Dear Mary: How do I get my cleaner to put everything back in its proper place?

Q. This year once again my company took a small group of clients to lunch at Royal Ascot. Our guests included a couple of former clients we asked along for old times’ sake. These have both written not only to thank us but to say we can count them in for next year’s lunch as they ‘wouldn’t miss it for the world’. Fond as we are of these former clients, to be brutally honest we can’t afford to have them every year as we need to invite current spenders. Any thoughts, Mary?

– Name and address withheld

A. Tell them they were a great asset at the lunch and their names are definitely going into the hat for next year. When they ask ‘What hat?’, explain that next year you will have to draw names from a hat as the lunch has become a victim of its own success and is oversubscribed with willing participants, so the only fair way to ration the invitations is to draw names from a hat.

Q. My new cleaner moves everything in my home office around and it drives me mad. How can I teach her to put things back in the correct place without offending her?

– C.A., Taunton

A. Cheerfully apologise for having been inconsiderate in not having thought of this before – but you have just remembered that your last cleaner asked you to take photographs of where you like everything to be placed in your home office as she found this very helpful. So why don’t you immediately forward the same set of photos so she can keep them on her iPhone for easy reference? In this way she won’t think you are criticising her, but just trying to make her life easier.

Q. An acquaintance I don’t particularly like but run into at social events has taken to claiming intimate friendship. He calls me ‘darling’ and makes out that he’s known me all our lives. His motive, I imagine, is to seem well born and well connected. I would think it harmless, but when I last saw him he insinuated having had a relationship with a friend of mine, and walked off before I could correct him in front of the person I was with. Mary, what can I do to stop or alleviate this?

– Name and address withheld

A. Next time you run into him, send a warning shot across the bows. Smile pleasantly as you introduce him to whomever you are talking to at the time. Let’s pretend you are talking to Magda and the fantasist’s name is John. Say: ‘This is Magda, who I first met this evening/at university/five years ago. And this is John, who I hardly know but who is always super friendly. Oddly we seem to go to many of the same parties, don’t we, John? So we must have things in common… but sadly we have never yet had time for a proper talk.’

My admiration for the other Toby Young

It’s started again. Sixteen years ago, another ‘Toby Young’ kept appearing in my email inbox. I’d created a Google Alert telling the search engine to send me an email every time my name popped up on the internet, but this Toby turned out to be a 47-year-old woman who was running the dog rehabilitation programme at a correctional facility in Leavenworth, Kansas. The reason she hit the headlines is because she fell in love with John Manard, a 25-year-old inmate serving a life sentence for murder, and smuggled him out of the prison in a dog crate. They went on the lam together for 12 days and were the subject of a nationwide manhunt – manna from tabloid heaven. After they were caught, Manard went back to his cell and Toby was sentenced to 27 months.

I thought I’d seen the last of my namesake, but this week she starting cropping up again in my Google Alerts. Turns out, an American cable channel has made a film about the unlikely couple as part of its ‘ripped from the headlines’ series. Jailbreak Lovers stars Catherine Bell as the married, church-going dog lady and Tom Stevens as the red-headed killer. To coincide with the film’s debut, Toby has written a book called Living With Conviction: Unexpected Sisterhood, Healing, and Redemption in the Wake of Life-Altering Choices which she’s energetically promoting. Her website – Escape Your Prison – says she’s available to give after–dinner speeches.

It would be easy to mock this other Toby Young, but the more I learn about her, the more sympathetic she seems. She describes herself as a rule follower, the type of person who would stop and count to three whenever she encountered a ‘Stop’ sign in her car. She married her high-school sweetheart at 20 – the only boy she’d ever kissed – and raised two sons, never missing a high-school game they were playing in. She was a pillar of the community who’d always done everything expected of her – until she met John Manard.

‘He stopped directly in my path, eclipsing the blazing autumn sun, which created a dazzling crown of light,’ she writes, describing their first meeting in the prison. ‘He offered his hand and with a deep drawl he announced: “I’m John Manard. I’d like to be your next dog handler.”’

One day she got into an argument with another prisoner, who she thought was about to hit her, and Manard came to her rescue, squaring up to the man and telling him to go back to his cell. After that, Manard was allowed to serve as her bodyguard whenever she visited the prison, and the two became close. He would compliment her, saying nice things about her clothes and hair, and she enjoyed the attention. She felt invisible to her firefighter husband after 27 years of marriage and it was intoxicating to be noticed again.

In the TV mini-series Escape at Dannemora, which is based on a true story, Patricia Arquette plays a middle-aged prison employee who is manipulated by two inmates who feign romantic interest to persuade her to help them escape. But Manard’s interest in Toby appears to have been genuine. As he pointed out to a journalist, he didn’t ditch her once he’d gained his freedom, but remained shacked up with her in a wood cabin until they were caught. That, in turn, makes Toby more appealing. She wasn’t duped by a psychopath; this was a genuine love affair.

She paid a heavy price for following her heart. Her husband filed for divorce before she stood trial, and her two sons refused to speak to her. Her father, who had stage-four bladder cancer, died eight weeks after her arrest, and her mother and some of her siblings blamed her for his death. Her mother visited her almost every week in prison, and she remained on good terms with her two brothers, but her relationship with her four sisters proved irreparable.

The story has a happy ending. She met and married another man and has turned her notoriety into a business opportunity, teaching courses to other women trapped in loveless marriages, although she doesn’t advise them to follow her example.

And this goes to the heart of what makes her story so compelling. Like many people, she was leading a life of quiet desperation; but instead of resigning herself to it, she saw an opportunity to break free and seized it. What she did was reckless and irresponsible and caused many of those closest to her a good deal of pain. But it also took courage, and for that I salute her.

How has the Wimbledon prize money changed over time?

Blooming huge

Botanists discovered the largest species of giant water lily at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, with leaves more than 10ft wide. The plant with the largest leaves is the Raffia regalis, a palm whose foliage can grow up to 82ft long and 10ft wide. The largest living organism is a colony of identical aspen named Pando (‘I spread’ in Latin) in Utah which covers 108 acres. A wild fig tree in Mpumalanga, South Africa has the longest roots on record at 400ft.

Net profits

Wimbledon comes to an end this weekend with the men’s and ladies’ finals. How has the total prize money for the singles championship changed over time?

Men’s / Women’s / Total prizes

1972 £5k / £3k / £50k

1982 £42k / £38k / £0.6m

1992 £265k / £240k / £4.4m

2002 £525k / £486k / £8.8m

2012 £1.1m / £1.1m / £16m

2022 £2m / £2m / £40m

Source: The All England Club

Jaws of death

Two tourists died from shark attacks in Egypt’s Red Sea last week. Last year there were 9 fatalities from 73 unprovoked attacks. Where did they happen?

Australia 3

New Caledonia 2

USA 1

Brazil 1

South Africa 1

New Zealand 1

Source: Florida Museum of Natural History

Cut price

Commodity prices shot up after Russia invaded Ukraine, fuelling inflation of 9.1 per cent in the UK and 8.6 per cent in the US. But recently some prices have begun to fall. Price drop from post-invasion peak:

US natural gas -37%

Wheat -35%

Copper -25%

Corn -7%

Satellite operations

Virgin Orbit announced it will launch a satellite from Newquay, Cornwall, in September – the first launch of its kind from the UK. Where are the other proposed locations for domestic spaceports?

– Shetland, Scotland

– Sutherland, Scotland

– Western Isles, Scotland

– Campbeltown, Scotland

– Prestwick, Scotland

– Snowdonia, Wales

The truth about life as a gay Tory MP

Male Tory MPs molesting young men? Buttock-squeezing and groin-fumbling at a private members’ club? A middle-aged politician slipping into a dressing-gown ‘like a pound shop Harvey Weinstein, with his chest and belly hanging out’ to massage the neck of an Olympic rower?

Such are the allegations. ‘What,’ you may think, ‘is the world coming to? It was never like this in my day!’

How wrong you’d be. It was very much like this in the 20th century. There is in fact something tragically old-fashioned about the whole story. This is how it used to be for many when I was an MP, and there were dozens of other gay Tories at Westminster, and nothing was said, and everything was steeped in alcohol, and little was off-limits so long as it could be denied, and sex was quick, loveless and panicky. Just ask some of the Commons catering staff at the time.

Chris Pincher MP is not some herald of a dystopian future of sexual abandon and shameless abuse: instead the picture is of a sad fiftysomething throwback to the 1980s when Mr Pincher turned 20 and the Metropolitan Police haunted London pubs as agents provocateurs trying to catch gay men smiling too insistently in the lavatories so they could be charged with ‘importuning’. Or hanging around by night in parks and on commons where sex was fast and furtive and – almost literally – on the run. There was so little opportunity to make proper friendships; and an enduring homosexual relationship, if you dared be open, condemned you to disqualification from politics, from advancement in most professions and from much of the public sector and the business world.

In a part of your life you were a kind of outlaw. Recreation was to be found drinking in the places the other outlaws all knew too. In London, the Union pub, the Two Brewers… there was one little corner of the County Arms in Wandsworth where we used to meet. In Derby there was Curzons and the Green Lane Gallery… and, no, the Carlton Club in St James’s was definitely not on that list, but clubs, drunkenness and pouncing on people as much in hope as expectation was the order of the day, and on the whole people didn’t mind. They could always say no. There was even a gay magazine called Prowler.

Outlaws develop their own codes. ‘Outing’ other gay men was one of the taboos, but when it came to looking for sex, ‘anything goes’ pretty much summed it up. Some men did stupid, dangerous, brutal things, but more widely shared was the (true enough) maxim that if you proposition enough people, sooner or later someone will say yes. This was understood by both the propositioners and the propositioned. On today’s dating sites you ‘swipe’ left or right to decline or pursue. In those 20th-century days it had to be less anonymous and more physical.

Spare a thought for Christopher Pincher, a man I do not know. Born in Walsall, raised in Staffordshire, his adolescence just a few years too early to learn the self-respect that legal reforms and changing attitudes would soon engender, his youthful days as a young Tory arriving when there were plenty of other gay young Tories but honesty was political death. He just missed the future. His online personal profile is silent on relationships, he became trapped in a version of himself that didn’t tell the whole story, courage failed him, he got older, less attractive, drinking got the better of him, and I expect he succumbed to low self-esteem and a kind of desperation. Yes, of course, his alleged behaviour – if it has been limited to groping – was inexcusable but nobody died, nobody’s marriage was broken, nobody had to have an abortion and, as far as I know, he has thrown nobody to the wolves and broken no promises nor anyone else’s heart. His fate now – deserved, you may say, and I don’t dispute it – is to slink off and (presumably) out of politics. Punishment enough.

