Even the no-hopers are flinging custard pies in this messy Tory leadership race

One of the great joys of the Tory leadership contest – OK, also one of the few joys to be accurate – is to be able to see, in the words of a friend of mine, some of the worst people in the country tearing chunks out of one another.

The latest is Lord (David) Frost, one-time Brexit minister until he became disenchanted with Boris Johnson, as everyone does in the end, even his spouses. Lost for much else to do, he’s decided to lay into Penny Mordaunt, and in rather personal terms: “I am surprised at where she is in this leadership race. She was my deputy. She wasn’t fully accountable or visible. I had to ask the PM to move her on,” he told LBC.

There’s a couple of delightful ironies in there, to add to the delicious spectacle of the internecine scrapping. Frost is, lest we forget, the prime architect of the “oven-ready” Brexit deal that he and Johnson prepared, signed up to and campaigned for, successfully, at the 2019 general election, and which he is now denouncing. All Mordaunt ever tried to do, with her then bosses, Michael Gove and then Frost, was to make its half-baked contents even remotely digestible, which was, and is, impossible. Not since Lord Pot called the Right Honourable Ms Kettle black has there been such a pompous deficit in self-awareness.

Maybe she found Frost’s attempts to simultaneously defy the laws of economics and logic too much to bear, and she had to go for a walk around the block to retain her sanity. Or maybe Frost was just too slow-witted for Mordaunt to remain in the same room with him for very long. Or vice versa. Who knows, but, as someone once said, recollections can differ.

The further irony, which crops up time and again in this contest, is that Frost was an enthusiastic Remainer in the 2016 referendum, and Mordaunt a long-standing Brexiteer. It’s like the supporters of Liz Truss (Remainer) sneering at Rishi Sunak’s “pro-European” supporters. The sad truth is that Sunak was a Leaver, we now have a hard Brexit anyway, and there aren’t any pro-Europeans left because Dominic Cummings had them all taken out and shot.

They’re only arguing about making Brexit harder and more damaging to the economy, and how much to cut taxes and borrow to try and hide the damage. Sunak’s sin is to have detected this acute risk.

Ah, yes, “Fishy Rishi”, as his critical colleagues call him. Sunak’s enemies take their cue from Boris Johnson, who blames Sunak personally for his downfall. Naturally. Our now caretaker prime minister tells us he is taking no part in this process, for fear of harming the chances of anyone he endorses, but that’s fooling no one. It hasn’t stopped him from approving a briefing against the “treacherous bastard”, while a Johnson supporter in the cabinet told the FT: “Rishi will get everything he deserves for leading the charge in bringing down the prime minister.”

That seems to include the relentless hostility of Johnson’s most slavish loyalists, Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg, teaming up with Liz Truss, as the runner best-placed to beat the treacherous bastard. As ever, Rees-Mogg’s faux toff veneer and exaggerated manners fail to disguise his vindictive nature: “We have had a high-tax chancellor and I belong to a low-tax party and I want to see us getting back to being a low-tax party,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions. According to Mogg, Sunak is a “much-lamented socialist chancellor”, which makes one wonder what they were doing in the same cabinet.

Dorries, as you’d expect, is just as direct, suggesting before the first ballot that the Hunt campaign was just a subsidiary of Sunak’s, run by Gavin Williamson: “This is dirty tricks/a stitch up/dark arts. Take your pick. Team Rishi want the candidate they know they can definitely beat in the final two and that is Jeremy Hunt.”

A source close to Sunak responded, “It’s totally untrue – just more anti-Rishi stuff rather than based on any facts. I think she is just upset about Boris.” Poor old Hunt’s miserable 18 votes – two less than his list of nominations – suggests that it wasn’t a successful Williamson scheme, if it ever was.

Nadine is certainly upset about Boris, and has also attacked Kemi Badenoch. To be fair, Badenoch did pronounce that the online safety bill, Dorries’ flagship policy, is “in no fit state” to become law because: “We should not be legislating for hurt feelings.” That certainly hurt the thin-skinned culture minister, who tweeted back: “Which part of the bill legislates for hurt feelings, Kemi?”.

Badenoch may be as brilliant as people say, but is also Michael Gove’s current weapon of choice in his long-running psycho-war with Boris Johnson. This began shortly after the referendum ended in 2016 and Johnson was “stabbed in the front” by Gove. It did not end when Gove was shot in the back by Johnson last Thursday when the PM sacked him at 8.59pm, seconds before the deadline for resignation Gove had impudently issued to Johnson.

According to Gove’s ex-wife, the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine, still on speaking terms with her ex, the conversation went as follows: “The prime minister rang me a few minutes ago and told me it was time for me to step back. I said, respectfully, ‘Prime minister, if anyone should be stepping back, it is you.’” Johnson’s people later called Gove a “snake”; Gove says he’s a “regular guy”. This is where we’ve sunk to in our national debate.

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Even the no-hopers are throwing custard pies around. Who can doubt that this derisive statement is aimed at Sunak: “We will never put the safety of our country in doubt because of bean-counters and spreadsheets. Security always comes before spreadsheets.”

To be fair, Suella Braverman seems to prefer attacking people on benefits to Tory leadership contenders, but she’s been happy to misrepresent Mordaunt, a strong rival on the right, as some sort of woke warrior, and revoke some old dispute about supposed attempts to replace the word “woman” with “pregnant person” in a bill. It’s ugly stuff, both repulsive but compelling at the same time.

So the Tories have done what they usually do when they’re panicked and exhausted – they’ve formed a circular firing squad, with Dorries holding an AK-47. It seems a long time ago indeed that David Cameron was so fussy and fretful about the EU referendum might possibly lead to outbreaks of “blue on blue” combat, which he expressly forbade. Then he fell out with Gove, George Osborne fell out with Theresa May, her party fell out with her, they all fell out with each other, there was a short-lived truce after Brexit “got done”, and now they’re all falling out with each other all over again.

The Tory civil war on Europe, which has raged on and off for six decades, and helped destroy virtually every leader from Macmillan through Thatcher to Johnson, has just destroyed another leader, and the next one, Mordaunt probably, seems doomed to go the same way. It’s great to watch, but it’s no way to run the country.