I've had £40 riding on Gove to be next Tory leader for over a year. They were offering 12:1 at the time and even though I didn't (and don't) think he's likely to win, I thought they'd got the odds wrong so I took a punt.

Malthouse and Stewart are relative unknowns to me as well. Malthouse loned his name to a Brexit proposal that was supposedly better than Theresa May's or the usual ERG solutions, because instead of Unicorns, the Malthouse Compromise was fuelled with Sooty's oofle-dust. Rory Stewart walked 10 times around the world to be a diplomat or something.

The rest are as repellant a bunch of self-promoting, vain, avaricious*, entitled vermin as you could ever hope to avoid.

*because sometimes greedy just won't do.

Stewart is the guy who made up a good stat during an interview.
 

A bit fucking dim to think nobody's gonna call him on saying 80%!

Oh, that was him! What a twat. So that's a full set of candidates lacking any ability whatsoever to be a Prime Minister (along with any compassion for or understanding of the lives most people live). The addition of Cleverly to the list doesn't change that. What a perfect bit of misnaming btw.

Anyway, Boris has a date with m'learned friends in due course...

He's now also the guy who put a video on twitter where he tried to make it look like he was holding his phone and recording it himself, but he wasn't and someone else was. Very odd.

Lying ain't a good look, unless you're an aspirational populist.

For some reason I thought you had that on Philip Hammond, though it appears there's no mention of him even possibly standing in this or previous leadership elections.

Heavens no! They'd have had to offer astronomical odds for me to have taken a punt on him. Even backing Gove was an act of laughable optimism spurred on by greed.

Rory Stewart looks as if he was born without a face and has borrowed one of Mick Jagger's old ones, even though it doesn't quite fit.

Nominations have closed, down from 13 candidates to "just" 10, with Boris as front-runner based on MP public support - three days until the first ballot gives the real numbers.

64 Boris Johnson
35 Jeremy Hunt
35 Michael Gove
24 Dominic Raab
19 Sajid Javid
14 Matt Hancock
 7 Mark Harper
 6 Esther McVey
 6 Rory Stewart
 5 Andrea Leadsom

I guess Hunt will be the final girl to lose against Johnson.

If the Tories had an ounce of bottle (or imagination) they'd go for Stewart and the (faint) possibility of a cross-party solution.  But they don't.

Meanwhile, the Summer of Gove owes me £40. He can pay me back in crack.

Rory Stewart is just as bad as the rest. Seems much more personable, but his voting record is that of a Tory. Unsurprisingly.

And he said he'd never let no deal happen, yet voted against the bill yesterday to help try and prevent it.

The brinkmanship involved in this exercise is breathtaking, to say the least.

Yeah, I wasn't defending his morality, just suggesting that his position on Brexit isn't so far from Labour's (well, Corbyn's) - perhaps close enough to arrive at a cross-party deal.

> Rory Stewart is just as bad as the rest. Seems much more personable, but his voting record is that of a Tory. Unsurprisingly.

Whilst I don't want to disagree with any of that, he has the highest parliament attendance (79%) and most rebellions (15 times, 0.7%) of the remaining candidates. (Although the now eliminated Dominic Raab had 92% attendance and 25/1.2% rebellions.). Rory also seemed to present himself well in the C4 debate the other night (resulting in a doubling of his votes), meaning second place might not be guaranteed to be Hunt.

126 (+12) Boris Johnson
 46 ( +3) Jeremy Hunt
 41 ( +4) Michael Gove
 37 (+18) Rory Stewart
 33 (+10) Sajid Javid

So, yeah three years of Boris, but I wonder to what degree the opinion polls currently putting Conservatives in 4th place will bounce back if he manages to rip the UK out of the EU, and to what degree the rise/return of Lib Dems and surge of Green support will be a factor in 2022.

What is nuts (and yet somehow not surprising) about all this is the apparent liking for Stewart among centrist remainer types. I mean, let's face it nothing he's saying here is likely to be true and he'll go and row back any promises about improving society, he's a Tory and that's a given. But even that aside, he's pretty much going "I will get May's Europe deal through" which everybody on both sides of the debate hated enough to see fail numerous times. Why is anybody even slightly interested? 

I do hope the country isn't too far ruined by the time these clowns have finished fucking it up. And I hope people don't start falling for this Lib Dem bullshit because jesus christ they'd jump back in with the conservatives at the drop of a hat if it got them into coalition again, brexit or not. 

I agree on a lot of that. Came across the best on the C4 debate, though not as good on the BBC last night.

He seemed to be the only one using even basic logic during the debate. Can't reduce taxes because that will reduce spending. Tories want reduced taxes, it's that simple.

But kinda as Milko has said, his Brexit offer is the current WA. That's been rejected by most groups of people across the Brexit spectrum. Seems a pointless offering of what we already have.

Just watching the Welsh Secretary Alun Cairns on Johnson vs Stewart. Apparently Stewart has done a 'great job' demonstrating the wide base of the Tory Party (Huh???) but Boris is the man who can get a deal with the EU and bring the country together. He was asked 'and Boris can bring the country together?' to which he replied 'Oh yes, easily.'

When Boris fans in the parliamentary party are so clearly living in isolation from the real world, then it goes some way to explaining some of the things they say and seem to believe.

Just seen that Stewart is out of the race. He will have to DOB, DOB, DOB somewhere else and his young supporters need no longer fear National Service.

"the man who can get a no deal with the EU"

FTFY