And then there were five. Delivering another bombshell in the extraordinary story that is Brexit, the Tories' "anyone but Boris" campaign yesterday succeeded beyond its wild expectations in getting the favourite to the mantle of David Cameron as leader of the party and prime minister to pull out of the race.
Boris Johnson’s retirement from the contest was all the more remarkable for the fact that we had repeatedly been assured by political commentators that he was only in the Brexit fight to smooth his way to No 10.
Nominations in the race to succeed Cameron closed with only five in the hat: Theresa May, Liam Fox, Andrea Leadsom, Stephen Crabb, and Johnson's Leave lieutenant, Michael Gove, whose last-minute declaration and warning that Johnson could not unite the party – followed by immediate defections of Boris loyalists – decisively pulled the rug from the latter's ambitions.
The five go to a parliamentary party vote where they are whittled down to two for the full Tory membership to decide. It is expected that Justice Secretary Gove will face Home Secretary May, a rerun of the Leave/Remain contest that also reflects the rift in the party between ideologists of the right and more pragmatic centre-ground conservatives.
Gove, positioning himself explicitly as the “change” candidate, spoke of “a bold break with the past” that presumably means the past associated with his old friend Cameron.
Any hopes that the contest might elect a candidate prepared to fudge critical elements of the EU divorce package – Johnson had spoken in recent days of a deal that might involve accepting free movement of labour – would seem to have been put paid to by the dramatic events. Gove is a Brexit hardliner, while May – an almost silent Remainer – made clear in her pitch across the party’s divided lines that “Brexit means Brexit”.
Like Icarus, Johnson soared too high, too fast; perceived by many Tory MPs as “lacking all conviction”, he was felled by his own “vaulting ambition that o’erleaps itself”. And all too often, as Tory history illustrates, the man who wields the knife does not inherit the crown.