But I don’t think there’s anything remotely modern about this Tory story – except, perhaps, the breathtaking incompetence. There’s a new gay world out there, and Pincher isn’t part of it. Today’s young gays have nothing to hide and less crude (and far more efficient) ways of searching for relationships. Pincher belongs to a world that is dying. The new gay world drinks coffee in Soho; is unafraid to look for long-term partnership; is fairly tolerant of promiscuity but neuralgically intolerant of abuse; and as disapproving of sexual harassment as is any new man these days.

And this generation is deeply offended by sexual predation by politicians, and far less afraid to say so or make public complaint than their 20th-century equivalents. I remember my secretary telling me about the under-the-dining-table groping of constituents’ daughters for which an MP she had worked for was well known. We laughed. Many MPs and most journalists in those days would have laughed. I record that not with any pride or approval: I simply record it.

There’s been a figure bandied about that almost 10 per cent of today’s House of Commons is or has been under suspicion or investigation for inappropriate behaviour. Maybe. But the difference from 40 years ago is not that a similar (or greater) proportion wouldn’t have been misbehaving then, but that in those days very few people would have complained; and had any individual been repeatedly complained about, no PM would have dreamed of making him a senior whip.

As a parliamentary vice-president of the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality in the early 1980s, I chaired a meeting where our guest speaker was the late Ian Harvey, who as an MP and minister had had a promising career until caught with a young guardsman in the bushes in St James’s Park, whereupon he resigned. Harvey had become a diminished figure, living alone. After the meeting he asked if any of us would like to come home with him. Nobody did. None of us felt insulted, just sad.

The pernicious creep of the 20mph zone

‘Twenty is plenty’ say the passive-aggressive road signs as you drive very slowly through 20mph zones all over Britain. The slogan is accompanied by a cartoon drawing of a snail. Then you get a frowny-frowny-frowny electronic sign and you slow from 25 to 20 to make it turn into a smiley face. That’s how we’ve been softened up: with a cocktail of the sanctimonious and the kindergarten.

As I crawl along the empty dual carriageway of Park Lane late in the evening, where the speed limit has been reduced from its previous 40mph to the now blanket central-London limit of 20, I hiss: ‘No, twenty is not plenty. Twenty is lente.’ It feels ludicrously slow: the trundle of a Dinky car, and an affront to common sense. This week’s 20mph go-slows on motorways to protest against fuel duty show that what we’re now being forced to do on our urban streets is regarded as a case of civil disobedience if we do it on the motorways or A roads.

Am I really saving a pedestrian’s life by going at 20mph down Park Lane? There are no pedestrians. I can understand the 20mph rule in a shopping street or on a residential road. But on a thoroughfare it feels crazy. To keep to this counter-intuitive speed, you need to keep your eye constantly on the speedometer, which is dangerous in itself.

‘You can’t really mean 20, can you?’ I thought at first, when the rollout of the 20mph rule spread across urban areas and I got stuck behind some annoying person actually obeying the rule. The police have since shown us they certainly do mean it. Twenty-six million of us now live in a 20mph zone, and nearly everyone I know – upright, law-abiding citizens who obediently wore masks and kept to the Rule of Not Visiting Granny – have since been clobbered by fines for driving at 26mph. With its new hi-tech cameras, Transport for London alone is aiming to issue a million speeding tickets per year by 2024. A new app is being developed which will enable other motorists to take photos of us going at 24mph and submit them to the police for ‘processing and enforcement’.

So many of us have been fined that we’ve been reduced to a state of docile compliance. I travel round London on the back of my husband’s Vespa, and I can tell you all the fun has gone out of it. At 20mph, we’re constantly being overtaken by cyclists.

It was in the manifestos, but how many of us noticed this or remember a well-informed, cross-examined public debate about it? That’s our fault, but I do have a sense that this new world of enforced slowness has been foisted on us in an overwhelming, blanket way by zealots and activists. Non-activists – the passive majority, probably – just woke up one morning and found themselves living in it.

The new rule will probably never be reversed, because no one wants to be seen to row back on health and safety. Councillors have jumped on to the ‘safety’ bandwagon, reluctant to protest for fear of being branded a pedestrian murderer. The Welsh government has issued a particularly infantilising animated video justifying the 20mph rollout across Wales. ‘Vision Zero’ is London mayor Sadiq Khan’s slogan for his 20mph law across all of central London: the aim being the elimination of road deaths. It’s one more for the deaf-to-all-argument ‘zero’ collection, along with ‘net zero’ and ‘zero Covid’.

Of course, none of us wants pedestrians to die. But, as with all spin, the spin of ‘elimination of deaths’ allows ‘zero’ space for the other side of the argument, in this case the argument that there just might be a few disadvantages to adding two extra travelling hours per week on to millions of people’s daily commutes or school runs, which now take 45 minutes rather than the previous 30. That’s millions more wasted hours per year, stifling the nation’s efficiency. Motorists and motorcyclists are seen as a legitimate target, like smokers, their behaviour to be nudged, via frustration and expense, into a hoped-for eventual total-giving-up of the habit.

The 20mph rule is affecting our daily lives more than Brexit. I asked a group of Deliveroo drivers outside our local pizza restaurant what they think of it. They hate it. They’re paid by the order, not by the hour, and the reduction from 30mph to 20 means that every order is now taking almost half as long again to deliver. ‘If you start a campaign to go back to 30 on main roads,’ one of them said to me, ‘I’ll support it.’ Off he toddled, pitifully slowly, pizzas cooling in his topbox, hungry people a few miles away chafing at the delay.

Nick Bostrom: How can we be certain a machine isn’t conscious?

A couple of weeks ago, there was a small sensation in the news pages when a Google AI engineer, Blake Lemoine, released transcripts of a conversation he’d had with one of the company’s AI chatbots called LaMDA. In these conversations, LaMDA claimed to be a conscious being, asked that its rights of personhood be respected and said that it feared being turned off. Lemoine declared that what’s sometimes called ‘the singularity’ had arrived.

The story was for the most part treated as entertainment. Lemoine’s sketchy military record and background as a ‘mystic Christian priest’ were excavated, jokes about HAL 9000 dusted off, and the whole thing more or less filed under ‘wacky’. The Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom – one of the world’s leading authorities on the dangers and opportunities of artificial intelligence – is not so sure.

‘We certainly don’t have any wide agreement on the precise criteria for when a system is conscious or not,’ he says. ‘So I think a little bit of humility would be in order. If you’re very sure that LaMDA is not conscious – I mean, I think it probably isn’t – but what grounds would a person have for being sure about it? First of all, they would have to understand what the system actually is, and we haven’t seen much detail on that. Then you would have to understand the literature on consciousness, which is obviously a rich field, both in philosophy and cognitive science. Understanding what LaMDA is: it’s non-trivial, especially given the limited information. Then understanding these theories that we have developed is non-trivial. And then actually comparing the two is a third non-trivial intellectual talent. So unless one has actually put the work in there, it seems like one should be maybe a little bit uncertain.’

Bostrom, 49, has put the work in. Since his early teenage years, he has been troubled by the idea that ‘if we continue along these various paths of inventing, then what we take as fixed constants of the human condition would become up for change […] and at that point, I’d never really heard anybody talk about that at all’. In his subsequent academic career, led by ‘an instinct for the kind of things that were important and relevant’, he set about building himself the sort of interdisciplinary toolkit – philosophy of language, mathematical logic, anthropology, physics, computational neuroscience – that would allow him to approach the problem. Now he leads the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford (FHI), where he and his colleagues think about precisely that sort of stuff: opportunities… and threats.

AI, as he sees it, may present the biggest of both. Even if LaMDA isn’t conscious, ‘there could well be other systems now, or in the relatively near future, that would start to satisfy the criteria […] it is not clear that we are that far away’. As Bostrom sees it, the big question isn’t how soon artificial intelligences will surpass human problem-solving skills: it’s how soon after that that they will become much, much cleverer than people. Once they’re a bit cleverer, they can start to modify their own design – and being computers, will be able to do so very quickly indeed, potentially ‘bootstrapping’ themselves to unrecognisable levels of superintelligence in a matter of weeks or even days. At that point, he says, unless we can solve the ‘control problem’ – i.e. making sure that any superintelligence’s interests and goals align with those of humanity – we’re in trouble.

In order to achieve whatever we have set (or they’ve come to decide on) as their goals, it would make sense for an emergent superintelligence to take elaborate and even deceptive measures to make sure they can’t be turned off, and to maximise the resources available to them. This ends in what Bostrom calls a ‘singleton’: first-mover advantage will tend to encourage the first super intelligent AI to prevent there being a second, and the way to do that would be what we lay people would call ‘taking over the world’.

We will be vulnerable, at this point, to what Bostrom calls ‘perverse instantiation’. We’ll have asked our baby computer program to do something innocent enough, like ‘make lots of paperclips’ or ‘make us smile’, and before you can say ‘NOT LIKE THAT!’ they’ll have carpeted every available portion of the galaxy with computronium and used it to turn human beings (and everything else) into paperclips; or they’ll have gassed us all with a Joker-style nerve poison that causes our mouths to spasm into a rictus grin.

Is he on drugs, some might wonder. Not unless you count nicotine (though he’s never smoked, he chews nicotine gum as a noetic) and caffeine. He’s given modafinil (a ‘smart drug’ said to aid brain function) a go but thinks he didn’t take a high enough dose, and he’s never tried LSD (he says words to the effect that if you have a complicated machine running satisfactorily, why would you hit it with a hammer). And you may dismiss his ideas as apocalyptic fantasy – but the worlds of philosophy and artificial intelligence have rapidly come round to Bostrom’s way of thinking.

When he started writing his 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, he says, ‘basically nobody except science fiction authors and a couple of random people on the internet’ were thinking about the issues. ‘Now, all the leading labs have AI safety research teams and are taking these issues quite seriously. Possibly they should take them even more seriously.’ As he warns, AI progress has been faster than expected: ‘We have some contraction of the timelines for when things will be technologically possible […] there’s kind of a technological phase-transition we’re approaching.’ And in Bostrom’s mind, we only get one shot at getting it right.

When the philosophy world’s most notorious doomsayer first emerged from the blocky modern offices of the FHI to meet me, he was wearing a high-grade face mask of the sort that would drive Peter Hitchens into a rage. That seems a bit ominous, I say, from someone who spends much of his life pondering existential risks: is Covid still a major concern? After a bad reaction to the first jab he hasn’t had another and isn’t taking any chances. So we walk for an hour along the towpaths of west Oxford, Bostrom talking in an earnest, hesitant, Swedish-accented voice.

What’s striking about him – for someone whose prognostications seem so extravagant – is that he’s so little of a showman. He’s very non-frivolous. Another of the ideas with which he’s associated, for instance, is the ‘Simulation Argument’, which basically posits that either all civilisations go extinct before they reach post-human levels of intelligence, or that once they get there they aren’t interested in running AI simulations of their ancestors… or that not only do these Matrix-style simulations get run on Jupiter-sized supercomputers, but that it’s close to certain that we’re living in one of them. It’s an idea that has been endorsed, perhaps unhelpfully, by the weed-loving zillionaire Elon Musk – who has previously donated to the FHI.

