Anyone who stays in the cabinet is complicit with Boris Johnson. The chancellor’s window for action is shrinking fast
He sits there silently on the frontbench, the man with nothing to say about the great swirl of chaos all around him. What is Rishi Sunak thinking? “There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” Miss it, warns Brutus the conspirator, and all his life will be “bound in shallows and in miseries”. Indeed, this chancellor may never get another chance to shoot through to No 10.
But when exactly is that damned tide at the flood? When Gray’s anatomy of No 10 parties is published, perhaps. Or when those notoriously dilatory plods report? Boris Johnson hopes that delaying the partygate reckoning will allow him to fortify his dam against that flood. His backers try to frighten Tory MPs by threatening that a new leader means a general election.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
