Robert Peston

This is what a senior member of the cabinet told me this morning about whether Boris Johnson’s prospects of becoming Tory leader and our PM have been seriously harmed by the disclosure that neighbours summoned police to his home after they heard his girlfriend Carrie Symonds shouting at him to 'get off me'. Minister: 'It will take a really gross transgression for Boris Johnson to deflect the faithful, but it’s not beyond him.' And another minister said: 'I don’t think it [the leadership contest] has changed one inch.' For the avoidance of doubt, neither minister is invested in a Johnson victory, and one of them would passionately prefer him to lose.

The video of Mark Field pushing a Greenpeace activist by the neck is so upsetting. https://twitter.com/itvnews/status/1141820588090114049 The climate-change protestors were, according to the police and friends who were there, wholly peaceful. Why on earth does Field react with such ferocity? The violence of his intervention is quite wrong. Some people are saying Mark Field was justified in shoving the protestor against the wall and then pushing her by the neck. But I don’t think you can have watched the longer clip. Because it shows Field is not being interfered with in any way and simply lashes out. Surely that is inexcusable. I am not engaging in virtue signalling by saying this, or engaging in culture wars or making any kind of political point.

Astonishing scenes at Mansion House tonight. Not the climate change protestors who interrupted Philip Hammond's speech (though goodness knows how they got through the extraordinary security) but the Chancellor saying he will fight and fight again to prevent Boris Johnson going for a no-deal Brexit (though he did not name Johnson). He said:- "I cannot imagine a Conservative and Unionist-led Government, actively pursuing a no-deal Brexit; willing to risk the Union and our economic prosperity, and a General Election that could put Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street, to boot. And I will not concede the very ground we stand on.

This is my scenario for how the last two days of the MPs’ stage of the Tory leadership ballot will play out - which of course by definition means none of it will happen (and the clever money probably bets against me). Most of the 30 votes won by the defeated Brexiteer Dominic Raab will transfer to Johnson - with perhaps just a few going to Sajid Javid, following his loud commitment to take the UK out of the EU by 31 October, no ifs or buts. So it will be touch and go who is knocked out today, Javid or Rory Stewart - because Stewart’s decision to cast himself in the BBC debate last night as the only 'honest' candidate, against four putative con artists, will have reinforced some Tories’ fears that he is too divisive a character.

Tomorrow at 1.30pm, Labour’s shadow cabinet, in a special Brexit session, may move towards making the historic decision to call for a referendum in 'all circumstances' – that is, on any Brexit deal agreed by parliament or on a no-deal Brexit. That said, sources close to Jeremy Corbyn caution me against expecting any momentous announcement tomorrow. By contrast, shadow cabinet members tell me that Corbyn is inexorably – if slowly – shifting Labour to become the referendum party, although one senior party member tells me a device will be found to delay the shift. What gives credence to the idea that there will be a decisive move towards a confirmatory ballot is that Andrew Fisher, Corbyn’s policy adviser, has written a paper recommending that.

At the hacks’ hustings for the Tory leadership candidates, I asked the five who could be bothered to be held to account by your inky fingered servants a really boring question. Would they accept the definition of a 'hard border' on the island of Ireland written into the December joint agreement between the UK and the EU, which underpins the backstop plan in the Withdrawal Agreement? The reason this matters is that the joint agreement says there is a commitment to avoid 'a hard border including any physical infrastructure or related checks and controls', and the Withdrawal Agreement says 'any future arrangements [for Ireland] must be compatible with these overarching requirements.

Before this Tory leadership election started, the party’s grandees and custodians were telling me party members MUST at all costs be given a choice of candidates to be leader and our next prime minister. Now they tell me Boris Johnson is so far ahead - both among MPs and seemingly among the membership - that it would politically insane to stick to the current timetable of two candidates beating each other up in public, in front of mostly retired white men, for four weeks.

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 and then win a general election.

Brexit is both the cause of the Tory leadership contest – it was too much for Theresa May – and is the toxin that threatens to destroy the contest to replace her and her party. The reason is that even if the new prime minister were to take the UK out of the EU – which can by no means be taken for granted – there is unlikely to be a Brexit dividend for him or her or the Conservative Party. Because for most Tories or their potential supporters, Brexit is no more and no less than the duty that voters set the government in that 2016 referendum. So far the defining characteristic of this government is its failure to fulfil that duty.

