week that the candidates have formally thrown their hats in the ring. We’ve already been treated to bucketloads of ambitious claims, bold rhetoric, and appeals to the power of positive thinking. We’ve had precious little, however, that even begins to respond to the key questions raised by the largest single issue confronting us. So in an attempt to be helpful, we thought we’d address those still in the race and list these Brexit questions in the hope that

Now the real shenanigans begin. Boris Johnson will – barring a disaster of Johnsonian scale – be on the ballot of Tory members to pick their next leader and our prime minister on or around 22 July. And, truthfully, given that he is by a margin the darling and chouchou of those members, it is challenging to see how he can be beaten. Except for one thing. His campaign has been wholly based on Boris Johnson as an idea, a concept – the idea being that only he through his force of personality and penchant for the arresting bon mot can sequentially deliver Brexit, boost the popularity of his party

Michael Gove’s launch was, easily, the strongest of any candidate yesterday and he deserves the plaudits he’s getting now. Even if you dislike him, his speech is worth listening to (it’s here) and it was made without notes. I’ve heard him talk before about the school in Liverpool he mentioned where only one pupil got decent grades. In his original telling, his point was that the distance between Liverpool and Edinburgh (where his birth mother is from) was about the same as the distance between Aberdeen and Edinburgh – so he could have ended up in either city. But alongside the cocaine use, another disclosure in Owen Bennett’s new book

Is this the best the Conservative and Unionist party can do? Really? The extraordinary thing about Boris Johnson’s campaign to become the country’s next prime minister is that even the people supporting him do not think he’s up to the job of being prime minister. The best that may be said of him is that he may defeat Jeremy Corbyn though, frankly, I wouldn’t want to bet on that.  But, his friends and allies say, you can set aside your concerns about Johnson’s suitability for the highest political office in the land. He will have help, you see. He’ll be surrounded by good people – though this is also something

The Tory leadership is fast becoming Boris Johnson’s to lose, I say in The Sun this morning. He has more MPs backing him than any other candidate, and his campaign receives a further boost this morning with the former Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon endorsing him. In the words of one of those knows the Tory parliamentary party best, ‘the wind is blowing in one direction’. There is increasing talk among senior figures in the party that if the former Foreign Secretary comes out on top in the parliamentary rounds, it would be best to skip the members part of the contest and make him Prime Minister straight away. The