Wipeout: the lies and cowardice that detonated the Tory party

“We are still being punished for Johnson and Truss,” one minister said ruefully as the Conservative Party surveyed the wreckage of its two crushing by-election defeats at Labour’s hands in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire. As one Tory insider told me: “Boris was a good mayor and brilliant after-dinner speaker, but should never have become prime minister.” Michael Gove got it right in 2016 when he knifed Johnson in the front, sabotaging his leadership campaign by saying that Johnson was incapable of “leading the party and the country in the way that I would have hoped”. open image in gallery Counting agents observe as ballots are verified during the Mid Bedfordshire by-election Thursday’s by-elections suggest that the Tories are still afflicted by what some party insiders call “long Boris”. open image in gallery Labour’s winning candidate Alistair Strathern will replace Nadine Dorries as MP for Mid Bedfordshire Anthony Seldon, the historian and co-author of Johnson at 10, wrote: “A top tier prime minister would, unlike him, have worked ferociously hard to drive through the benefits of Brexit and to show definitively that the decision had been the right one for the country.” Seldon concluded: “Johnson had the potential, the aspirations and the opportunity to become one of Britain’s great prime ministers.