Bye-Bye Boris … What took you so long … The end of the show for a show pony … The Queen faced with the Lascelles principles … Election not an option … Curious position for the Attorney General … Janek Drevikovsky reports from a chaotic Blighty 

By midnight on Wednesday, the figure was over 40; the previous record, set in 1932, was 11 resignations in 24 hours. 

The greased piglet could no longer slither away from the mounting party and community disgust – and now he’s ham.

Years of illicit lockdown parties, sleaze and scandal were the background. Countrywide disaffection was the result, generating two by-election defeats last month, one to Labour in a seat that first flipped blue in 2019 and the other, more shocking, in a Tory safe seat – won by the Lib-Dems. 

A dismayed no-confidence ballot among Tory MPs followed, narrowly won by the PM with 59 per cent of the vote.  

But the immediate reason for this week’s comedy of government was the ignominy of Chris Pincher MP. Mr Pincher resigned as Tory deputy whip on June 30 when the public learnt he was a serial sex pest and inveterate groper of other men. One of his victims called him a “pound shop Harvey Weinstein“.

The question was how much Johnson knew when he appointed Pincher in February this year. Not very much, was the PM’s initial answer. Actually very much indeed, according to those in the know. 

It was too much. Three of the defectors were cabinet secretaries, including chancellor Rishi Sunak, once heir presumptive to the Tory throne – now beleaguered by scandals, including his failure to relinquish his American green card or convince his billionaire wife to pay tax.

The other big cabinet name to go was Sajid Javid, health secretary.

The other leavers were junior ministers and parliamentary private secretaries (PPSs). Many in this camp are gormless newcomers from the class of 2019, gifted with government sinecures as a reward for breaking down Labour’s “red wall” in the winter of anti-Corbyn zeal. These MPs rose with Johnson; they were meant to be loyal.

Under party rules, the PM could not face another no-confidence vote until June 2023 – yet, if the 40 ministerial departures are added to the 148 MPs who voted against Johnson in June, then well over half the 358 Tories wanted the PM gone.

In the last few days the country effectively did not have a government, with swathes of positions unfilled, and desperate efforts to fill vacant slots with a suicide crew of deplorables who knew they had no hope of a government job under any other leader.

The British press described his position as “defiant”. That is not the image Johnson cut in a grotesque performance delivered on Wednesday to an important House of Commons committee, as the resignations rolled in. 

There was a moment when the mask slipped entirely, as though none of it mattered any more. Johnson admitted that, while foreign secretary in 2018, he met Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev in private, sans advisors, immediately after a NATO summit. 

This is an extraordinary admission, because Lebedev is a former KGB spy; Johnson is friends with his son Evgeny, whom he appointed to the House of Lords.

In another telling moment, when asked if he would resign if his party passed a no-confidence motion in him, Johnson demurred. Would he go to the polls instead? Again he refused to rule it out.

A general election seems to have been Johnson’s first flailing attempt at a survival strategy. That would be a disaster, given the Tories’ polling and Johnson’s unpopularity. 

It also seems cabinet officials have pushed back. If Boris had sought an early dissolution, the Queen would have to decide whether to grant the request. In this scenario, she would follow the Lascelles principles, laid down in a 1950 letter to the Times by George VI’s (also later the Queen’s) private secretary Tommy Lascelles.

Under these principles, one of Johnson’s conservative colleagues could put themselves forward as an alternative prime minister. The Queen would then face a compromising choice; to avoid this, the PM would have been counselled against calling an election at all.  

Instead, Johnson’s pitch to MPs was that choosing a new Tory leader will take too long; more “navel-gazing” will alienate voters; and there is a plan to fix the economy, including with tax cuts. 

There is no obvious successor. The most qualified candidates are foreign secretary Liz Truss, who is the great exponent of diplomacy by Instagram post, and back-bencher Jeremy Hunt, who cannot tell if his wife is Chinese or Japanese, and lost to the PM in the last leadership contest.

But the field will be thick with hopefuls. Anti-lockdown back bencher Steve Baker thinks he has a chance because readers of Conservative Home rank him in their top 10 for leader.

The Attorney General, Suella Braverman, has also entered the race. Clearly she is untroubled that her office is meant to be as impartial as possible, or that she might be called on to give contentious advice in the coming weeks (the UK’s AG is solely a dispenser of legal advice to the government; the role does not have oversight of the justice system and is not a member of cabinet)