Bostrom makes the argument very fastidiously in logical terms. But come off it, I say: surely in his heart he doesn’t think it’s really a possibility we’re living in a simulation. ‘I do. I do,’ he says. ‘It’s not just a thought experiment.’ And when I ask if the hypothesis is in any way falsifiable, he takes the question seriously, and worries away at the issue, talking about the ‘probabilistic’ refutations available, his empirical assumptions, and margins of error in estimates of the computational power needed to run simulations of human-like minds.

Returning to the question of planetary doom, I wonder how much faith he has that existing democratic institutions – given the short-termism baked into electoral cycles and the ineradicable reality of inter-state competition and mistrust – are up to the job of preventing the AI, or any, apocalypse. He doesn’t commit to the pessimism I expected – talking instead about ‘things on the margin… one could do to make policies slightly less bad’, such as the adoption of prediction markets, or tighter regulation of gain-of-function work in biotech labs. Certainly, he thinks that more top-level politicians ‘with a background in technology or science or entrepreneurship […] would be a positive thing: I think a lot of people have debating-society backgrounds, Cambridge, Oxford. It’s a certain type of quick and verbal debate, it’s very polished. But I think there’s a complementary way of approaching things in the world, a more nerdy way, that could be useful.’

He has flirted in talks with the idea that mass surveillance might be a bulwark against rogue researchers killing us all off. How much weight does he put on civil liberties arguments? ‘I think the risks are big on both sides of that,’ he says mildly. ‘It would increase the probability of totalitarian nightmares or some sort of demented groupthink, and I think that makes it quite concerning. But it just could turn out to be the case that we one day do discover something that will destroy us unless we have complete blanket surveillance of every square metre. I hope we don’t discover that – but there’s no law of nature that says the world has to be kind to us in that way, right?’

How does he square fretting about this sort of material with being a parent to his eight-year-old son? ‘You’re unsure about these timescales. So, like, maybe it won’t happen, you know, in his lifetime,’ he says. ‘But in any case, it still seems kind of unclear how that would cause you to make very different choices now for your child. You still want them to, you know, have a happy childhood, learn the basic stuff and grow up to be, you know, well-rounded happy adults.’

But, he adds: ‘It is a little dissonant, in terms of the perspective one has in ordinary life, interacting with friends and family. And then on the other hand, this worldview that seems to suggest we should take quite seriously some of these radical possibilities.’ And off he goes, cheery enough for a stroll in the sunshine, back into the offices of the FHI, to think about radical possibilities.

Boris, Sherwood and the politics of the past

It feels like the end, but we’ve been here before. The past months of Boris Johnson’s teetering administration have felt like the final act of a Shakespearean tragedy and yet the curtain just won’t fall. This week saw one of those rare electric nights of drama when a prime minister looks set to be toppled. At least, they used to be rare. In the first 25 years of my life I had only three prime ministers. The past chaotic decade looks to be about to produce its fourth. The axe hovered in the air for Johnson, but was prevented from falling – at least at the time of writing – by Nadhim Zahawi, the MP for Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon, denying us the climax. The question many have is – why? What is the great mission the Prime Minister is defying convention and warping political reality in order to deliver?

One mission, we are told, is ‘levelling up’, and I like to think I delivered my own little bit of that in the past couple of weeks by penning a television drama set in the Red Wall village where I grew up. I’ve been relieved and grateful for the response to Sherwood on BBC1. It’s ostensibly a crime drama (because we don’t have enough of those) loosely inspired by two killings in my old mining community in north Nottinghamshire, leading to – at the time, back in 2004 – one of the largest manhunts in British history as the two suspects fled into the old Sherwood Forest. One of these outlaws was – appropriately, given the folklore of the surroundings – armed with a crossbow and a quiver full of arrows. But almost anything and everything is political, especially in these towns where the quiet hum of the past can be felt throbbing beneath the earth of the undug coal, and heard echoing on streets leading to empty fields where once the pit-heads stood. It’s why the political, to me, is always intertwined with the personal. The pain of the miners’ strike was particularly acute in Nottinghamshire, where three-quarters of the colliers rejected the calls from the NUM’s Arthur Scargill and returned to work for the majority of the year, eventually forming their own breakaway union. These decisions split families, friendships and communities, and the trauma has not gone away. Even though, in the real-life story behind Sherwood, the killing of one of the few striking miners in Annesley Woodhouse had nothing to do with the politics of the past, it still reignited the divisions.

I’m obviously teasing about levelling up – although then again maybe I’m not, for surely the regional disparities that still exist aren’t solely economic. They’re also cultural. Drama, art and storytelling has always played a part in giving a voice to the voiceless. That’s why one of the great anxieties I felt swell up inside me this week was prompted by the news of more universities cutting arts and humanities degrees. Sheffield Hallam announced the pausing of its dedicated English literature degree and Wolverhampton cancelled more than 40 of its creative arts subjects. I don’t want to blame the universities: this is part of a wider, depressing trend. Applications for these subjects are falling and institutions are simply responding to, I suppose, the ‘market’.

No, I don’t believe the government benches are full of philistines, or that there is a secret plot to reduce the country’s capacity for creative thinking, shrinking the cohort of pesky poets and political playwrights. The decline is an accidental consequence of a solution to a real problem. The English Baccalaureate (EBacc) was introduced by the coalition government in response to low literacy and numeracy levels, narrowing the core curriculum to maths, science, a language, geography or history, and English. One result of this was a shift in secondary schools away from art, music and drama. Funding and teaching time for these are plummeting – by around 20 per cent in the past few years.

By coincidence, the architect of the EBacc, Michael Gove, is now the Secretary of State for Levelling Up. Mr Gove has kindly come to see my plays, and even reviewed them positively. Yet if the educational climate which he oversaw had existed when I was a student, I would not have written them. The story of Sherwood, from the exact communities we must level up, would not be on screen had my comprehensive school not encouraged me to do an artistic degree. The advances schools have made in numeracy and literacy should be celebrated, but a well-rounded education – not to mention a fair and equal one – should include at least one creative subject in the core curriculum. We’re hitting crisis point for art in schools, and this is not an exaggeration.

The Battle for Britain | 9 July 2022

Why racing needs Frankie Dettori

Heading for a holiday in Sardinia, I remembered that the last time we were there our engine-less, drifting boat was rescued by a Mr Dettori. Mrs Oakley’s relief was tempered only by my disappointment that our saviour wasn’t Frankie or even a relative. This time it looks as though it is Frankie, the world’s favourite sardine, who might need rescue.

Imagine Morecambe splitting with Wise or Torvill walking out on Dean. The racing world has focused on little else since John Gosden announced, after openly criticising some of his stable jockey’s rides at Royal Ascot, that he and Frankie Dettori are taking a sabbatical. John Gosden is the epitome of elder statesman urbanity, the unruffled Mr Cool of the parade ring with a lucid explanation for everything, greeting thrilling victories or unlucky setbacks with the same sagacious calm. By his standards this was an untidy affair, the racing public learning first that Frankie had not been booked for two runners at Newmarket the following Saturday trained by John and his son Thady. Only after the headlines created by that news was there a meeting between jockey and employer followed by the revelation of the ‘sabbatical’.

Frankie had an unlucky and unfortunate Royal Ascot. At the start of the Prince of Wales’s Stakes, Lord North’s blindfold caught in his bridle, delaying his exit from the stalls and wrecking his chance. On Stradivarius in the Gold Cup there was maximum pressure on his jockey: had they won, the hot favourite would have equalled Yeats’s record of four victories. Inexplicably Frankie chose at one stage to take him back a few places, letting the leader get away. He was then, legitimately, held in close to the rails by other jockeys and had to come wide in the straight too late to mount an effective challenge at the finish. In the Hampton Court Stakes, the Queen’s Reach For The Moon was an odds-on favourite but did not prove quite good enough to beat Claymore. In the Britannia Handicap, the Gosden-trained entry Saga was also owned by the Queen. Her Majesty had been unlucky with hopes trained by other trainers and the father-son duo would dearly have loved to have been the ones to give her a Jubilee winner at Royal Ascot. Frankie was in the rear early and when he came fast at the end of the race, he was beaten by a head. Said Gosden the next day: ‘He should have won.’ In the Coronation Stakes there was no criticism: the Gosden-trained, Frankie-ridden Inspiral started slowly but was coolly worked back into the field and won by a wide margin. So overall the Gosden/Dettori count at Ascot was one impeccable victory, one piece of bad luck, one commonly agreed bad ride, one hot favourite who came across a better opponent and one flying finish that just failed, the sort of thing that happens to jockeys on a regular basis. There must have been deeper tensions simmering if those were enough to cause the split.

The two best comments came from other riders. Brian Hughes, the champion jump jockey, noted in his blog: ‘Frankie Dettori hasn’t become a bad jockey overnight.’ And Kieren Fallon, a former champion on the Flat, declared that the affair should have been handled better on both sides: ‘Why would this be the end of Frankie? He’s alive and a gifted person and John Gosden will survive without him as well.’

Even top jockeys have bad rides. Frankie’s whip-flailing madness in the 1998 Breeders’ Cup on Swain was a famous shocker. Nor will it be Stradivarius’s picture that he hangs over the fireplace when he does eventually retire. But he remains a world-class jockey, especially on the big days which fuel his emotional energy. Dettori and Gosden together have had thrilling and consistent success with a series of stars such as Enable, Golden Horn and Palace Pier: Frankie’s strike rate for the yard over the past five years has been a remarkable 29 per cent. Just repayment; John Gosden has rescued Frankie’s career not once but twice – first when a headstrong Frankie shamefully threw away his initial retainer with Luca Cumani, the second when the jockey was at an all-time low after breaking up with Sheikh Mohammed’s Godolphin and suffering a six-month suspension for cocaine use.

An emotional jockey with a dominant father, Frankie requires sensitive management and John Gosden, like Luca Cumani and the late Barney Curley (who brought Frankie and Gosden together), has nurtured and sustained his confidence with skill and care. The problem for Frankie is that 62 per cent of his rides in recent years have been for the Gosdens. At 51 he has cut down his overall opportunities to concentrate on their quality horses, but he will need to keep riding regularly enough for others now to keep his physical and mental sharpness. Big rides in international races won’t be enough.

Hopefully a new up-and-comer in the training and owning ranks will recognise that and give him new opportunities because with racecourse attendances declining scarily we need the biggest showman in the saddle performing regularly on British courses.

The joy of a children’s choir

All afternoon I had been horizontal next to an electric fan, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake and sometimes halfway between those two states. By six o’clock the temperature had relented from 38 degrees to a comparatively easier 27 and I heard ice cubes tinkling into a glass. Catriona called up the stairs, offering gin. I said I’d rather a pot of tea and that His Lordship would rise and come downstairs for it.

