Mark Spencer has reportedly rung round to inform them that they have lost the Whip.
The former Party Chairman and Chief Whip says the only way to save moderate conservatism is to get Brexit through.
We must not allow a situation where, through oversight, such a child, years from now, could face a Windrush-type debacle.
But there is method in his madness.
The Party’s rules – and the history of legal challenges to them – make for grim reading for the former Chancellor.
Shouldn’t local Assocations have the right to select their candidate? It is far from obvious to us that the answer is no.
Oddly there is no line that says ‘we might leave the EU, but only if the process passes tests that Philip Hammond isn’t applying publicly at this stage’.
Plus: I’ve never thought a national unity government is a runner, and I think it’s even less likely now.
“Leaving the EU without a deal would be just as much a betrayal of the referendum result as not leaving at all.”
He suggests that Johnson is acting dishonestly in claiming that he wants a deal. But with all respect to the former Chancellor, he is throwing stones from a glass house.
Perhaps the cost of dying all seems rather small fry, in relation to delivering Brexit by October 31. But there is likely to be a Budget ahead of the deadline.
We concede that this is a question to which the Prime Minister himself may not yet have an answer.
In a nice piece of constitutional give-and-take, a more loyal minister-class makes for a potentially more troublesome set of Tory Select Committee chairmen.
One could sense Labour MPs, and some Tory ones too, grasping that “everything is changing”.
Gauke, Hammond, Burt and other rebels have little intellectual case for their actions; their moral or political rationale is threadbare.