{UAH} Operation Arse: the secret Tory plot to keep Boris Johnson out of No 10

Operation Arse: the secret Tory plot to keep Boris Johnson out of No 10

Are Scottish Conservative MPs mobilising to keep the foreign secretary at the bottom of the list of potential new leaders?

Tue 2 Oct 2018 13.28 BSTLast modified on Tue 2 Oct 2018 13.42 BST

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 The Daily Record reports there is a plan to prevent Johnson becoming leader. Photograph: AFP/Getty

Name: Operation Arse.

Classification: Top secret.

In that case, why are you telling me about it? All right. Bottom secret.

That's better. What is it? What's what?

The secret. Oh, that the Tories have a plan to stop Boris Johnson from becoming party leader.

That's a secret? The fact that they have a plan is. Or was. The Daily Record now reports that a group of Scottish Tories are coordinating a campaign to persuade their MPs to vote against Johnson in any forthcoming leadership contest. They also want to convince party members that he would be an electoral disaster.

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I thought Theresa May was already an electoral disaster? Yes. She is very unpopular with voters, it's true. But, luckily for her, Jeremy Corbyn is even more unpopular, according to the polls. However, Johnson is so staggeringly unpopular that he might run Corbyn close if he took over.

Just a thought: maybe the Tories could choose someone popular to lead them? Let's not try to run before we can walk. The first thing is to stop the Johnson juggernaut. Hence: Operation Arse. "We called it that so we'd all be clear who we were talking about," said a senior Tory.

Cunning. So far at the party conference, Johnson has been called, among other things, an "irrelevance" and an "offensive person" (Digby Jones), a maker of "good headlines but not necessarily good policies" (David Davis) and "very unhelpful" (George Freeman).

So why would such an unpopular person be a threat? Ah. Well it all depends who you are unpopular with. Just as Corbyn is very popular among Labour party members, but disliked more widely, Johnson is very popular with Conservative party members.

Ah. And members ultimately choose the leader? That's right. Some Tories worry about Johnson becoming the focus of a so-called "blue Momentum", which could see thousands of new members join the party and push it further to the right.

What on earth do people see in him? Some say he has star quality. Others call him a charlatan. He certainly has a talent for using blunt, straightforward language to paint dreamy pictures of the perfect Britain that would follow a kind of Brexit that he is persistently vague and indecisive about.

So he sounds as though he tells it like it is, while telling it like it isn't? Welcome to politics.

Do say: "Surely no big western democracy would ever be foolish enough to elect a wild-haired conman on the strength of his false promises and bracing sense of humour?"

Don't say: "No. The chances must be one in a million."

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