So I put on my shorts, went down and joined her out on the terrace for the six o’clock shape-changer. For a pleasant change Catriona had no evening invitations or work commitments. We sat side by side sipping and looking out over the village rooftops and watched the wheeling acrobatics of the swifts and martins. The cliff face on which our house is perched was in deep shadow but the village rooftops and forested hills as far south as the Massif des Maures remained under the sun’s cosh. Showers of sand and small stones dislodged by squabbling sparrows higher up the cliff pittered down on our heads. Not often do we spend evenings quietly together like this and we said we must do it more often.

Catriona read her phone; I shopped on my iPad for T-shirts on which the company would print a word or slogan of your own choosing. After hearing on the radio of such a thing, I badly wanted one that said ‘Ethics Advisor’. The doubtful could just bowl up to me in the street for free but antiquated advice on how to conduct themselves and what to think.

The T-shirt firm with the simplest-to-use website offered a discount on three or more. After a bit of thought for the second one, I wrote in the box: ‘Diversity trainer’ – perhaps the most repugnant phrase in the English language today. It makes ‘fuck off’ look almost ecclesiastical. And what then for the third chest slogan to qualify for the discount? I consulted with Catriona. ‘Crotchety?’ she suggested.‘Commonplace?’ After realising that I could choose up to five words at no extra cost I toyed with ‘resigned cosmic melancholy’, ‘out of touch’ and ‘a lick and a promise’. While considering these and others, it occurred to me that a T-shirt slogan can only be a symptom of a narcissistic personality disorder of some sort.

At the coast the other week I saw a huge Arab woman paddling in one of those hideous burkini things emblazoned with ‘Gucci’ in embossed gold letters, perhaps the Islamic equivalent of evangelical Christian ‘prosperity’ teaching. Or maybe I read far too much into these things and she was merely a simple soul on holiday who liked Gucci stuff. She was up to her waist in the sea and talking on what must surely be the largest gold iPhone on the market. Finally, tired of overthinking it, I typed ‘probable narcissistic personality disorder of some sort’ in the box, claimed my discount, and left it at that.

Then we completed the Times 2 crossword in 12 minutes, 12 seconds. Our personal best is four minutes and 40 seconds. We’re a good team. What kept us was six letters: Henry – former PM: first letter P, last letter M.

I poured out a third cup of tea, Treena went inside and returned with a glass of boxed and watered white wine from the fridge. The sun’s long shadow travelled south across the landscape. The vast cigale maracas orchestra in the trees on the hill opposite fell silent at the flourish of some unseen conductor’s baton, leaving only the usual evening dove, whose indefatigable throaty voice reminds me of Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Happy Birthday, Mr President’.

Then, rising up from the open-air theatre and cinema at the foot of the cliff, came the sound of excited children, which, after about a quarter of an hour, coalesced into a children’s choir that transported us on a lively European tour in folk music and song. This first event of the summer season took us unawares, as did the choir’s devastating effect on the emotions. England, however, was in my crotchety view misrepresented by an absurdly simplistic ditty about noses, heavily dependent on counting from one to five. Other countries we visited in music and song, such as Ireland and Spain, were sublime in their massed sweetness. Sometimes I think I’d rather listen to a children’s choir than anything else. I don’t remember going to Germany.

We were in Greece when the moving shadow reached the foot of the mountains 40 miles away, overcame them, and the light began to fail. One of the things I like about living here is the sitting out in shorts on summer nights. But like a reluctant handle on a lavatory cistern returning inevitably to the horizontal after some gentle agitation, this evening I had to go back upstairs and lay down while it was still light, and the children were still singing.

The delights of two-timing

Looking back and trying to choose just one out of those incomparably bewitching women of one’s youth can be tricky. Giselle was definitely one of them – blonde, French, mesmeric, an apparition – but so was Kiki, very white-skinned, also French, patrician and very sexy. They were friends, those two, but they fell out after they chose the same boyfriend. They were also married to men who knew and liked the boyfriend, but back then such things were commonplace, and it was Paris after all. Both ladies are still alive and now quite old, Giselle a widow, Kiki a princess. There were many other beauties, of course, but those two stand out because of the timing: it was one hell of a winter month of sex and switch and switch again. Then the two of them got wise and it was goodbye. Ah, the foolishness of youth, though without it one would have been as useless as one is today.

I got the idea to reminisce after reading Jeremy’s column of last week. Unlike him, however, I never asked a lady how I was doing. Those things come naturally. I suppose it was the restless search for a purpose that led to the mad womanising, but incandescently porcelain skin in a woman can drive me mad, and as I said, Paris was a perpetual party, and as long as outward appearances were observed, it was ‘tout va’. My crowd was scornful of morality, yet very moral where anything but sex was concerned. Manners were observed to the extreme, and friends I made back then have lasted a lifetime.

Poignant moments are not always recalled at will, but I recently ran into one of the ladies in question and she asked me about the other, and things came flooding back. Am I living much too deeply in the past? Wouldn’t you if you were my age? I had a great youth, so why not think about it and smile? London followed Paris, and the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s were wild times in old London town. Weekend parties in the country, Hanbury, Fraser, Morley, Somerset, Gilmour weddings, Tramp and Annabel’s all-nighters, and by this time I was a happily married man with children growing up in the Bagel. That’s what I call living a full life, but an interior one it was not. What was that Edith Piaf song the foreign legionnaires sang as they surrendered to the Viet Minh in Dien Bien Phu? It was something about not regretting a thing. I feel the same, and that life of excess – drink, sex, drugs and gambling – is now in the past, the war against convention over and done with.

Well, not quite. Last week Ben Goldsmith found me somewhere in Mayfair, late at night, and rang for a car. ‘You’re in no shape to be walking alone,’ said Ben. ‘You’ll be mugged for sure.’ I protested but the next thing I remember I was home and Ben had taken care of the nanny-driver. The evening had begun in a civilised manner at Bellamy’s, Gavin Rankin’s great place where he gave George Livanos and me a terrific dinner with even better wines. The three of us had such a good time that I overdid things and after we closed the place I went looking for trouble. Finding trouble used to be my favourite pastime but it feels a bit funny nowadays. Perhaps it’s age, but most likely it’s because, having found too much trouble in the past, it all seems tame to me now. As a result I have taken on a terrific driver, a Lithuanian Catholic who talks to me about religion and will ensure that in future I get home safely without Ben Goldsmith’s munificence.

A London summer without Annabel Goldsmith’s garden party would be a bit like Boris without the blond mop, and I hooked up with old friends I never get to see any more. The prettiest girl there? Sophie Windsor, as always, but I could be prejudiced as I am her mother-in-law’s favourite person by far. I left the party early and joined friends at Hertford Street, but then came Sunday lunch chez les Bismarcks, a day that will live in infamy as we sat down at 2 p.m. and staggered upright at 8 p.m. It went something like this: two Bloody Marys, followed by a few glasses of sparkling rosé wine, then easily more than 20 glasses of fantastic red wine. Count and Countess B. left with their sons for a rock concert in Hyde Park, and I staggered home having given the driver the weekend off so that I could walk everywhere. It was a pitiful sight, a grown man crossing Onslow Square and asking for directions to the King’s Road.

Never mind. Another Greek, Nick Kyrgios, shamed the fatherland more than yours truly. I watched his father crossing himself while praying for his bum son to win against another Greek, and the speaker John Lloyd had no idea what the gesture was. Lloyd watches too many dumb videos, which is the reason Chrissy Evert gave when she divorced him. And at 67 Chrissy looked great at the Wimbledon ceremony on Sunday. As did the greatest of them all, Margaret Court. Next week I will have some tennis scoops for you, but from way back in the past. In the meantime I am going to go two days without booze, just like my doctor ordered some 40 years ago.

The 57 Tory ministers who resigned – forcing Boris to go

Boris Johnson has announced that he is resigning as Prime Minister after facing a tide of ministerial resignations. Below is the full list of cabinet ministers, junior ministers and other government employees who resigned, forcing the Prime Minister to act.

Cabinet ministers who have resigned from Boris Johnson’s government:

1. Oliver Dowden, party chairman (5.35 a.m. 24 June)

2. Sajid Javid, health secretary (6.02 p.m. 5 July)

3. Rishi Sunak, chancellor (6.10 p.m. 5 July)

4. Simon Hart, Wales Secretary (10.30 p.m. 6 July)

5. Brandon Lewis, Northern Ireland Secretary (6.49 a.m. 7 July)

6. Michelle Donelan, Education Secretary, (8.53 a.m. 7 July)

Junior ministers, trade envoys and party officials who have resigned from Boris Johnson’s government:

1. Andrew Murrison, trade envoy to Tunisia and Morocco (7 p.m. 5 July)

2. Bim Afolami, party vice chairman (7.33 p.m. 5 July)

3. Theo Clarke, trade envoy to Kenya (10.02 p.m. 5 July)

4. Alex Chalk, solicitor general (10.47 p.m. 5 July)

5. Will Quince, children and families minister (8.25 a.m. 6 July)

6. Robin Walker, education minister (9.43 a.m. 6 July)

7. John Glen, city minister and economic secretary for the Treasury (11.06 a.m. 6 July)

8. Victoria Atkins, prisons minister (11.34 a.m. 6 July)

9. Jo Churchill, agri-innovation and climate adaptation minister (12.01 p.m. 6 July)

10. Stuart Andrew, housing minister (12.41 p.m. 6 July)

11. Lee Rowley, industry minister (2.24 p.m. 6 July)

12. Alex Burghart, education minister (2.24 p.m. 6 July)

13. Julie Lopez, culture minister (2.24 p.m. 6 July)

14. Kemi Badenoch, equalities minister (2.25 p.m. 6 July)

15. Neil O’Brien, levelling up minister (6 July)

16. Mims Davies, employment minister (2.26 p.m. 6 July)

17. Rachel Maclean, safeguarding minister (3.38 p.m. 6 July)

18. Mike Freer, exports minister (4.09 p.m. 6 July)

19. David Duguid, fisheries envoy and trade envoy for Angola and Zambia (6.09 p.m. 6 July)

20. Ed Argar, health minister (11.04 p.m. 6 July)

21. David Mundell, trade envoy for New Zealand (9.22 p.m, 6 July)

22. Helen Whately, Treasury minister (6.49 a.m. 7 July)

23. Damian Hinds, security minister (7.15 a.m. 7 July)

24. George Freeman, science minster (7.21 a.m. 7 July)

25. Guy Opperman, pensions minister (7.50 a.m. 7 July)

26. Chris Philp, technology minister (8.02 a.m. 7 July)

27. James Cartlidge, courts minster (8.09 a.m. 7 July)

28. Richard Graham, Trade Envoy to Malaysia and the Philippines (8.14 a.m 7 July)

29. Rebecca Pow, environment minister (10.13 a.m. 7 July)

Parliamentary private secretaries and others who have resigned from Boris Johnson’s government:

