Shortly after 2am, Helen Hurford locked herself inside a dance studio at the Crediton sports centre. Never to be seen or heard of again, other than in a trivia quiz question as the Tory candidate who had the biggest majority overturned in byelection history. In the end, the result wasn’t even close in Tiverton and Honiton, with the Lib Dems coasting to victory by more than 6,000 votes. Nor was the news from Wakefield much better for the government. On a much smaller turnout, Labour comfortably won that byelection with a 4,000 majority. Happy sixth Brexit birthday to you, Boris.
After that, things moved fast, with Oliver Dowden announcing his resignation as Tory party chairman at about 5.30am. Something that will have been as much of a shock to Dowden as it was to everyone else. Because the whole point of Olly was that he has no sense of shame. He is a man without conscience, a once passionate remainer who erased his own history and reinvented himself as a lifelong Brexit supporter, who was only given the job of Tory chair as he could be relied on to eat shit and do whatever the Convict needed. So to find that Dowden did have a breaking point was a watershed moment.
Dowden announced his departure with the familiar exchange of letters with the prime minister. Tories were distressed and disappointed by recent events, he said, and someone needed to take some responsibility. And given that the Convict was a narcissist incapable of taking responsibility for anything, it had better be him. Which was odd, as literally no one had ever thought that Dowden had been the Partygate ringleader. Or indeed had done anything very much ever. Largely because they had never heard of him. Still, never look a gift horse in the mouth and the country should just bank the win. Olly is much more useful when he’s doing nothing.
With Dowden out the way, it was left to Dominic Raab to fill the party chair-sized hole in the morning media round. Raab did not seem at all pleased to have drawn the short straw and was tetchy and resentful throughout. Expect the homicide rates to spike in the next 24 hours. More usefully, don’t walk home alone in the dark. Watch out, there’s a Dom about.
What we got was Raab at his incoherent best. It’s a wonder he can manage the weekly shopping let alone manage to get by as deputy prime minister. First he tried to shrug off the byelection results as no big deal. Labour and the Lib Dems hadn’t really won because all that had happened was that fewer people than usual had voted Conservative. Er, yes, that’s the way elections work. If you don’t get as many votes as another candidate, you don’t win. It’s not even GCSE maths. Where do the Tories find such stunning intellects? Oxbridge may have to rethink its admissions policy given the number of quarterwits it has now supplied to the cabinet.
It rapidly got worse as Dom was unable to give any clue about how the government might reform itself. Mostly because he doesn’t have a clue. He’s totally lost. He tried to make out that Partygate was some kind of distraction, concocted by the media to divert voters away from the big issues, rather than a scandal of the Convict’s own making. Then he talked about a high-wage economy. This after the government had spent the last week urging the unions to exercise wage restraint. Finally he just shrugged when the BBC’s Nick Robinson asked about Boris trying to blag top jobs for Carrie. Presumably this means she’s a prime candidate to fill Dowden’s old job.
Much of the rest of the morning was taken up with various Tories lining up to take pot shots at Johnson. Almost everyone seemed to have realised that it was no longer a question of saving Boris’s job. It was all about saving their own. The winner is now very much a serial loser and the Convict would take them all down with him. The most surreal intervention was from the former Tiverton MP Neil Parish. Boris needed to take some responsibility, he said. When you’re being offered spiritual guidance from the man who watched tractor porn in the Commons, then the game is up.
The media finally caught up with Boris Johnson in Rwanda, where he was attending a Commonwealth heads of government meeting. He didn’t want to minimise the byelection defeats, he insisted. But the way forward was to minimise the defeats. They were no big deal. People were just overreacting. Nothing was his fault. What he was going to do was just keep plugging away at all the things he had been doing to drive the economy on to the rocks. In the background, you could almost hear Nadine Dorries and Priti mouthing their adoration. The sound of no hands clapping.
Later in the afternoon, Johnson appeared again, this time to give a press conference. The day’s events looked to have caught up with him. The bags under his eyes had deepened and darkened significantly, while the rest of his face was as unhealthily pallid as ever. He had the appearance of someone who had gone 10 rounds with himself and lost. Collecting two black eyes en route. The Rwanda Panda.
The Convict began by listing some attributes of the Commonwealth that even he didn’t seem much interested in. He knew what was coming next. Because even though he only took questions from largely government-friendly media outlets, he was still put under the cosh. No one thinks that his Rwanda refugee scheme is anything other than a distraction. The best that he could come up with was that no court had yet found it illegal. The morality didn’t seem to bother him. Then it seldom does.
Most of the questions concentrated on the byelection results. Yet again Johnson seemed to be in denial. He was just doing the best he could, he insisted. Working tirelessly to improve things. He just couldn’t quite understand why everyone was struggling. Why they believed things were getting worse. And of course he couldn’t be resigning. That’s what the little people did. People like Dowden.
“The way forward is not to focus on personalities,” he concluded. This was delusional. Johnson’s whole career has been built on his personality. He has no policies he believes in. Everything is about him. Except now no one likes him any more. They don’t even feel sorry for him. They feel a disgust at the way they have allowed themselves to be conned. That they fell for someone who played by completely different rules. Or no rules. And now they were in no mood to forgive or forget.
The Convict bustled out of the media room. Time for another session with President Zelenskiy. Therapist to national leaders the world over.
