DYER: Johnson’s gambit likely to leave his Conservative party in disarray

As his rather dim-witted wingman Jacob ReesMogg put it: “So much for an impartial civil service. The Gray Report now looks like a left-wing stitch up against a Tory prime minister.”

I’m a simple, trusting soul, so I went along with the idea that Gray and Starmer had made a big political mistake by letting Johnson wriggle off the hook like that. Gray’s move didn’t really discredit the evidence at all, but you know how people think.

However, my wife

Tina Machiavelli – ‘Tina Viljoen’ to the rest of the world – took a quite different tack. She immediately asked: Why would Starmer and Gray deliberately schedule the latter’s resignation for the precise week when the Parliamentary Privilege Committee would be releasing its report?

It’s almost as if they wanted Johnson to hang around as the alternative leader of the Conservative Party. After all, if he’s still in Parliament and not facing expulsion, all he needs is one serious stumble by Sunak and he launches his come-back bid. But he’s even likelier to lose the election next year than Sunak is.

Alternatively, the Tories lose the election without Johnson, and the broken and decimated party turns to him afterwards to save it. But half the surviving Tory members of parliament would still blame

Johnson for the destruction of the brand, so he would probably just split the party instead.

Johnson would soon get bored with being opposition leader and go back to making big money on the speaker’s circuit. His breakaway faction would crumble, and what’s left of the party would spend the next decade in the wilderness.

That may not all happen. From Starmer’s and Gray’s point of view, however, what’s not to like?