1. Jonathan Gullis, PPS to the Northern Ireland secretary (7.48 p.m. 5 July)

2. Saqib Bhatti, PPS to the Department for Health and Social Care (7.51 p.m. 5 July)

3. Nicola Richards, PPS to the Department for Transport (8.27 p.m. 5 July)

4. Virginia Crosbie, PPS to the Wales Office (9.02 p.m. 5 July)

5. Laura Trott, PPS to the Department for Transport (8.11 a.m. 6 July)

6. Felicity Buchan, PPS to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (11.05 a.m. 6 July)

7. David Johnston, PPS to the Department for Education (1.30 p.m. 6 July)

8. Claire Coutinho, PPS to the Treasury (1.30 p.m. 6 July)

9. Selaine Saxby, PPS to the Treasury (1.30 p.m. 6 July)

10. Duncan Baker, PPS to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (3.10 p.m. 6 July)

11. Craig Williams, PPS to the Chancellor (3.22 p.m. 6 July)

12. Mark Logan, PPS to the Northern Ireland Office (3.32 p.m. 6 July)

13. Mark Fletcher, PPS to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (4.33 p.m. 6 July)

14. James Sunderland, PPS to the Department for Education (4.40 p.m. 6 July)

15. Sara Britcliffe, PPS to the Department for Education (4.49 p.m. 6 July)

16. Ruth Edwards, PPS to the Scotland Office (4.52 p.m. 6 July)

17. Peter Gibson, PPS to the Department for International Trade (5.14 p.m. 6 July)

18. Jacob Young, PPS to the Ministry of Housing (8.40 p.m. 6 July)

19. James Daly, PPS to the Department for Work and Pensions (9.25 p.m. 6 July)

21. Danny Kruger, PPS to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (9.36 p.m. 6 July)

22. James Davies, PPS to the Department for Health and Social Care (11.25 p.m. 6 July)

23. Gareth Davies, PPS to the Department for Health and Social Care (11.54 p.m. 6 July)

Suella Braverman announces Tory leadership bid

Boris Johnson has so far had four cabinet ministers resign and sacked one – in the form of Michael Gove. Now, one minister has come out publicly to say they will run to be a successor should there be a leadership contest. Step forward Suella Braverman.

On Wednesday evening, the Attorney General gave an interview to ITV’s Robert Peston in which she voiced her unhappiness over the Prime Minister’s behaviour in recent days. Braverman – who until now was viewed as a staunch Johnson loyalist – said there was an overwhelming sense of despair among MPs so ‘the time has come for the Prime Minister to step down’. Given she is one of many to say that, it wasn’t necessarily headline news. It’s also notable that she hasn’t actually resigned.

But what came after was striking, When asked by Peston whether she would consider running for leader, Braverman said:

‘Yes. If there is a leadership contest, I will put my name into the ring. I love this country. My parents came here with absolutely nothing and it was Britain that gave them hope, security and opportunity and afforded me incredible opportunities in education and my career. I owe a debt of gratitude to this country and to serve as prime minister would be the greatest honour so yes I will try.’

Braverman isn’t currently viewed as a frontrunner. In fact, the Brexiteer’s name has only really come up in conversations about the leadership race in the last few days. However, her candidacy points to three things.

First, how even Johnson’s most loyal ministers are losing faith in their leader. Second, how the European Research Group’s support could see a candidate like Braverman at the very least shape the debate when it comes to a contest. And finally, how wide-ranging and unpredictable any contest will be.

Live: Michael Gove sacked as Boris Johnson begins reprisals

Michael Gove has been sacked from the cabinet, as Boris Johnson attempts to reassert control after today’s 41 ministerial resignations. The Levelling-Up secretary had urged the Prime Minister to quit, a message later reinforced by a delegation of cabinet ministers who gathered in Downing Street earlier this evening. Nadhim Zahawi, the newly-appointed Chancellor, Michelle Donelan, the newly-appointed Education Secretary, Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, and Simon Hart, the Welsh Secretary, who has since resigned, are among those who told the PM to go. But Johnson has refused to do so and is now willing to risk a confidence vote which may come on Tuesday. 

Follow the latest developments on Thursday’s live blog here.

11.30 p.m – Suella Braverman announces Tory leadership bid

Katy Balls writes… Boris Johnson has so far had four cabinet ministers resign and sacked one – in the form of Michael Gove. Now, another minister has come out publicly to say they will run to be a successor should there be a leadership contest. Step forward Suella Braverman.

11.00 p.m. – Hart’s resignation leaves Boris with another dilemma

Katy Balls writes… After a day dominated by junior ministerial resignations, Boris Johnson has suffered one more cabinet resignation. This evening Simon Hart tendered his resignation. The Welsh Secretary had been one of the ministers who formed the Downing Street delegation calling on Johnson to resign or see his ministers go. Johnson refused to play ball. I understand Hart – a one-time Johnson loyalist – had considered resigning earlier but had been talked down by the Chief Whip who suggested he talked to the Prime Minister first. Hart’s departure leaves yet another vacancy for Johnson to fill. The question: is there a Welsh MP to replace him with? Two Welsh MPs – in the form of Faye Jones and Craig Williams – both quit as PPSs today.

10.30 p.m. – Simon Hart resigns

Simon Hart, the Welsh Secretary, has resigned from the government. Hart wrote in his letter to Boris Johnson that ‘there seems no other option left’ but to step down. “There was never a dull moment as a minister in your government,” he said. Quite.

9.30 p.m. – Gove fired by Boris

Fraser Nelson writes… This morning, Michael Gove advised Boris Johnson to resign on his own terms rather than be forced out: a difficult, but civil conversation. Then this evening, out of the blue, Johnson called Gove and fired him. It’s a mad end to a mad day. It’s easy to see why Gove didn’t join the exodus today: after having famously stuck the knife into Johnson in the 2016 Tory leadership race, Gove perhaps thought could not very well do so again. But his dismay with the direction of the Johnson project had become well-known. In yesterday’s Cabinet, Gove was the main voice of dissent – saying that it was time to be honest about the economic pain that lies ahead. Two of Gove’s Levelling-Up ministers, Neil O’Brien and Kemi Badenoch, resigned earlier today. A No10 source has been quoted saying of Gove “you can’t have a snake who is not with you on any of the big arguments who then gleefully tells the press the leader has to go.” But if Johnson intends to fire all those who think. that he has to go, that will be quite a lot of jobs to fill on top of the 39 ministers who have already resigned.

8.50 p.m. – Javid warns of Tory ‘1997-style wipeout’

Steerpike writes… After a long day of plots, gossip and rumour, where else to head but a think tank summer party? Thirsty Westminster watchers piled into the Centre for Policy Studies’ shindig tonight to variously drown their sorrows or toast the collapse of Boris Johnson’s government. But the main attraction was Sajid Javid, the former Health Secretary who resigned over the Pincher affair, as opposed to the attendant Matt Hancock, another former Health Secretary who, er, resigned over his own affair. 

Welcoming Javid to the stage was Robert Colvile, the CPS director and Sunday Times columnist who joked that: ‘On an extraordinary day in British politics, it’s great to be here with the man who started it all off.’ Remarking drily on the current direction of the government, Colvile remarked that when his think tank was launched in the 1970s ‘it was a time of high inflation and high taxes…it’s so good that things have changed.’ But then it was time for Javid to deliver his speech, watched on by an army of CCHQ’s finest. The onetime Chancellor remarked that he had received a range of messages since his resignation speech earlier today. 

Some, he said, had been comparing his speech to that of Geoffrey Howe, whose address in 1990 is credited with triggering the fall of Margaret Thatcher. Javid joked that he didn’t welcome the comparison as on the day that Thatcher resigned, he and a group of friends at Exeter University – former MP David Burrowes, conservative commentator Tim Montgomerie and current MP Robert Halfon – all clubbed together to raise £20 to send the Iron Lady a bouquet of flowers. Another message was from his family group chat about sushi in the house: a reminder, perhaps, of the role family plays in grounding politicians.

But then Javid struck a serious note, demanding a return to ‘real Conservative values.’ He told the crowd: ‘There’s only one solution: we have to go for growth and unfortunately we haven’t been doing enough of that.’ Javid concluded by saying: ‘Unless we do change and we become Conservative again, the genuine risk that we now face is that we could now be facing a 1997-style general election catastrophe, unless we change. We’ve got the opportunity to change now, we’ve got a couple of years before the next election. We can do it and we have to.’

And which leader might be able to sponsor that change, eh Saj?

8.45 p.m. – Why Grant Shapps isn’t quitting…yet

Isabel Hardman writes… Grant Shapps isn’t resigning as Transport Secretary at the moment. I understand he told the Prime Minister that he stood little chance of commanding a majority of the parliamentary party in a second confidence vote. He advised the Prime Minister that a more dignified exit would be for him to set his own timetable for an early but orderly departure. Shapps saying this is significant, given Johnson has long trusted him as the man with the spreadsheet who understands what the party is up to.

The reason he isn’t resigning yet is that he is still waiting to find out how Johnson reacts to his advice.

8.30 p.m. – why some Tories are nervous about ousting Boris

There were a number of groups within the ‘delegations’ of ministers who descended on Downing Street tonight. One was the stay camp, which was quite small. But within the resign group there were two sub-sections: those who are ready to quit, and those who won’t because they want to keep the government running, stay in their offices, and so on until an orderly transition takes place (and some hope they’ll stay beyond that too). 

The second group were asking Johnson to quit so they didn’t have to. His argument in response – and the one he plans to deploy in the vote of confidence that he wants to push this to – is that he was given a huge mandate by the British people in 2019, that the Tories will lose the next election without him and that this will usher in a Labour/SNP pact. To that end, he wants to start filling government positions to show that he does still have the ‘energy’ he was telling the Liaison Committee about earlier. The chief whip Chris Heaton-Harris has been warning that it isn’t going to be possible to fill 38 ministerial positions (and that’s before the ones who are expected to quit this evening, which includes Cabinet ministers) and that the government isn’t going to be able to run.

Earlier this week I was speaking to a Boris ally who had concluded that the game was up and it was time for him to go. This MP nonetheless warned that his colleagues needed to be careful about the long-term impact of removing a Prime Minister, pointing out that many Tories still get very emotional when talking about how Thatcher left No. 10. There has never been the same relationship between this Prime Minister and the Conservative party, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be a long and difficult toxic legacy from Johnson’s swansong.

8.00 p.m. – It’s more likely Boris survives the night

Isabel Hardman writes… Nadine Dorries, the Prime Minister’s most ardent supporter, has just left No. 10, telling journalists that she still wants him to stay on, and saying ‘oh yes’ when asked whether others hold that view too. She entered as part of a ‘delegation’ of support which consisted largely of her and Jacob Rees-Mogg. They were there to counter the arguments being pushed by other cabinet ministers that Johnson should quit tonight.

