The next morning, Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s former top adviser turned arch-foe, heated things up even further by gleefully taking to Twitter to set the fuses on a new round of “Dom Bombs” for the candidates, suggesting at least two of they slept with their special advisors (spads).
“At least three current candidates would be worse than Boris,” he said. “At least one is crazier than Truss, apparently unfit to be near nuclear codes. At least one dash—–. The odds of improvement are dangerously close to 50:50!”
He later added: “Sorry, correction, I’m informed by the Cabinet Office ‘at least 2 spad sh—–s’!” It would be very Westminster for Boris to get the bullet for the lies about the sex/groping and SW1’s inability to deal with it, only to be replaced by someone who actually whispers to him!”
Whether there is any truth to the allegations is beside the point – the enemies of the various candidates are already sharpening their knives, and whoever is running would do well to clear the skeletons out of their closet now.
One Downing Street source summed it up: “You’re going to have a circus; clown show. What will happen over the next 72 hours will be an extremely intense live-fire exercise where various people jump, lunge forward, introduce themselves and get shot. It’s going to be a messy business.
“The Herd Tramples”
Having survived the controversies surrounding partygate, wallpapergate and the Owen Paterson affair to name but three, no one could have predicted that it would be a scandal that didn’t even directly involve the Prime Minister who finally brought it down.
Chris Pincher resigned as deputy chief whip on June 30 after admitting he had “embarrassed myself and other people” after “drinking too much” and allegedly groping two men at the Carlton club in Piccadilly , the Conservative Party’s de facto private common room club.
Not for the first time in political history, it was not the incident itself that caused the dominoes to fall, but the way Downing Street misled the public about Mr Johnson’s prior knowledge of Mr Pincher’s behavior before promoting him.
After claiming that Mr Johnson was unaware of any allegations against Mr Pincher at the time – a line repeated by ministers as they were dispatched for television and radio interviews – Number 10 continued to change its story until on Monday did not admit that Mr. Johnson was in fact personally aware of previous such claims but that they had been “dissolved”.
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