UK’s Tory papers call it: it’s Boris! No, wait…

Hard to believe it’s not even four days since Liz Truss threw in the towel, isn’t it? No one’s had a wilder ride in that time than Britain’s right-wing London mastheads, both the traditional tabloid-style (like Viscount Rothermere’s Daily Mail and the Murdochs’ Sun) and the more deeply serious arms in the Conservative stable (like the Barclay brothers’ Telegraph or the Murdochs’ Times).

Judging by the once-were-influential front-page splashes, deep into Sunday night London time it looked like Boris was their man — until, well, he wasn’t. Not anyone’s, actually. Lucky there was just enough caveating and hedging in the kickers and subheads to give the media barons space to pivot.

Since partygate started to roil an already unstable British politics, the Tory press has been on a rollercoaster, rocking from “Boris In!” to “Boris Out!”, rolling from fangirling our Liz through a tax cuts thumbs up to market chaos and a Truss gotta-go. Over the weekend, they did it all again.

From Friday, The Sun was Johnson’s most enthusiastic backer, with three successive days of front-page photos, with Friday’s quote heading “‘I’m flying back, we’re going to do this: I’m up for it'” to Saturday’s swaggering Schwarzenegger-style “BoJo: I’ll be back”.

Beneath the blustering banner, there was already a note of caution, with subheads saying: “Ex-PM needs 100 MPs to stand chance”/”Rishi is hot favourite to replace Truss”. By Sunday, they were mixing BoJo braggadocio with open confusion: a full-page pic of a thumbs-up Johnson on the phone, overlaid with the all-caps “DEAL OR NO DEAL”.

Meanwhile, over at The Sun’s stablemate, the heavily paywalled Times, the company hedged its bets. On Friday, they hemmed “Johnson Weighs Return To Power As Truss Quits No 10”. By Saturday, they were hawing: “Johnson ‘will prove fatal’” and on Sunday “Tory right spurns Johnson as Sunak support surges”.

The Daily Express followed The Sun’s lead, with Friday’s “He Couldn’t, Could He … Will Boris Bounce Back To No. 10?” to Saturday’s “Boris: I’m up for it … We’re going to do this”. By Sunday, they were all BoJo with an all-caps “BORIS IS BACK!”

Done deal, then. But hang on: the more influential Daily Mail spent the weekend engaged in plaintive hand-wringing. Friday’s “Boris v Rishi: Fight For Soul Of The Tories” gave way to Saturday’s hopeful “Could Boris and Rishi now unite to save Tories?” and Sunday’s “Will Boris and Rishi thrash out Unity Deal?”

We now know the answer: no, they won’t.

Meanwhile, The Telegraph (that’s the one dubbed “The Torygraph” by Private Eye) didn’t seem to know what it thought. On Friday, it was “Boris Johnson Tells Tories: I Can Save Party From Election Wipeout”. (Hmmm, as 1960s Tory influencer Mandy Rice-Davies famously said: “He would say that, wouldn’t he?”)

On Saturday, they’d jumped to “Sunak Races To Secure Majority Of Tory MPs”, complete with a photo of Rishi striding confidently to the sun-lit uplands of conservative rule. No Boris below the fold either — that was handed off to “Mordaunt puts focus on ‘talent’ in leadership run”. (There’s a whole take on the semiotics of class in the quotes around “talent” for the red-brick, Reading-educated Mordaunt challenging the two Oxford boys, Sunak and Johnson.)

By Sunday, they’d jumped on the Mail’s train: “Sunak and Johnson urged to strike deal”.

The voice of the markets, the Financial Times had its own “umm, hang on, guys” coat tug with “Investors And MPs Alarmed By Idea Of Johnson’s Return To No. 10”. You think?

The London front pages have long aimed to be more message than medium. On the right, they are eager to be players, not watchers. Both Johnson and Sunak understand the “power without responsibility” tag 1930s PM Stanley Baldwin gave them. They’ve spent years wooing key players like Rupert Murdoch and the Mail’s owner Viscount Rothermere and its powerful long-time editor Paul Dacre.

They’d remember the preconditions for leadership laid down by Johnson’s fellow Balliol man and Conservative MP Hilaire Belloc in the (poetically fictional) case of Lord Lundy:

The stocks were sold, the press were squared,
The middle class were quite prepared

By squaring the press, both Johnson and Sunak would have been hoping the middle-class Conservative membership will be quite prepared to give them their votes — at least in the party leadership vote.

Maybe. Some are already moving on. That most rigorously red-top of the red-tops, The Star, for one. On Friday, it was celebrating its global news-making stunt with “Lettuce Rejoice”. By Sunday, it had more important things to report: “IT’S ONLY ROCK AND GHOUL: I saw the ghost of World War I soldier” from AC/DC lead singer Brian Johnson (just so you know, no relation to Boris).

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