Allegra Stratton won’t be the last to fall in his blundering path, but still the Conservatives party on
Another day. Another body under Boris Johnson’s battlebus. Another Tory adviser on the white steps of another Canonbury villa. Another pantomime of regret fabricated from whatever tortured sounds and sad shapes the face can muster. Another bright satellite burning up in Johnson’s doomed orbit. Intended to absorb difficult questions, Allegra Stratton was a five-and-a-half foot human loofah made of chlorinated chicken, 30% full of liquefied facts.
Her press secretary role was created in 2020, a firewall between Boris Johnson and the troublesome world of events. This week, for example, she might have shielded him from the unproven suggestion that he had helped to fly 170 asylum-seeking pets out from collapsing Kabul, like the animal-loving politician played by Steve Coogan in the forthcoming Disney+ film Taliban Dolittle.