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

Exactly. The EU agreed a deal with the British government. This involved the EU negotiating team separately negotiating/agreeing the terms of the deal to be offered with 27 individual national governments. It was a tortuous process extending over 2.5 years and was characterised by the British governments combination of "red-lines" (No Common Market, No Free Movement, No Contribution to the EU Budget) with demands for as many EU goodies as possible - Oh, and not undermining the Good Friday Agreement with a physical, tariff barrier between N & S. Not surprisingly, the EU says "That's it. No more negotiating."

It follows that the strategy of ALL the candidates who want to leave the EU but with a deal and not Theresa May's deal  (i.e. all the candidates) depends ENTIRELY on the EU being bluffing. 

The negotiation that will take place when the EU admits that it's bluffing consists of various MAGICAL replacements to the "back stop" agreement - the propoposal to remain temporarily within the Customs Union while a long term solution to the N/S Irish border is worked out. The plan popular with the Tory ERG is MAGICAL TECHNOLOGY. The ERG have been assured by experts (IT salesmen and CEOs) that it is quite possible to solve everything with existing technology really, really quickly. This solution appears to have been talked into reality over the last few months so that it is now a given in Tory discussions.

If it wasn't all so serious with such consequences for real lives I'd say 'fuck the lot of them and lets just screw the whole nation up with a no-deal exit'. After all, that's exactly what the majority of Tory Party members with the final say on the candidates actually believe according to recent polls.

Wouldn't the potential benefit of Lib Dems be in taking votes away from the Conservatives and Labour, moving away from a two-party system, and towards the possibility of PR?

Tim Farron made it clear the Lib Dems wouldn't coalesce with either of the other two parties in 2017. It's still another five weeks before we find out if they pick Ed Davey or Jo Swinson - a brief look suggests both of them suck, but I'll sit myself on the fence about whether either is opportunist enough to bury the party by jumping back into bed with the Tories.

I've seen nothing to disabuse me of the opinion that the LDs are weather-vanes and will say whatever seems most politically expedient in any given moment. Chuka Umunna seems entirely suited to them in that regard, in that both him and Cable were on the fairly recent record about respecting the referendum result and hardening up on immigration at one point, but now of course it's all different and always has been. Haha, Chuka's also on record about how he could never join the LDs after their coalition history and broken promises. Lolz all round!

The LDs also managed to fuck up getting even AV, I don't have any hope they'd get anywhere with PR at all. If they surprise me then I'll be happy, but I have zero faith in it.

And then there were two.

Picking what solace I can from the wreckage, I do think that all this shit does bring us nearer to PR. FPTP was being propped up by the Coke vs. Pepsi two party cartel; but it will look less attractive to them as they drop down the rankings. One clear outcome of the recent elections is that 21st century politics can't be expressed through a 19th century electoral process.

If we're not going to descend further down the pan of irrational polarisation, we need an electoral system which ensures that every vote - no matter how much I object to it - influences the complexion of government. My vote (Green) will get on other people's tits too.