Can anyone stop Boris Johnson? It is an inevitability that the former Mayor of London will be in the final two candidates of the Tory leadership contest, and already many members of other campaigns are talking about what he will do as Prime Minister, rather than how their candidate will beat him.
Given there has been an ‘anyone but Boris’ operation rumbling on for a number of years now, this seems to be a rather early admission of defeat. It is true that Johnson’s opponents were too confident in their presumption that he wasn’t sufficiently popular in the parliamentary party to guarantee his inclusion in the final two. Yesterday’s result shows his campaign team have managed to reverse any unpopularity dramatically.
This means that there isn’t much point in trying to peel off hundreds of MPs from backing Boris.
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