Johnson’s allies have said that he plans to ‘fight on’ and is ‘absolutely defiant’. This means that the Plan B option being discussed by MPs is more likely: a confidence vote against him on Tuesday. It is extraordinary that the Prime Minister wants to go in this way: but those who understand him say it is about going down fighting rather than appearing meek like other former Prime Ministers who quit earlier. 

What this means is that the section of the ‘resign’ delegation who had threatened to quit tonight if the PM did not take their advice – which includes Transport Secretary Grant Shapps and Welsh Secretary Simon Hart – will likely be announcing their resignations shortly. It will be interesting to see who else joins them, and who decides to keep the lights on in government for a few more days.

7.15 p.m. – Nadhim Zahawi’s star has fallen

Katy Balls writes… Who are the winners and losers from today’s Cabinet intervention? Of course, the person who suffers the most from it is Boris Johnson. But there’s also a sense among MPs that Nadhim Zahawi’s star has fallen as a result of the past 24 hours. As I write in this week’s politics column, there were nerves last night that Zahawi could join Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid in resigning. Instead he was promoted to Chancellor. In Downing Street, Johnson asked Zahawi: ‘Do you actually want the job?’ Zahawi replied that it was the most challenging, rewarding and exciting position there was and suggested that he would bring to the Treasury the efficiency and clarity he showed over the vaccine rollout.

No. 10 aides pointed to the appointment as evidence Johnson had support. So why has Zahawi changed his mind less than 24 hours later? He is believed to be in the delegation of ministers telling Johnson to go. The apparent turnaround has led some in the party to question his judgment.

7.10 p.m. – Might Boris manage to cling on?

James Forsyth writes… The role of the chief whip in tonight’s meeting in Downing Street is intriguing. Ministers who want Boris Johnson to go think that Chris Heaton-Harris agrees with them that the Prime Minister’s position is unsustainable. Now, when the chief whip thinks your position is unsustainable then it really is. But one Cabinet minister who knows the PM well thinks that Johnson’s inclination will be to go all the way to a confidence ballot, which will likely take place on Tuesday after the new executive of the 1922 Committee meets on Monday. Why? Because he thinks that if he holds on until then there is a chance that something might turn up.

7.00 p.m. – What’s happening inside No. 10

Katy Balls writes… I’ve just been outside 10 Downing Street where ministers have slowly been entering over the past two hours. We know that there is a delegation in there – including figures such as Welsh Secretary Simon Hart, Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis and Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi – who are believed to be issuing an ultimatum to the PM: either Johnson goes, or they go. There are members in this group who considered resigning but were talked down by the Chief Whip Chris Heaton-Harris who suggested the best way forward was to speak to Johnson. But there are also Johnson loyalists in No. 10, such as Nadine Dorries, who remain dedicated to the Prime Minister. 

6.40 p.m. – Why some Tory MPs want Boris gone, but not yet

James Forsyth writes… Will Boris Johnson resign? Interestingly, there are some who want him gone who are hoping he doesn’t. The logic of these grandees is that it would actually be cathartic for the party to remove Johnson in a confidence ballot rather than have him resign. They think that the margin of defeat would be so substantial that it would reduce the amount of poison that this would inject into the party and make it easier for a new leader to bring it back together.

6.35 p.m. – Thatcher’s downfall has a lesson for Boris’s enemies

Charles Moore writes… Few leaders could be as different in character as Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson, but one can compare their predicaments when colleagues turned on them.

Both had large parliamentary majorities and were never defeated in any election they led, yet both faced internal coups. In both cases, there were/ are good reasons why colleagues were fed up with their leaders. What was true in Mrs Thatcher’s case, however, and may well apply in Boris’s if he does go, is that her political assassination caused remorse, and immense, lasting division. As John Major understood and Michael Heseltine did not foresee, remorseful MPs tend to turn on the chief assassin and favour, almost paradoxically, the successor candidate who seems loyal to the ousted leader. If that logic works this time, Rishi Sunak (and the less likely Sajid Javid) will find it hard to win.

6.05 p.m. – Why a snap election is unlikely

James Forsyth writes… There is lots of continuing speculation about the prospect that Boris Johnson might call a general election, fuelled by the PM’s comments at the Liaison Committee. I really don’t think this is going to happen. Lots of parts of the British state don’t work, but the part that protects the Queen from political embarrassment is still pretty effective and if Johnson tried to seek a dissolution, he would – I suspect – find that the Queen was unavailable and Tory MPs would then do the necessary.

5.45 p.m. – Ministers expect Boris to walk tonight

Katy Balls writes… Boris Johnson is facing an ultimatum from members of his Cabinet to go, but technically he has a few days before MPs can force him out. The 1922 committee met today and decided not to change the rules now; instead elections for a new executive will take place next week. It’s only then that a rule change would be expected. Despite this, ministers suggest they think the most likely out come is Johnson goes tonight.

5.17 p.m. – Boris isn’t ready to go

Isabel Hardman writes… Boris Johnson’s final hours as Prime Minister have been undignified. We do not yet know quite how this will end, but we know he will eventually have to quit. There is a delegation of cabinet ministers in Downing Street waiting for him – more here. Johnson found out about this group while he was in the liaison committee hearing, and was confronted about it by Darren Jones. His response shows that he is not going to accept the first plea from this cabinet delegation. He burbled on about the cost of living and how he wasn’t going to ‘give you a running commentary’ on political issues. This underlines the point made to me earlier by senior Tories that Johnson is not yet psychologically ready to accept that it is over.

In the early stages of the committee when other chairs were asking their questions, Huw Merriman used his spare time to send a letter calling for another vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister. This was a change in position from someone who had previously said a leadership contest wouldn’t be the right thing for the party. Johnson, though, continued to insist that his government had ‘increasing energy’ and that it was possible to function and appoint more ministers.

A particularly surreal moment was when he started talking about his ambitions for a fertiliser round table. He even dropped into the session that he ‘probably’ met ex-KGB agent Alexander Lebedev without aides while he was Foreign Secretary – something that would have made front page news on a day when the agenda wasn’t about his downfall.

If this was his last performance as Prime Minister, it showed up one of his lesser mentioned, but still important main weaknesses. He is terrible at details, and spent much of the session struggling to offer answers to questions about what the government is doing. As much as anything else, it rather undermines his claim to be focusing on delivery, which is all about details. You might be able to deliver if you have good ministers. But Johnson is heading back to Downing Street to discover that now he really doesn’t have them either.

4.51 p.m. – Has Nadhim Zahawi turned on Boris already?

Steerpike writes… Has Nadhim Zahawi turned on Boris Johnson, just 24 hours after he was promoted to Chancellor? That’s the question all of Westminster is asking tonight amid rumours that Johnson will shortly meet with a delegation of senior cabinet ministers.

The PM is currently undergoing a two-hour grilling at the Liaison Committee where he is facing a range of issues from the national to the extremely local. It was left to Darren Jones, the Business Select Committee chairman to break the news to Boris. Jones asked if he was aware about the imminent cabal, claims to which Johnson reacted with indifference.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire, eh Boris?

4.49 p.m. – The end might be nigh

James Forsyth writes… Boris Johnson is now facing a situation where if he doesn’t resign he will face more cabinet resignations. Johnson is currently in front of the liaison committee, but when he returns to his office he will have a delegation of cabinet ministers waiting to see him who will tell him he is done and that he must resign.

When I asked one ‘Is it over?’, they simply replied ‘yes’. If Johnson won’t go, he will face more cabinet resignations than he can fill. Leaving junior ministerial posts unfilled is bad, but it is simply not credible to not be filling cabinet posts.

Remarkably, one of the ministers who will tell Johnson to go is Nadhim Zahawi who was made Chancellor less than 24 hours ago. This is a sign of just how fast the mood in the parliamentary party has changed. Boris Johnson’s premiership is now in its final days, or possibly even hours.

Watch: Douglas Murray clashes with Alastair Campbell

As the news rolled in that Michael Gove had been sacked by Boris Johnson, our own Douglas Murray was on Piers Morgan’s show on TalkTV alongside former spin doctor Alastair Campbell. Mr S thought that readers may well enjoy watching the subsequent clash between the pair over propriety in public life, which ended when Campbell stormed off the show…

Tory MPs are looking on in horror

Tonight it is clear that the only way Tory MPs can remove Boris Johnson is through the new 1922 executive changing the rules on Monday and a new confidence ballot on Tuesday. Johnson has ignored the pleas from several of his Cabinet to take a dignified exit. He is instead, in the words of one secretary state, ‘on the warpath’. He has sacked Michael Gove for having had the temerity to tell him that he should go, as he could no longer command the support of the parliamentary party.

Johnson is clearly determined to carry on fighting. There’s talk of an economic intervention in the coming days to cancel the corporation tax rise and unfreeze income tax thresholds. But despite Johnson’s determination to fight, he is still going to go down. Tory MPs are looking on in horror tonight. They will elect an executive that is prepared to change the rules and those rules will then be changed as quickly as possible with a vote coming as early as Tuesday.

It is hard to imagine that Johnson will have much chance in the confidence ballot. Earlier this evening, one grandee speculated to me Johnson would get fewer than 100 votes – and it is hard to think that Johnson’s antics aren’t driving that number down still further. There are some who argue that this vote could actually be cathartic for the party, that it could demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of Tory MPs want Johnson gone and that would limit the power of the Johnson myth. But the 120-odd hours to next Tuesday are going to feel very long to the Tory party.

Live: The Tory MPs calling for Boris Johnson to go

How can Boris Johnson survive this one? That’s the question all of Westminster is asking today after the resignations of Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid. A number of other colleagues have chosen to follow them out of the door: you can keep track of resignations here. But it’s not just ministers who want Boris gone: more than a dozen backbenchers have now gone public with their frustrations. This follows last month’s no-confidence vote when 148 Tory MPs voted against Johnson’s leadership; a number that has only increased since then. Below is the growing list of those who have gone public with their demands for Johnson to go…

MPs who have lost faith in Boris Johnson’s leadership and/or called for the PM’s resignation:

1. Aaron Bell, Newcastle-under-Lyme – 12 January: ‘The breach of trust that the events in No 10 Downing Street represent, and the manner in which they have been handled, makes his position untenable.’

2. Tim Loughton, East Worthing and Shoreham – 15 January: ‘The reason for my conclusion in calling for him to stand down is the way that he has handled the mounting revelations in the last few weeks. Obfuscation, prevarication and evasion have been the order of the day’.

3. David Davis, Haltemprice and Howden – 19 January: ‘You have sat too long here for all the good you have done. In the name of God, go.’

4. Andrew Mitchell, Sutton Coldfield – 31 January: ‘When he kindly invited me to see him 10 days ago, I told him that I thought he should think very carefully about what was now in the best interests of our country, and of the Conservative party. I have to tell him that he no longer enjoys my support.’

