Boris johnson

It was when Matt Hancock went over to Boris Johnson that something snapped. ‘Every time a child says “I don’t believe in fairies,”’ said Peter Pan, ‘there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.’ When Matt Hancock said this week that he did believe in Boris Johnson, something in me died. I remember Matt practising with a few of us for his speech to Conservative candidate selection meetings. He needed more work on the fluency — he still does — but was outstandingly bright, quick, endearingly ambitious, full of bounce and, most important, he seemed to me a good person.

Last night's Tory leadership debate was an illustration of where the wider party has ended up: fractious, confused, and without a clear plan for what to do next. Today's Prime Minister's Questions showed the damage that these blue-on-blue attacks are doing to the Conservative party. A number of the candidates have criticised the policies of their own government particularly when it comes to spending. It was inevitable that this was going to get picked up by the Opposition as an attack line. Labour's Paul Williams pointed out that Sajid Javid had pledged to reverse Theresa May's police cuts, while other MPs either made bids for the spending review or warned the Prime Minister not to make commitments which would bind the hands of the next leader.

Boris Johnson’s warning that the televised Tory leadership hustings would be a ‘cacophony’ was proved correct this evening when the five candidates spent an hour talking over one another. Any private fears the former Foreign Secretary may have had about his own performance were largely unjustified, though, as he stayed reasonable and quiet throughout the debate. His worst performance came when he answered a question on Islamophobia. Johnson appeared not to have prepared an answer for this, even though his column on the burqa and his handling of the Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe have come up repeatedly throughout this contest.

With Boris Johnson having all but booked his place in the final two, the most interesting question of the Tory leadership contest right now is whether Rory Stewart can get the 33 votes he needs to get through the next round of voting. If he does, he makes it to Tuesday night’s BBC debate. At which point, Stewart would have the chance to take on Boris Johnson directly. Some, including former Downing Street staffers, think that this clash could even propel Stewart into the final two. But I think it could actually break Stewart’s momentum. Why, because a lot of Tory MPs fear too much blue-on-blue action and wouldn’t want the members round to turn into a no-holds-barred contest.

There is a reason Boris Johnson is avoiding the TV debates, and his name is Lynton Crosby.  Crosby is running the Johnson leadership campaign — in awkward conjunction, it seems, with Boris’s girlfriend Carrie Symonds. He is a veritable TV debatephobe. He has run the last two Tory general elections, and he ordered David Cameron and Theresa May to shy away from the TV debates.  In Crosby’s view, debate-ducking is the sensible course. He sees no upside. For frontrunners, especially, if the debate goes well, there is no real uptick in support. The only way a TV debate can influence an election is if a candidate has a massive gaffe, a viral FAIL that destroys his or her credibility. So best shunned.

Should Boris Johnson become Prime Minister it would be a calamity for his country and for Europe. That's the view of Le Monde, a newspaper that declares it's time for France and the rest of the continent to stop 'regarding him as a buffoon'. In an editorial headlined ‘Boris Johnson at the head of the UK? No thanks!’, the left-wing paper said that Britain's answer to Donald Trump is a danger to European stability, although clearly not as much as the Brexit Party. Since the party's formation earlier this year, Le Monde routinely describes them as ‘extreme-right’, which must come as something of a shock to Claire Fox and millions of other British lefties and their old-fashioned belief in democracy.