Boris v Davis, it’s war!

They’re battling to be the Brexiteer pick for PM. Davis says Bojo’s a busted flush and should stand aside. Boris’s fans say his rival is ‘out of his depth’

DAVID DAVIS has written off Boris Johnson’s chances of ever becoming Tory leader and is planning to mount his own bid for No 10, friends of the former Brexit Secretary have told The Mail on Sunday.

Mr Davis – who joined the exForeign Secretary in resigning from the Cabinet over Theresa May’s Chequers plan – has argued privately that Mr Johnson does not have enough support among Tory MPs to win a leadership contest if Mrs May goes. And he regards himself as the Brexiteers’ natural ‘candidate of choice’.

But the claims have angered Mr Johnson’s supporters, with one telling this newspaper last night that Mr Davis was ‘painfully out of his depth’ and insisting that he would be a ‘disaster’ as Prime Minister.

Mr Davis’s friends claim that Mr Johnson is struggling to build a large enough base of MPs prepared to vote for hi min a contest. Although he remains the clear favourite among Tory party members, who have the final say in a contest, it is the MPs who vote to select the two candidates they have to choose between.

Mr Davis’s embryonic campaign team believes that Tory MPs have been ‘alienated’ by Mr Johnson’s attacks on the Prime Minister and what they claim is an attempt to use party activists to pressurise MPs into voting for him.

One ally of Mr Davis said: ‘People realise Boris can’t win now. There’s no way he can get through the parliamentary party.’

But a furious supporter of Mr Johnson said: ‘David Davis and his allies are telling everyone who will listen that he can be the “father of the nation” and deliver Brexit.

‘MPs haven’t forgotten that for almost two years he was Olly Robbins’s [ Mrs May’s civil service Brexit adviser] useful idiot and was totally outmanoeuvred by the civil service. If he was so painfully out of his depth as Brexit Secretary, how could he possibly be considered for Prime Minister – it would be a disaster and everyone knows it.’

Mr Robbins repeatedly clashed with Mr Davis. The civil servant is disliked by Brexiteers, who regard him as a pro-Remain establishment figure set on thwarting Brexit.

There has been bad blood between the Davis and Johnson camps since their resignations in July.

Mr Davis made his dramatic announcement at midnight on the Sunday after the Brexit plan was agreed at Chequers on the Friday. Mr Johnson followed 15 hours later.

Allies of Mr Johnson said Mr Davis suggested they should announce they were leaving the Government in a co-ordinated double act, but the former Foreign Secretary declined. The Davis camp dismissed this version of events as nonsense and claim Mr Johnson came up with the idea.

Mr Davis’s original plan had been to position himself as a natural caretaker leader in waiting, ready to take over if Mrs May was forced to resign – allowing him to steer the country through Brexit before stepping down and clearing the way for a broader leadership contest involving Mr Johnson.

Now he thinks that it is in the ‘ public i nterest’ to push more proactively for the leadership.

Mr Johnson called yesterday for Mrs May to rebuff the European Union’s demand for a special ‘backstop’ deal to avoid a hard border in Ireland after Brexit, saying it would be the UK’s ‘greatest humiliation’ since the Suez crisis of the 1950s.

He said that it was ‘ now completely obvious that the Government made a dreadful mistake’ in bowing to the EU’s demands for the backstop, adding: ‘The only way to put things back on the right track is to ditch the backstop and then to chuck Chequers.

‘The fatal error was not to challenge the EU’s position that the only way of avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland – an objective we all share – is for Northern Ireland to have the same regulations for trade as Ireland and the rest of the EU.

‘ The Government well understands how weak the backstop makes its future negotiating hand – which is why it has proposed Chequers. If we let this go it will be the greatest national humiliation since Suez.’

A source close to Mr Johnson said last night: ‘As Boris has consistently stated, he wants a change of policy not leader. Chequers is a bad deal for this country– it would leave the UK as a permanent EU colony. We must chuck Chequers and deliver what the people of this country voted for.’

‘People realise Boris can’t win now’

‘Everyone knows it would be a disaster’

DAVID DAVIS is running. Literally. ‘ It’s his 70th birthday in December,’ a friend reveals, ‘and he’s going to celebrate it by doing a marathon.’ He will not be exercising for his health. The former Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union is sending a less than subtle political signal: ‘I’m still young and fit enough to lead.’

This weekend, Westminster is again rolling and pitching with rumour. At l east four Cabinet Ministers are said to be on ‘resignation watch’. Half a dozen more are in semi-private revolt over the Prime Minister’s Brexit strategy.

Reports suggest an ambush of the Budget and other key planks of the Government’s flimsy domestic agenda are being planned.

And the whispering about a leadership challenge has risen to an audible rumble. We have been here before, of course. Theresa May’s premiership has been the subject of more premature death notices than Mark Twain. But this really is different. As one Minister put it: ‘This time she is testing the Cabinet’s loyalty to destruction.’

