THE TORY party tore itself apart on live TV last night in a brutal debate between four of the five men vying to be the next prime minister.
Boris Johnson stayed away from the Channel 4 hustings, saying he’d rather wait until the field has been slimmed down.
“My own observation is that in the past, when you’ve had loads of candidates it can be slightly cacophonous,” he told the BBC’s World At One on Friday.
“And I think the public have had quite a lot of blue-on-blue action frankly over the last three years. We don’t necessarily need a lot more of that.”
Yet, last night, “a lot more of that” was what the public were given.
“Where is Boris?” Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt asked. “If his team won’t allow him out with five fairly friendly colleagues, how is is he going to deal with 27 European countries?”
The broadcaster marked his absence with an empty podium.
But the digs at Johnson were nothing compared to the digs at former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab.
The hardline Eurosceptic has refused to rule out pushing through a no-deal Brexit by suspending Parliament at the end of October.
“I don’t think it is likely but it is not illegal,” Raab said.
“What I’m saying is, the minute we telegraph to the EU...that we’re not willing to walk away at the end of October come what may, we lose the best shot of getting the deal.
“Stop taking things off the table and make sure that the only thing we are absolutely 110% committed to is keeping our promises to the voters of this country. This leadership contest is an issue of trust and I’m the only one, I believe, who can be trusted to get us out at the end of October.”
International Development Secretary Rory Stewart – who pointed out that the bookies had moved him from 100-1 outsider to 2-1 second favourite – led the attack on Raab, saying it was “undemocratic” to shut down the Commons.
“Parliament is not a building. Parliament is our democratic representatives and they will meet wherever they want to meet regardless of what a Prime Minister tries to do.”
Home Secretary Sajid Javid went further: “You don’t deliver democracy by trashing democracy. We are not selecting a dictator. We’re selecting a prime minister of our country, of one of the proudest Parliamentary democracies in the world.” he said.
Raab warned that if the person who replaced Theresa May in Number 10 was determined, it would be “near impossible to stop a government that is serious.”
Hunt told him it was the wrong thing to do. “If your response to that lack of ability to unite is to say, well in that case if you don’t agree with me I’m just going to close down Parliament, despite the fact that the Brexit referendum was actually bringing back power to Parliament, it was bringing back sovereignty to this country – that is a fundamental misreading of what Parliament stands for and what the people in this country will accept.
“It’s the wrong thing to do. I wouldn’t do it – and I don’t think most people in the Conservative party would do it either.”
Environment Secretary Michael Gove told him: “I will defend our democracy. You cannot take Britain out of the EU against the will of parliament.”
Raab, in turn, told Gove that he would “buckle” when faced with EU negotiators.
“I’m afraid you would buckle because you’ve shown you would take another extension,” said Raab. “You would take no-deal off the table. You’ve said that you would accept legislation on a second referendum. When you do all of that you rob ourselves of the best chance of a best deal.”
The bickering between the two led to Stewart declaring it a “competition of machismo.”
“Everybody’s saying ‘I’m tougher’. Genuinely, genuinely, every time I have this debate everybody’s like ‘Trust me, I’m going to do it, I’m the guy, I can defeat the impossible odds’,” he said.
“It reminds me...I was trying to cram a whole series of rubbish bins into the...rubbish bin,” he said.
“And my wife said ‘you’re never going to get these three huge bags of rubbish in. And I was tempted, like Michael, like Dom, to say ‘believe in the bin, believe in Britain’. Right? It’s nonsense.”
Stewart was the clear winner with the audience in the room, who applauded him far more than the other candidates.
But the next ballot in the leadership contest is in the hands of Tory MPs, who have little love for the former diplomat. They will whittle the shortlist down further on Tuesday with any candidate who fails to get the backing of 32 of their colleagues turfed out.
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