The weekend in Chequers had promised so much. A chance to launch the fightback to save his job with the old team who had helped win him the leadership back in 2019. How he had missed Grant Shapps and his Amazing Spreadsheet. Just imagine having a list of the names of every Conservative MP and their phone numbers! Along with the chief whip’s hilarious nicknames for everyone. Gold dust. A gamechanger.
But Operation Save Big Dog 2.0 hadn’t really gone to plan. First off, it had taken several hours for Boris Johnson to realise that the Shappster hadn’t updated his spreadsheet and he had had rather an awkward telephone conversation with someone who turned out to be his brother, Jo. Then, when he had finally got hold of all the right numbers for his MPs, his advisers rang to tell him that the Sunday Times would be running stories about parties in the No 10 flat and how Nusrat Ghani had been told that being a Muslim had been a factor in her being fired from her ministerial post.