Much of the political narrative of the summer has centred on a tortuous debate over if, and when, a Conservative Party leadership contest will commence. But the truth is one is already under way. Albeit currently with only two candidates.

Freed from the constraints of office, Boris Johnson and David Davis are locked in a duel for the crown. ‘David was reluctant initially,’ says a Tory backbencher. ‘If the party came and knocked on his door, he’d accept. But he’s realised the stakes are too high to just sit around and wait for people to come cap in hand to him.’

Davis has begun overtly courting his colleagues. His campaign team are now confident he has overtaken Johnson as the Brexiteers’ candidate of choice. ‘People realise Boris can’t win now. There’s no way he can get through the parliamentary party,’ says a Davis ally.

THEY cite numerous reasons for this rapid ascent. One is the backlash from colleagues to Boris’s attempt to bypass Tory MPs. In a strategy reminiscent of Jeremy Corbyn’s use of Momentum to boost his candidature, Johnson and his team are encouraging Tory activists to pressure their MPs to place his name on the ballot. ‘Boris is basically trying to bully his way on to the shortlist,’ says a back- bencher, ‘ and i t’s backfiring on him.’

They also claim Davis’s impeccable Brexit credentials – friends point out he needed to write no angst-ridden articles weighing the pros and cons of Britain’s EU departure – and working-class-boymade-good biography give him the edge over his flamboyant but entitled rival. And there is some evidence to support this thesis. ‘ If David pitches himself as the caretaker to see us through Brexit, I would support that,’ says a leading member of the influential European Reform Group.

But it is not just Boris who is viewing the Davis ascendency with mounting concern. Downing Street is obviously alarmed. Even more significantly, so is the rest of the Cabinet. Although the conference was seen as a success for the Prime Minister, it was a fraught and frustrating experience for many of her senior colleagues. Demands for overt expressions of Cabinet loyalty were coupled with an insistence that all speeches be vetted by No 10. ‘The dead hand came down hard,’ according to one Minister.

Having spent the post-Chequers period propping up Mrs May, a number of Cabinet Ministers are starting to worry they have become lashed to her like mountaineers on an increasingly suicidal ascent.

As one puts it: ‘We’ve understood we have to try to stick together. But the danger now is she’s going to go over the edge, and instead of saving her, we’re just going to go down with her.’

Given the enormity of the moment the Brexit negotiations represent, this may seem a case of personal ambition overtaking the national interest. But the core members of Mrs May’s Cabinet are facing a more complex dilemma.

Most senior Ministers have reconciled themselves to potentially having to sacrifice their careers to get Brexit through. But what is bringing them to the brink of rebellion is the thought that they are being asked to sacrifice themselves for a Brexit strategy that is ultimately doomed. And even more damningly, that the Prime Minister is not even entertaining any alternative to Chequers. ‘ She’s not engaging,’ one complained, ‘she sat at Cabinet this week and just read from a script.’

Specifically, Ministers are angered at two separate issues. Firstly, that Downing Street has failed to agree to an end-date to any continuing ‘transitional’ membership of the customs union. And secondly, there is no planning for a looser, free- trade style Canada option in the event that Chequers is rejected.

No 10’s line is that Mrs May would never agree to a deal that would permanently trap the UK in a customs union back-stop. But they stop short of naming the all-important end-date. And they insist Chequers is the only plan on the table that respects the will of the British people and safeguards the unity of the UK.

This is not what Mrs May’s Ministers want to hear. ‘We understand that, to get this through, we’re going to have to swallow a lot,’ says one, ‘but if I’m being honest, if you put Chequers on the table and Canada on the table, and asked me to pick one, I’d go for Canada. And so would just about everyone else.’

UNTIL now the Prime Minister has managed t o hold her Cabinet t ogether. Or, as her Ministers would frame it, their own self- discipline – in the face of significant internal and external provocation – has just about managed to keep the Government and its Brexit strategy on the rails. But this morning that self-discipline is close to fracturing.

Theresa May has pushed her colleagues’ loyalty to the brink before. But this time she may have pushed them too far.

DOMINIC RAAB’S special advisers at the Department for Exiting the EU are doing a sterling job fighting Britain’s corner in the corridors of Brussels. But they face some issues with working conditions when they return to the corridors of Westminster. ‘I popped in to see them the other day,’ a DEXU Minister tells me, ‘and they were sitting in a broom cupboard. Not a rhetorical broom cupboard, an actual broom cupboard.’ The Ministry was set up with such haste that an old janitor’s room which had been converted to hold a computer server was all that was available. Some crave the trappings of office. Others merely an office.

WHILE No10 braces for a round of possible Brexit resignations, officials have been quietly gaming out replacements. I’m told Victoria Atkins, Rishi Sunak and Kit Malthouse are three Ministers who have caught the PM’s eye. Don’t leave the phone on silent this week, guys.