#lettuce gate

- Rishi got 100 MPs to back him, meaning he’s in the race to be PM

- among Rishi’s backers include Lord Frost, who was, and I quote, “an unknown whisky salesman until Boris made him UK’s chief brexit negotiator and gave him a peerage in the house of lords’

- and Boris’ former chief of staff also backs Rishi

- Boris ALLEGEDLY has 100 MPs to back him, but right now only 51 MPs have publicly declared their support for him, so now there’s twitter spats over this

- wild rumours saying that it’s an attempt to save face for Boris to announce he has 100 MPs backing him before he’s even secured 100

- the Der Tagesspiegel front page is just a picture of Boris with the caption ‘Ernsthaft?’... meaning ‘Seriously?’

- Boris’s FATHER has gone on the record to say that calling a general election would be political suicide for the Tory party

- meanwhile Penny Mordaunt’s own constituents don’t know who she is

HoLY SHIT

1. Boris still ONLY has 57 MPs out of the 100 required to support his leadership bid

2. Rishi has 139 as of right now

3. Boris has ~alLEgeDly~ asked Penny Whatshername to pull out of the race and support him

4. Penny has said ‘lmao no‘ and then to add salt to the wound, she said that even if she did pull out of the race, her backers will go to RIshi

5. a bunch of big wigs have come out in support of Rishi, such as Suella Braverman who resigned as Liz’s home secretary with a politically worded ‘fuck you’ letter to Liz

6. by trying to force a member’s vote, Boris is willing to tear his party apart to return as PM (although if he doesn’t even get 100 MPs, presumably the vote can’t go to the membership)

7. the party gate vote on whether Boris lied to parliament STILL hasn’t happened yet, it’s upcoming, so there’s a chance that Boris WILL BE PM WHEN THE PARTYGATE VOTE HAPPENS

at this stage I think we’re gonna get a one person race where Rishi is the only candidate who gets the required 100 MP backing and wins the leadership he should’ve won over a month ago

this is a very fascinating race becaus Rishi has always had more popularity among both the MPs of his own party and the general electorate over literally any other candidate (Liz, Boris, and WhatsHerName), but not with the conservative party membership base which is the deciding body and we saw that reflected in the race between Rishi and Liz

I wouldn’t be surprised if some MPs are abstaining from backing anyone in this race partly out of frustration but partly also because they fucking hate their own membership base for voting for Liz when Rishi was clearly the better choice, and abstaining allows them to remain in the shadows and not have to deal with the fallout on the now ever diminishing chance that Boris wins again

not laughing at the victims or the severity of this but this is objectively the funniest time for one of the opposition MPs to have a sexual harassment scandal, like this was buried deep in the rolling news on the Guardian between ‘someone who you’ve never heard of backs Rishi‘ and ‘someone who you didn’t want to be PM anyway rules himself out of being PM‘