Pretty much the whole intellectual gap (if we can dignify it as such) between the candidates in the Tories' leadership contest is summed up in two tweets this morning that react to the Conservative humiliation in the Peterborough by-election. One tweet was by the Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, the other by his predecessor Boris Johnson. And I will come on to the dispute between them after weighing the catastrophe that Peterborough was for their party. In what for years was a relatively safe Tory seat, the Conservatives slumped from second place to third, suffering a fall of 25 percentage points in their share of the vote, compared to the result in the 2017 general election.

When the influential Tory ERG Brexiter Steve Baker refused last night on my programme to deny Boris Johnson is closer to his position on how to leave the EU than Dominic Raab, and he would be backing Johnson, I concluded that Johnson is now unstoppable. Barring some self-inflicted cataclysm (which cannot be ruled out) – the former foreign secretary will be Tory leader and new PM in July. Because where Baker goes, a significant number of other Brexiter Tory MPs will venture too; Baker denies he is their shepherd, but the ERG MPs habitually choose the sometimes illusory safety of travelling as a herd.

Now that the Tory party has confirmed we'll know the identity of its new leader and therefore in theory our new prime minister in the week beginning 22 July, it is also possible to capture the single issue that will dominate both the coming two weeks of voting by MPs – who will choose the shortlist of two – and then the definitive choice by party members. It is this deceptively simple question: will Boris Johnson save or sink the Tory Party? Right now the former foreign secretary and Churchill biographer is streets ahead of the pack, both in respect of the declared support of Tory MPs and popularity among party officials and the membership.

In refusing to come out for a confirmatory referendum as the primary aim of Brexit policy, Jeremy Corbyn and his allies - Len McCluskey, Karie Murphy, Seumas Milne, and Andrew Murray - have signalled they would not want to turn their backs on Labour's traditional working class voters, many of whom are Brexiters and do not wish Labour to become the party of the lefty London middle classes. So it's a bit confusing that Labour's leader has chosen not only to boycott the state banquet for Donald Trump tonight, but tomorrow Corbyn will be the most important speaker at the anti-Trump rally. Because in being the figurehead for the anti-Trump movement, Corbyn is playing explicitly to the metropolitan middle class gallery.

I never thought I would live to see the Conservative and Unionist Party, dominator of British politics for centuries, falling to a vote share of nine per cent in a national election. Hindsight is mind-bending, which means I now find it impossible to believe that David Cameron could ever have conceived that holding an EU referendum would bring peace, stability and strength to the divided Tories. And as for Theresa May she will be seen by many as guilty of a strategic error to rival any in the history of this democracy, with her failure to establish what kind of withdrawal from – and future relationship with – the European Union would command a majority in the Commons before negotiating her deal with the EU.

Theresa May has been forced from office by her own MPs because they concluded there would be no progress on delivering Brexit, or on anything important, while she remained their leader. But if they thought her government was characterised by factionalism and chaos, they ain’t seen nothing yet. Because the big facts of her failed government – no majority in parliament, religious divisions on how to leave the EU – cannot be wished away. The Buddha would struggle to pacify and unite her fractious party. And the Buddha is unusual in not running to be Tory leader. The coming weeks of battle for the Tory crown, which officially starts 10 June but is already happening in guerrilla skirmishes, will make Game of Thrones seem as tame as Teletubbies.

Put 10th June in your diary. Because that is when the contest to elect a new Tory leader, and therefore a new prime minister, will begin, I am told. Why am I confident of that? Well it is the last possible date for the contest that the shop stewards for Tory MPs, the executive for the 1922 committee, deem acceptable. And – perhaps more importantly – it is the date that the PM has signalled to her closest allies that she can tolerate. How so? Well she does not want the state visit of Donald Trump and the D-Day celebrations of the preceding week to be undermined by the unseemly spectacle of Tory MPs and ministers scrabbling and scrambling to replace her.

I am told, in completely unambiguous terms by a source very close to the Prime Minister, that there will be no statement from Theresa May tonight on anything – either setting out a timetable for her departure or agreeing to pull the vote on the Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB). ‘Why would we do any of that the night before an election?’ said the source. BUT in a way this planned silence is more amazing than if she were making a statement. Because several members of the cabinet have told me in no uncertain terms that they expected her to set out her timetable for departure tonight. The gap between the Prime Minister and her cabinet is wider than ever in modern history. No minister thinks she can remain in office for more than a few days.