Fantasists Making Johnson Look A Lot Like The Grown-Up

Kicking out a prime minister who won a massive 80-seat majority is quite a drastic thing for a party to do, especially when it appears to have taken the Tory party well under 24 hours to forget why it did it.

- Tom Peck

The main problem with Johnson was that, when faced with a difficult decision, or finding himself backed into a tricky corner, all he knew how to do was ease the pressure on himself by telling barefaced lies until the problem went away for a few seconds, the consequences of which could be worried about later.

He overpromised and underdelivered. It's not merely that he pretended parties hadn't happened, even though he'd attended them. What was just as damaging, in the end, was that everything was going to be "world-beating" - even when it didn't exist. Government as a form of sociopathic narcissism had run out of road.

And yet, here we are, on what feels rather a lot like day one of the Tory party leadership contest, and they're absolutely all at it.

There is hardly a candidate in the field, as things currently stand, that hasn't already promised to cut taxes. Nadhim Zahawi reckons he'll cut the basic rate of income tax twice over the next two years. Jeremy Hunt has promised to "cut all taxes", just like he did three years ago. Liz Truss is going to "cut taxes from day one as prime minister".