The Tories are returning like a dog to its own vomit – and we’re all going to have to eat it

The festering, reeking meat hunk that is Boris Johnson is rushing back from the Dominican Republic – and the Tories are licking their lips and preparing to gleefully swallow it down for a second time

It’s a common phrase, “like a dog returning to its own vomit” – but I’ve only seen it happen once, albeit not with a dog, but a cat.

I think I was about 11 years old. It was during the school day morning rush. Standing on the landing, almost unnoticed by anyone, the cat’s stomach contracted and expanded again, just for a second, like a semi-inflated football that had been trodden on. And suddenly lying there before him, on the carpet, was a half-digested helping of Whiskas.

I hadn’t fully worked out what had happened until the smell hit my nostrils. It smelled like what it was – rotten cat food; rotten in the sense that it had already been ground down to kind of gelatinous beefy mash and corroded by stomach acid.

And then things got worse. Much worse. I looked at Tosca. Tosca looked at me. And then he took two short paces forward, licked his lips, lowered his neck and sank his teeth into it.

And that, all of a sudden, is what it feels like to watch the news. The festering, reeking meat hunk that is Boris Johnson is rushing back from the Dominican Republic – and the Tories are licking their lips and preparing to gleefully swallow it down for a second time.

They’re beating down a path to the television studios, they’re firing out their little social media memes, #BorisorBust, #BringBackBoris. They’re the same people who, fully seven weeks ago, were saying – with the same certainty with which they speak now – that Liz Truss was the answer to Britain’s prayers. The same people who thought the mini-Budget was a huge success; right up until the moment about an hour after it had finished, when it became glaringly obvious that it wasn’t.

It’s not merely that they’re deluded, which they are. They are a rolling clown car of human deficiencies but the one with its hand on the steering wheel is shamelessness.

But guess what? It doesn’t matter. Because there’s absolutely nothing anyone but them can do about it. It’s up to them, not us – for the fourth time in the last six years.

They just turn up on the TV to have their little contest between themselves; and the rest of us just accept what they decide, time and time again, over and over and over.

It remains scarcely believable that they have reduced national conversation to a place where Sir Graham Brady, the guy whose main job is to keep a running count of how many Tory MPs hate their own leader, has reached such a permanent level of public exposure that you wouldn’t be surprised to see him on next year’s Strictly.

Naturally, Tories are being accused of having already forgotten the events of just three months ago. But they haven’t forgotten, they just don’t care; and are hoping the public don’t care either – or that they will care a bit less in 2025 than they do now.

They don’t care that a parliamentary investigation into whether Johnson knowingly misled the House of Commons is still ongoing, and they don’t care that the evidence that has already been handed over to its investigators is devastating.

What they care about is only one thing. If you’re a Tory MP from a northern town that voted Tory for the first time in 100 years, then you really do think you’ve got Boris Johnson to thank for your £81,000-a-year salary that absolutely nobody else is ever going to pay you. And you really do think, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Johnson is the last best hope of not losing it all, and to that consideration all else must yield.

At this point the arithmetic is uncertain. There may not be the required 120 or so MPs with sufficiently deep reservoirs of shamelessness to ensure that Johnson makes it to the final two, and so it is put to the Tory members to choose the nation’s future for a second time since September. But there probably are, and should they do so, the Tory members will no doubt choose their man again – gladly overlooking an entire year of Partygate scandal, lies and quite blatant corruption.

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They also evidently don’t care that he will not be able to solve the principle problem they face: that the parliamentary party has become ungovernable. When Johnson won in 2019, he had a working majority of 80. That has now been whittled down to 71, a huge dent caused almost entirely by sex scandals, some of which have ended in criminal conviction – a staggering fact.

There are already large numbers who’ve said that should Johnson win, they’ll resign the whip. It’s not merely that he’s not the solution. He is quite literally the problem. But at time of typing, you would be brave to bet against him not being everyone’s problem, yet again – and as soon as Monday night.

Because when the Tories decide to feast again on their own regurgitated waste, we all have to eat it too.