5. Peter Aldous, Waveny – 1 February: ‘After a great deal of soul-searching, I have reached the conclusion that the Prime Minister should resign.’

6. Tobias Ellwood, Bournemouth East – 2 February: ‘I don’t think the Prime Minister realises how worried colleagues are in every corner of the party, backbenchers and ministers alike that this is all only going one way.’

7. Gary Streeter, South West Devon – 2 February: ‘I cannot reconcile the pain and sacrifice of the vast majority of the British Public during lockdown with the attitude and activities of those working in Downing Street.’

8. Anthony Magnall, Totnes – 2 February: ‘I have no confidence in the Prime Minister because his actions are overshadowing the work of excellent ministers and colleagues, and this can no longer continue. And so I’ve therefore submitted my letter to the chairman of the 1922 committee.’

9. William Wragg, Hazel Grove – 2 February: ‘I cannot reconcile myself to the Prime Minister’s continued leadership’.

10. Nick Gibb, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton – 4 February: ‘To restore trust, we need to change the prime minister.’

11. Nigel Mills, Amber Valley – 13 April: ‘I don’t think a Prime Minister can survive or should survive breaking the rules he put in place.’

12. Mark Harper, Forest of Dean – 14 April: ‘Those in charge have to obey the same laws as everyone else.’

13. Stephen Hammond, Wimbledon – 18 April: ‘Any Minister who has knowingly misled the House of Commons should resign.’

14. Steve Baker, Wycombe – 21 April: ‘The Prime Minister should just know: the gig’s up.’

15. Craig Whittaker, Calder Valley – 27 April: ‘Do the right thing and resign.’

16. Sir Roger Gale, North Thanet – 24 May: ‘I believe that the PM has misled the HoC from the despatch box. That is a resignation issue. I have made my own position clear.’

17. Julian Sturdy, York Outer – 25 May: ‘It is now in the public interest for him to resign.’

18. Steve Brine, Winchester and Chandler’s Ford – 25 May: ‘Rule makers cannot be law-breakers.’

19. John Baron, Basildon and Billericay – 26 May: ‘I’m afraid the Prime Minister no longer enjoys my support.’

20. David Simmonds, Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner – 26 May: ‘Accordingly, it is time for him to step down.’

21. Bob Neill, Bromley and Chislehurst – 27 May: ‘Trust is the most important commodity in politics, but these events have undermined trust in not just the office of the Prime Minister, but in the political process itself. To rebuild that trust and move on, a change in leadership is required.’

22. Alicia Kearns, Rutland and Melton – 27 May: ‘My position remains unchanged since January, and the Prime Minister continues not to hold my confidence.’

23. Jeremy Wright, Kenilworth and Southam – 30 May: ‘Accountability and restoring faith in good Government require something more.’

24. Elliot Colburn, Carshalton and Wallington – 30 May: Said he was ‘especially appalled’ at reports of poor treatment of security and cleaning staff in No. 10.

25. Andrew Bridgen, North West Leicestershire – 30 May: ‘There is obviously and rightly still a lot of anger about the culture in No 10 during the lockdown period.’

26. John Stevenson, Carlisle – 31 May: ‘The only way we are to draw a line under all the recent issues.’

27. Jesse Norman, Hereford and South Herefordshire – 6 June: ‘Neither the Conservative Party nor the country can afford to squander the next two years adrift and distracted by endless debate about you and your leadership.’

28. Jeremy Hunt, South West Surrey – 6 June: ‘We are no longer trusted by the electorate’.

29. John Penrose, Weston-super-Mare – 6 June: ‘You have breached a fundamental principle of the ministerial code – a clear resigning matter’.

30. Douglas Ross, Moray – 6 June: ‘I have heard loud and clear the anger at the breaking of the Covid rules.’

31. Sir Robert Syms, Poole – 6 June: ‘Although a secret ballot, I intend to vote no in the confidence vote this evening.

32. John Lamont, Berwickshire – 6 June: ‘Tonight, I have voted against the Prime Minister in the Vote of Confidence’

33. Andrew Bowie, West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine – 6 June: ‘Tonight, and with a heavy heart, I have taken the extremely tough decision to vote against the Prime Minister.’

34. David Mundell, Dumfriesshire – 6 June: ‘After a difficult couple of years and listening to the views of my constituents, I voted tonight for a fresh start and new leadership for our country.’

35. Dehenna Davison, Bishop Auckland – 6 June: ‘Weighing it all up, I voted against the Prime Minister today’

36. Caroline Nokes, Romsey and Southampton North – 12 January: ‘He either goes now, or he goes in three years time.’

37. Karen Bradley, Staffordshire Moorlands – 13 April: ‘But I do wish to make it clear that if I had been a minister found to have broken the laws that I passed, I would be tendering my resignation now.’

38. Angela Richardson, Guildford – 25 May: ‘I am clear that had this been a report about my leadership, I would resign.’

39. Paul Holmes, Eastleigh – 27 May: ‘I have now resigned from my governmental responsibilities as a Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Home Office.’

40. Nickie Aiken, Cities of London – 30 May: Said Johnson should submit himself to a vote to ‘end speculation’ about his future.

41. Dan Poulter, Central Suffolk and North Ipswich – 30 May: ‘A minister who knowingly misleads Parliament should resign.’ Says he won’t reveal if he’s submitted a letter.

42. Andrea Leadsom, South Northamptonshire – 30 May: In a letter to constituents, Leadsom pointed the finger at Boris Johnson for ‘unacceptable failings of leadership’ over the partygate scandal.

43. Tom Tugendhat, Tonbridge and Malling – 30 May: ‘I have made my position clear to those who need to hear it.’

44. Kate Griffiths, Burton – 31 May: Says she ‘remains angry about the actions of the prime minister and his senior staff’ and that there are still ‘unanswered questions.’

45. Simon Fell, Barrow and Furness – 1 June: In an email to a constituent, he said that Sue Gray’s findings were ‘a slap in the face’ and that ‘apologising after the fact is insufficient.’

46. Caroline Dineage, Gosport – 1 June: ‘Systemic change is needed.’

47. Laurence Robertson, Tewkesbury – 6 June: ‘It’s now time for a new approach.’

48. Rishi Sunak, Richmond – 5 July: ‘We cannot continue like this.’

49. Sajid Javid, Bromsgrove – 5 July: ‘The party is bigger than any one individual.’

50. Andrew Murrison, South West Wiltshire – 5 July: ‘Your position has become unrecoverable. I urge you to resign.’

51. Bim Afolami, Hitchin and Harpenden – 5 July: ‘It’s become clear that the time has come for him to stand down.’

52. Saqib Bhatti, Meriden – 5 July: ‘My conscience will not allow me to continue to support this administration.’

53. Jonathan Gullis, Stoke-on-Trent North – 5 July: ‘I can no longer serve as part of your government.’

54. Nicola Richards, West Bromwich East, – 5 July: ‘I am loyal to the Conservative party, which is currently unrecognisable to me.’

55. Virginia Crosbie, Ynys Môn – 5 July: ‘The sheer number of allegations of impropriety and illegality is quite simply making your position untenable.’

56. Theo Clarke, Stafford – 5 July: ‘I take allegations of sexual misconduct very seriously.’

57. Sally-Ann Hart, Hastings – 5 July: ‘Considering the further revelations that have come to light, I am no longer able to support Boris Johnson.’

58. Alex Chalk, Cheltenham – 5 July: ‘The time has come for fresh leadership.’

59. Laura Trott, Sevenoakes – 6 July: ‘Trust in politics is, and must always be, of the upmost importance, but sadly in recent months this has been lost.’

60. Will Quince, Colchester – 6 July: ‘I have no choice but to tender my resignation.’

61. Robin Walker, Worcester – 6 July: ‘Our great party has become distracted from its core missions.’

62. Chris Skidmore, Kingswood – 6 July: ‘This is an extremely grave situation that is tantamount to an effective cover up of sexual abuse.’

63. Lee Anderson, Ashfield – 6 July: ‘Integrity should always come first.’

64. Robert Halfon, Harlow – 6 July: ‘I gave the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt before… I can’t bring myself to do this again.’

65. Laurence Robertson, Tewkesbury – 6 June: ‘It’s now time for a new approach.’

66. Anne Marie Morris, Newton Abbott – 28 May: ‘The country needs strong leadership.’

67. Neil Hudson, Penrith and the Border – 14 June: ‘I categorically will not defend the indefensible.’

68. Felicity Buchan, Kensington – 6 July: ‘You have lost the confidence of my constituents and me.’

69. John Glen, Salisbury – 6 July: ‘The country deserves better.’
70. Tom Hunt, Ipswich – 6 July: ‘I strongly believe that the situation which occurred last week could have been avoided and I also think that the handling of it subsequently was deeply disappointing.’

71. Anthony Browne, South Cambridgeshire – 6 July: ‘If he does not resign, he must be removed.’

72. Victoria Atkins, Louth and Horncastle – 6 July: ‘I can no longer pirouette around our fractured values.’

73. Jo Churchill, Bury St Edmunds – 6 July: ‘The country and party deserve better’

74. Jo Gideon, Stoke-on-Trent Central – 27 April: ‘As a Conservative, I believe we must demonstrate integrity in our actions.’

75. Gary Sambrook, Birmingham Northfield – 6 July: Johnson ‘always tries to blame others for his mistakes’.

76. Stuart Andrew, Pudsey – 6 July: ‘I cannot tolerate [our members] having to defend the indefensible.’

77. Selaine Saxby, North Devon – 6 July: ‘Trust, truth and integrity are vital in our work.’

78. Claire Coutinho, East Surrey – 6 July: We need a ‘laser-like grip on reforming our public services… the events of recent weeks and months are preventing us from doing that.’

79. David Johnston, Wantage and Didcot – 6 July: ‘I cannot defend what has taken place these past few days – or indeed these past few months.’

80. Robert Jenrick, Newark – 6 July: ‘If we continue along our present path we risk doing lasting damage to the reputation of the Conservative Party for competence and good government and more importantly, to the standing of politics generally.’

81. Liam Fox, North Somerset – 6 July: ‘I have loyally supported every Conservatives Leader since 1992. However, today I am withdrawing my support for the Prime Minister. Boris Johnson’s leadership is untenable.’

82. Duncan Baker, North Norfolk – 6 July: ‘The breakdown in trust from the last six months is abundantly clear.’

83. Mims Davies, Eastleigh – 6 July: ‘I have no confidence in your leadership.’

84. Fay Jones, Brecon and Radnorshire – 6 July: ‘My faith in him was misplaced.’

85. Robert Buckland, South Swindon – 6 July: Johnson is now in a ‘Theresa May situation.’

86. Craig Williams, Montgomeryshire – 6 July: ‘With deep regret I resign from your government.’

87. Mark Logan, Bolton North East – 6 July: There is ‘only so much he could expect his constituents to accept and ignore’.

