There had been no hint of contrition. He had, he said, been hounded out of office by the ‘herd instinct’ of Westminster politics, despite the ‘incredible mandate’ the electorate had handed him in December 2019. As the front page of the Financial Times reported the morning after he’d announced his decision to quit, he had remained ‘defiant to the end’.

One thing was for sure. The party and the country wanted change. Everyone wanted someone very different. An honest and honourable new leader, rather than a deluded, preening narcissist.

So, who might succeed him? (And what might satirists and journalists do for kicks and giggles, if the Conservatives put someone rather less ridiculous in charge? With the blundering, bumbling, blithering, bombastic, blond buffoon in the hot seat, the comic copy pretty much writes itself. But at least we have a little while of the man left to enjoy.)

Yes, the good news (for the editor of the Daily Mirror and the leader of the Labour Party) is that it looks like Boris Johnson is staying on for a bit longer. He has declared that he will continue as caretaker Prime Minister until his successor is elected. That currently looks like being in the autumn, unless his party forces him to step down in favour of his uninspiring deputy – or unless all but one of the candidates drops out before the end of the race, a situation that Tory grandees are hoping (for the sake of the semblance of unity and democracy) to avoid.

Yet, Mr. Johnson’s ongoing unflushability is hardly great news for the nation. He’s sticking like a limpet to the back end of an ancient and moribund whale. Many Conservatives believe that he should depart straight away. Her Majesty’s Opposition is also demanding that he go. The Deputy Prime Minister is probably asking himself exactly what his job title is supposed to mean.

The day after Mr. Johnson said he would be leaving (eventually), the press reported that he was remaining in post so that he didn’t have to disrupt his plans to hold a party to celebrate his first wedding anniversary at the Prime Minister’s official country residence at the end of this month. (That’s a party to mark the first anniversary of his most recent wedding, not one to mark the anniversary of his first wedding – which was the first of three, so far – as that really would be too perverse and complicated even for Boris Johnson.) Following criticism across the media, Downing Street announced that the event’s venue has since been moved.

Meanwhile, this ‘zombie government’ – as the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition has called it – is bogged down in the machinations of senior Tories vying for the golden ticket (or poison chalice) of leadership. In the days following Mr. Johnson’s announcement of his decision to go, a veritable host of screeching vultures descended upon the still-warm corpse of the Prime Minister’s political career, ready and eager to throw their hats into the ring (if you’ll forgive the surreal image of behatted raptors conjured by that mixed metaphor). The prize is, after all, highly tempting: the leadership not only of the Conservative Party, but also (despite the limited electorate) of the country as a whole.

The list of contenders had initially included Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, former Chancellor Rishi Sunak, former Chancellor (and former Home Secretary and Health Secretary) Sajid Javid, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Attorney General Suella Braverman, Chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Tom Tugendhat, former Foreign Secretary (and former Health Secretary) Jeremy Hunt, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, former Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch, Trade Policy Minister Penny Mordaunt, and a newly appointed and utterly obscure junior minister at the Foreign Office called Rehman Chishti. Mr. Chishti pulled out a few days later.

Much to the disappointment of many in the Conservative Party, and to the relief of the Opposition, the popular Defence Secretary (and former soldier) Ben Wallace said he would not stand.

At the same time, last week, the Labour leader and his deputy were cleared of allegations that they had broken lockdown rules by sharing a beer and a curry with colleagues during a work event in April 2021. Both had pledged to resign if (like Boris Johnson) they had received a police fine. Sir Keir Starmer must have been annoyed at the timing of this decision, as the anarchy that had erupted across the Conservative Party rather stole the headlines that week.

Labour’s attempt to introduce a parliamentary vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister was then vetoed by the government. This may sound absurd, but at least Mr. Johnson didn’t send an armed insurgent dressed as a bison to disrupt the democratic process of his removal. Nevertheless, after all its recent slippery shenanigans, Downing Street’s continuing procedural squirming hardly came as a massive surprise.

But not everything in British politics is quite so predictable. The Conservatives’ leadership contests have been known to throw up unexpected outcomes. In 2016, Theresa May claimed victory when her opponent made an ill-judged remark which suggested that Ms. May would be unsuitable for the job as she didn’t have children. This year, Jeremy Hunt, the man who came second to Boris Johnson in 2019, exited the fray after the first ballot.

As successive votes of Tory MPs whittle the candidates down to the two whose names will eventually go to a ballot of the party’s grassroots members (if two survive that far), gaffes, damaging revelations and secret deals tend to result in some of the best-known runners dropping out of the race. 

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Moreover, a number of the lesser names may only have joined the competition to raise their profiles, with no real hope of winning. Others may have entered the fray just so that they might later agree to withdraw in exchange for a decent Cabinet role. A few might even be there to split a rival’s vote and stymie their chances of winning. These are hardly the fairest or most honest of fights. No wonder they so rarely cast to the most exalted heights of office the more conspicuously honourable of political operators. 

The political editor of Sky News has described this contest as ‘ill-tempered, vicious and ugly’. The fact that it has coincided with a heat-wave of an intensity uncharacteristic for a British summer certainly hasn’t helped cool things down, but that’s still no excuse.

