Is Boris Johnson plotting a comeback in 2024?

With the Mail raising the spectre of Boris Johnson making a pre-election comeback – worse, as part of a “dream ticket” with Nigel Farage – Theresa May and David Cameron are already on manoeuvres to stop him at all costs.
“Theresa is willing to stand as a caretaker leader against Boris with David maybe as her deputy,” one well-informed Tory backbencher tells me. “They may not have got along famously in the past, but their hatred for Boris has united them and they see this as a fight for the life and soul of the Tory party.”

There is, of course, little realistic prospect of a leadership contest until after the general election – and it’s a measure of the political naiveté of the Mail that they think it possible Johnson and Farage could compete for the leadership without either being MPs – but both May and Cameron are aware it’s hard to predict how the year ahead will play out for the Tories.

“They still command respect among the party members and they will be the ones who decide the next leader,” my informant adds. “The question is what influence the Mail will still have with members after urging them to get behind a succession of duff leaders, including Boris and then Liz [Truss].”
Johnson may well still command a measure of support among the hard right of the Tory party, but, as the leading pollster Prof John Curtice pointed out last week, the popularity of the Conservatives among the electorate first began to plunge under Johnson and he regarded him as an ongoing “liability” for the party.

Indeed, it’s hard not to see the prophecy that the former Tory attorney general Dominic Grieve made in this newspaper five years ago now more or less fulfilled. Describing Johnson as “a shallow populist, manifestly unsuitable for high office,” Grieve warned that making him prime minister “would undoubtedly be a disaster for the country and bring doom to the Conservative Party.”

With scarcely £1 billion to his name, the Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere clearly isn’t in the mood to throw his money around this Christmas. Having already decided not to have his traditional festive gathering at Claridges – a high point of the capital’s social calendar that had previously only ever not gone ahead because of the pandemic – his lordship has now told the rank and file in his office in Kensington there won’t be any celebrations for them either.

“The big knees-up for the journalists was always the Daily Mail travel editor’s Christmas party,” says my disgruntled source in the Mail workhouse. “In the good old days, we had it at the posh Milestone hotel near the office when the champagne flowed, and, more recently, it was cheap wine in a nearby pub called the Britannia. This time around, Rothermere has made it clear he isn’t even prepared to stump up for so much as half a shandy and a packet of pork scratchings.”

Rothermere is said to be fretting about a looming recession in the year ahead – the inevitable result of policies such as Brexit that his newspapers have championed – and the potential cost of the privacy case Prince Harry, Sir Elton John and Baroness Doreen Lawrence are bringing against his newspapers. He may also have to fork out to buy the Daily Telegraph.

It looks like there has been a stay of execution for Laurence Fox and his Reclaim Party just as Companies House was about to shut it down. The strike-off notice issued against his hard right organisation in October has been “suspended,” although why it had got into their bad books remains a mystery.

The party has some wealthy backers – which is handy as Fox claimed during a libel action he brought against various individuals who called him a “racist” that he now derives virtually all his income from it. At the height of his acting career, he claimed to have been making up to £600,000 a year. Mr Justice Collins Rice has still to decide on Fox’s libel action.

When his wife Akshata’s fabulous wealth is ever mentioned, Rishi Sunak’s retort has always been “keep my family out of it.

Still, the prime minister’s official Christmas card – taken by his personal taxpayer-funded photographer Simon Walker – shows him out walking with a Santa Claus hat Photoshopped on to his head, together with both his wife – she had a green hat Photoshopped onto her head – and their two hatless children.

Sunak doubtless took pleasure in sending the bizarre card to his old enemy Liz Truss. She had already been toying with ideas for her own prime ministerial Christmas card with her taxpayer-funded photographer Simon Dawson in late October last year, but of course never got to send it. Only a matter of days later, Dawson got to snap her leaving Downing Street for the last time.