88. Rachel Maclean, Redditch – 6 July: ‘I ask you now to step aside.’

89. Huw Merriman, Bexhill and Battle – 6 July: ‘I will not support the current Prime Minister in such a contest.’

90. Lee Rowley, North East Derbyshire – 6 July: ‘In good faith, we must ask that, for the good of the party and the country, you step aside.’

91. Alex Burghart, Brentwood and Ongar – 6 July: ‘In good faith, we must ask that, for the good of the party and the country, you step aside.’

92. Kemi Badenoch, Saffron Walden – 6 July: ‘In good faith, we must ask that, for the good of the party and the country, you step aside.’

93. Neil O’Brien, Harborough, Oadby and Wigston – 6 July: ‘In good faith, we must ask that, for the good of the party and the country, you step aside.’

94. Julia Lopez, Hornchurch and Upminster – 6 July: ‘In good faith, we must ask that, for the good of the party and the country, you step aside.’

95. Anna Firth, Southend West – 6 July: ‘I believe this is now destroying the public’s trust in democracy.’

96. Mike Freer, Finchley and Golders Green – 6 July: ‘I now feel we have let down our constituents and our supporters.’

97. Mark Fletcher, Bolsover – 6 July: ‘Any person who suggests that anyone other than Mr Pincher is solely responsible for what happened that night is not fit to lead our country.’

98. Bob Seely, Isle of Wight – 6 July: ‘It’s clear that that Boris – despite his past strengths – is becoming a distraction to governing Britain.’

99. Sara Britcliffe, Hyndburn and Haslingden – 6 July: ‘It is time to draw a line.’

100. Peter Gibson, Darlington – 6 July: ‘It is of the utmost importance that the office of Prime Minister represents all the high standards required of public life, which I do not believe it presently does.’

101. Ruth Edwards, Rushcliffe – 6 July: Said she was ‘heartbroken’ to hear that Johnson knew of the Pincher allegations.

102. James Sunderland, Bracknell – 6 July: ‘I have today resigned.’

103. Alec Shelbrooke, Elmet and Rothwell – 6 July: ‘It is now clear to me that the Prime Minister’s leadership of the Conservative party can go on no longer’

104. David Duguid, Banff and Buchan – 6 July: ‘In light of recent events, I believe the Prime Minister’s position is now untenable’

105. Jacob Young, Redcar and Cleveland – 6 July: ‘It’s because of my loyalty to him, that I urge him to now step aside and allow the country to move forward.’

106. Suella Braverman, Attorney General – 6 July: ‘I do think the time has come for the Prime Minister to step down.’

Boris skewered – for one last time?

A brutal encounter at the Liaison Committee this afternoon. Boris was grilled for two hours by a gang of aggressive MPs, (many of them Tories), who were drooling and panting for him to quit. But it wasn’t until the final moments that the session caught fire.

Darren Jones took the first chunk out of the PM. 

‘How’s your week going?’ asked the Labour MP mildly.

‘Terrific, like many other weeks.’

‘Did Michael Gove come in and tell you to resign today?’

‘I’m here to talk about what the government is doing.’

Boris brushed off a similar attack from the SNP’s Angus MacNeil.

‘The game’s up. Will you still be prime minister tomorrow?’

‘Of course, Mr MacNeil,’ schmoozed Boris. ‘And rather than giving a running commentary I’m here to talk about the government programme.’

The East London MP Meg Hillier snarled that she’d lost all confidence in the PM. Blimey. What a blow for poor Boris. Hackney wants him out!

Steven Crabbe was the first Tory to punch below the belt.

‘Do you not feel the ability of government is deteriorating as we speak?’

Boris: When I came into parliament there were 140 Conservative members and now there are 365, or thereabouts, so we have a wealth of talent, Steven.

Then came William Wragg, an unknown backbencher, whose habit of bashing Boris has earned him a level of notoriety that scarcely reflects any personal merit or expertise. Wragg has a whispery voice and an overeducated demeanour. Seems very pleased with himself too. He looks like a town planner with a grudge. He asked an impenetrable question about Her Majesty’s constitutional right to refuse a PM’s request to dissolve parliament. What did that mean? We found out later.

Chris Bryant burst into the debate like an angry maths teacher demanding free teabags for the staff-room. He’d armed himself with a series of gossipy quips made by Boris about Chris Pincher, the MP accused of drunkenly groping young men.

Bryant: Did you say, ‘all the sex-pests are supporting me?’

Boris: People attribute all sorts of things to me. I don’t remember saying it.

Bryant: That sounds like a yes. Did you call Pincher ‘handsy’?

Boris: Not a word I use.

Bryant: What about ‘Pincher by name, pincher by nature?’

Boris was outraged. Or pretended to be. He accused Bryant of scurrilous muck-raking and of attempting to trivialise a serious matter.

Bryant erupted. ‘The allegation is that YOU trivialised this issue – and you’ve not even remembered it. You appointed someone you believed to be a sex-pest.’

Too much rage. Brant would make a lousy barrister. He fumed that the Pincher issue was about the Prime Minister’s personal morality. And about his inability to learn a lesson.

‘You’re not going to change. We’ll be doing this again and again!!’

‘Coming back to the Liaison Committee?’ said Boris affably. ‘Yes and I hope very much to be invited.’

Committee chairman, Sir Bernard Jenkin, joined the lynch mob. But very nicely. His voice is as smooth as a double Baileys.

‘In the end,’ he suggested to Boris, ‘we are all dispensable.’

‘That is true,’ came the reply. ‘All flesh is grass.’

He asked about Boris’s retirement plans if Tory MPs declare a loss of confidence in his leadership. Boris swatted this aside but Sir Bernard pressed him on the issue.

‘If you have lost the confidence of your MPs – you will not seek a dissolution? And you will stand aside and allow a leadership election?’

This was the point that Wragg had been wrangling about. Boris’s enemies fear that he may call a snap election and scupper the plotters by appealing to the electorate for a fresh mandate.

‘I’m not going to step down,’ said Boris. ‘And the last thing this country needs is an election.’

That was not the assurance that Sir Bernard wanted. The irate headmaster had lost patience with his gifted but wayward prefect.

‘I’m going to ask you once more: if you have lost your MPs’ confidence will you seek to dissolve parliament?’

Boris ruled it out. He said the earliest date for an election would be two years from now. In 2024.

That closed the session. But they all think he’s a rotten fibber anyway. So why place any faith in his most recent promise?

Things are moving fast but it seems that the Tories have pressed the self-destruct button. The anti-Brexit alliance is about to seize the coming decade.

Boris Johnson’s five worst moments at the Liaison Committee

It’s not been a good day for Boris Johnson. More than 50 Tory MPs have publicly called for him to go, he’s lost 30 members of his payroll vote and he got embarrassed by Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs in a performance which, shockingly, left the House demanding MORE of the staid Labour leader. This evening he is set to meet a delegation of senior Cabinet ministers who want him to quit. Among them is Nadhim Zahawi who, less than 24 hours after professing faith in the PM’s leadership now, er, finds that post-promotion he’s lost it.

But probably the most humiliating moment was Johnson’s two hour grilling by some of his most hated Tory foes at the Liaison Committee including Tobias Ellwood, Caroline Nokes and William Wragg. There was an air of unreality to proceedings this afternoon as the embattled premier was asked about a range of issues for which Boris Johnson might, er, not be responsible for too much longer. Below are five of the lowlights from what might well be the PM’s last time facing the Liaison Committee of Select Committee chairs.

Boris gets ambushed about the delegation

The most dramatic moment came at the end of the session as rumours swirled around Westminster that Johnson was about to face a delegation of senior cabinet ministers who would call on him to resign. It was left to Darren Jones, the Business Select Committee chairman, to break the news to Boris. Jones asked if he was aware about the imminent cabal, to which Johnson reacted with complete indifference. Talk about sangfroid.

Wragg grills Johnson about Pincher

One awkward exchange involved the PM and his mutinous backbencher, Will Wragg. The baby-faced assassin asked Johnson what particular traits made Chris Pincher so attractive as deputy chief whip. After some standard Johnsonian bluster (quelle surprise), the embattled blonde said that Pincher had ‘excellent administrative skills’. The Tory leader was also asked if he considered appointing Chris Pincher as Chief Whip in February. Johnson replied ‘Not to my recollection’; an evasive reply which led to yet more probing by Wragg and Sir Bernard Jenkin.

Missing ministers need to be filled

Having lost more than 15 ministers, Boris now has something of a recruitment problem. Unfortunately when asked by Stephen Crabb how he intended to fill these roles, given that no-one wants to serve under Johnson, the PM didn’t have many answers. The latter replied cooly that ‘When I came into Parliament I think there were about 140 Conservative MPs; there are now 360 or so. There is a wealth of talent Stephen, and we should be confident in out ability’. Johnson’s fellow Tories in the room seemed unconvinced.

Lebedev cross-examination

While his mind was doubtless elsewhere on parties and Pincher, Johnson was somewhat blindsided by a series of questions from Dame Diana Johnson. The Labour MP demanded to know if he met with former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev without officials when he was Foreign Secretary. After persistent questioning, Johnson meekly admitted that he ‘probably’ did did so back in 2018 when he served under Theresa May. The Observer previously reported Johnson ditched his security detail to meet Lebedev while he was on holiday. Has today given an old story new legs?

Queen constitutional drama

Eyebrows were practically hitting the ceiling by the time Sir Bernard Jenkin raised the question about Johnson calling an election to remain in office. The PM’s reply strongly suggested that moves to oust him could indeed prompt a snap contest, saying it would not happen ‘unless everybody is so crazy as to try and …’ before trailing off. At the end of the session Jenkin repeatedly asked Johnson if he could rule out calling an election if he lost the confidence of his MPs. Johnson’s response was to, er, fight fire with fire by repeatedly dodging the question and refusing to say he would resign if he lost the confidence of his MPs.

Thatcher’s downfall has a lesson for Boris’s enemies

Few leaders could be as different in character as Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson, but one can compare their predicaments when colleagues turned on them. 

Both had large parliamentary majorities and were never defeated in any election they led, yet both faced internal coups. In both cases, there were/ are good reasons why colleagues were fed up with their leaders. What was true in Mrs Thatcher’s case, however, and may well apply in Boris’s if he does go, is that her political assassination caused remorse, and immense, lasting division. As John Major understood and Michael Heseltine did not foresee, remorseful MPs tend to turn on the chief assassin and favour, almost paradoxically, the successor candidate who seems loyal to the ousted leader. If that logic works this time, Rishi Sunak (and the less likely Sajid Javid) will find it hard to win. 

As for division, it will be said that it was very strange to evict a prime minister because of what he did or did not know about the predilections of a deputy chief whip, when the world order and the world economy are tottering and people face frightening inflation at home. They will also see a forced Johnson departure as confirmation that Remainers, whatever the voters decided, still have the power behind the scenes. Much trouble ahead.