The parliamentary Conservative Party is aiming at reducing the candidates down to the final two by the end of this week. Within the next few days, we will therefore have a good sense of (or at least a fifty chance of guessing) who, barring accidents, might be running the UK in the near future. 

From the start, the two most prominent contenders – ‘Dishy’ Rishi Sunak and ‘Dim’ Liz Truss – faced significant image issues: the former because he is the husband of a multimillionaire tax-dodger, because he received a police fine for lockdown partying, because he advocates fiscal responsibility rather than tax cuts, because he holds an American green card (presumably so he can flee the UK if things ever get too tough), and because the production values on his campaign launch video suggested that he had preparing his leadership bid since well before his boss quit; the latter because she appears as bullishly idiotic as a privately educated triceratops. Mr. Sunak has said that, if chosen, he would run the economy like Margaret Thatcher. Given the chance, Liz Truss would doubtless seek to run Britain’s relations with Europe in a similar style. In 2014, her idea of patriotism was demonstrated in her incongruous decision to brand Britain’s fondness for imported cheese ‘a disgrace’.

Having co-founded YouGov and masterminded Britain’s Covid vaccination campaign, Nadhim Zahawi had always been disadvantaged by his reputation for competence, intelligence and success in business, politics and administration, a combination of qualities which would hardly mark him out for greatness at the top of the British Conservative Party. He just wouldn’t fit in. It anyway also remains uncertain whether Britain would have been ready to welcome its first Prime Minister in 120 years (and only the second one ever) to sport a beard. Tory MPs appeared to share this anxiety: after the first ballot, he was out.

Meanwhile, Sajid Javid has found himself distrusted by some and celebrated by others, for the simple reason that he resigned in protest from Boris Johnson’s Cabinet not just once but twice. Mr. Javid quit the contest last Tuesday, unable to secure sufficient support to get him into the first round of voting.

The only white man among Johnson’s own Cabinet members to have put his name forward for consideration was Grant Shapps. Given his extraordinary lack of abilities, one can only assume that he was relying upon the chauvinism and racism of his party to get him through. (Unless, that is, he believed that his responsibilities for overseeing rail strikes, flight cancellations, airport logjams and the shock sacking of hundreds of ferry staff had all formed part of his remit as the UK’s first lord of travel chaos.) However, with an uncharacteristic degree of self-awareness, Mr. Shapps pulled out of the race last Tuesday, pledging his support to Mr. Sunak.

Home Secretary Priti Patel had been expected to stand, but, also last Tuesday, announced she would not be doing so. Ms. Patel is, of course, renowned for representing the purity of evil incarnate in a vaguely human form. She has been accused of bullying her staff, and her contempt for immigrants has led her to initiate plans to deport asylum-seekers to Central Africa. Though seen by many as the epitome of the so-called ‘Nasty Party’, as a hard-line Brexiteer she has remained the darling of the more overtly callous wing of the Conservatives. But it may be that her closest colleagues at last realised that to commend her to the electorate would prove to be too tough a sell.

On the day that Ms. Patel withdrew from the leadership race, British Olympian hero Sir Mo Farah revealed that he had originally entered the UK as an illegally trafficked child immigrant. Downing Street applauded the athlete’s courage. Mr. Farah said that he hoped his disclosure would help change perceptions of human trafficking. He received overwhelming public, press and political sympathy and support. If nothing else, this news would have scuppered the Home Secretary’s almost inevitably xenophobic campaign to lead the nation, if she’d been foolhardy enough to press ahead with it.

Despite much of the media attention having fallen upon these bigger beasts, the results of a poll conducted by the Conservative Home website last week showed that the most popular candidates among grassroots party members had not served in Boris Johnson’s Cabinet at all. In this context, particular attention had been drawn to Territorial Army lieutenant colonel Tom Tugendhat and to Royal Naval Reservist (and former Defence Secretary) Penny Mordaunt. Ms. Mordaunt received an especially large number of initial nominations from Tory MPs, second only to Rishi Sunak. This was reflected in the results of the first and second ballots themselves. ‘PM for PM’, her supporters have pithily (but cheesily) insisted. A few days ago, she overtook Mr. Sunak as the bookmakers’ favourite to gain the keys to Downing Street.

By the time you read this, most of these names, both the famous and the obscure, will have dropped out, or will have been knocked out as a result of failing to reach the levels of support required at each stage. Backroom deals will have been struck, threats and promises will have been made. 

The first person to announce their intention to stand for the leadership had been Suella Braverman. She had done so rather prematurely, while still a member of Boris Johnson’s government (from which she didn’t resign), and indeed even before Mr. Johnson’s had agreed to step down. She hung on until the second round of MPs votes eliminated her from the field.

A week ago, the Tories’ committee of backbench MPs had published the timetable for the election of their new leader. The process is due to be completed by early September, following a ballot of about 200,000 party members, a niche-interest constituency which will determine the leadership of the nation. (This may seem undemocratic, but it’s how three of the last four British Prime Ministers first got into power.)

That same day last week, NASA’s new space telescope published an image in which distant galaxies could be seen the way that they had looked near the beginning of the universe, more than thirteen billion years ago. It was an image which might have put our petty local conflicts, tensions and differences into a sobering sort of perspective. But, as the current infighting within the upper echelons of the British Conservative Party shows, it appears that in some quarters of the Palace of Westminster it sadly has not.