Wes Tender

I have to keep on repeating although your skull seems to be too thick for it to penetrate, a candidate withdrawing and supporting another one, does not mean that all of their votes automatically transfer to the other one. Are you not going to defend your ridiculous assertion that if Hunt and Gove united earlier in the process, there would not be any need for a final ballot? And as I also asked, which of the two of them would you have expected to withdraw, Hunt or Gove? Keep it going. You crack me up.

You totally fail to understand the simple rules of the leadership election campaign and then have the audacity to accuse me of senility? The counter accusation, since you're into hurling insults, is that you must be a bit simple to not understand the procedure, and then you only compound that impression by thinking that by producing a flow chart that somehow validates your assertions. Where the process reduces the candidature by one or more persons at each stage, an alliance between two of them does not equate to one joint candidate. They remain as two candidates, each of whom could be eliminated. Keep it up. You're providing great entertainment value with your ideas on how the process ought to work ideally in your very own little Utopia.

I advise you to go and lie down somewhere quiet until your thought processes have cleared. As a Conservative member, I would have expected you to have read the literature you will have been sent informing you how the leadership ballot procedure is run. Just for a laugh, why not go on Conservative Home and post the opinion that it is a pity that Gove and Hunt didn't form an alliance so that the final ballot would have been unnecessary. You'd be shot down in flames and mocked mercilessly for your total lack of knowledge or comprehension of how the whole thing worked. Of course, there is nothing to stop Hunt forming an alliance with Gove now, during the hustings before the membership, but Hunt would probably fear Gove stabbing him in the back somewhere along the line. Equally, Boris might indicate during the hustings what positions in the cabinet could be available to his allies.

You really are a bit of a fruit loop on this little plot. If you really were a Party member, then you would realise that there is a firm procedure on how leadership elections are run. You little unicorn fantasy doesn't cut it, I'm afraid. Whether they formed an alliance or not, they still didn't have a majority, even together. And for some reason, you assume that Boris just disappears from the final vote, despite having led the campaign vote throughout. If you are indeed a Conservative Party member, no doubt Hunt will have your vote. I'll indulge you regarding your lack of comprehension of the difference between a FTA and the Withdrawal Agreement. The Free Trade Agreement is what the name suggests. An agreement to trade freely together, without tariffs. The Withdrawal Agreement is a proposed agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union on how to implement Brexit. It covers such matters as money, citizens rights, border arrangements and dispute resolution. Does this now penetrate?

I see that you've ignored the advice I gave you, to stop digging yourself deeper into the hole you made for yourself with this stupid assertion that somehow Gove and Hunt should have formed some sort of alliance to beat Boris.

My guess is that the two spoilt ballots earlier were Ken Clark and Grievous.

I repeat, you have not the faintest clue about the Tory Party membership. Why wouldn't there have been a final vote had they joined forces? At no stage during the process would the two of them combined have been able to stop Boris and I repeat, the candidates might have influence over their followers, but they don't command their votes, so there is no guarantee that the supporters of either one preferred the other over Boris. And which one of them would have given way to the other anyway? You're in a hole over this, so stop digging.

Boris v Hunt. Great

He isn't wrong though. You are.

I do enjoy watching you struggling to justify yourself when you've been caught out, mate,and as usual when this arises, you seek to belittle your opponents by petty insults. Agreed that the Jihadist insult is lesser known than some of the Remoaner rhetoric when compared to the usual cliff edge, car crash, crashing out that is much more commonplace and which I see you have avoided denying or defending. But anyway, despite you insisting that some of that usage of Jihadists came after you used it, I presume that you originally got the idea from Claire Perry, rather than her getting it from you.

What does it matter whether they get close to Johnson's total vote? Surely you weren't really suggesting that one or the other deliberately drops out before the vote later this afternoon and somehow gifts their supporters' votes to the other? If so, it seems that you are under the illusion that most of the supporters of one, would be also prepared to support the other. That isn't the case; they have their own reasons for supporting one or the other and wouldn't necessarily support the other in preference to Boris. If this isn't what you were getting at, then I refer you to my earlier reply, when I pointed out that if Boris is in the final two, the membership will not be voting for either of those two, barring a catastrophic event that makes Boris unelectable.

You claim that you and your alter ego Verbal popularised the phrase Brexit Jihadists. I can't be arsed to try and find your first usage of it, but Claire Perry used it in February 2017. There have been subsequent uses of it by Vince Cable, Yasmin Alibhai Brown and Ian Dunt. Did they all get if from you two on this football forum, or did you copy them? And you have the bare-faced temerity to pull me up on using phraseology that is common currency in Brexit circles.

I had not heard it before then. Who do you think coined it first, and when?

Poor old Jeff doesn't have a clue. Even if Gove or Hunt, (whichever is the in the last two), outshines Boris in the hustings, the party membership has a substantial pro-Boris majority. The membership is also comprised of a huge Leave majority and also a majority in favour of leaving on WTO terms. Gove is still loathed by many for stabbing Boris in the back and giving us May, the reason for the current mess we're in. Hunt lacks charisma and isn't a leader.

The remoaners are all a load of hypocrites if they accuse the leavers of using these pat phrases to describe Brexit. There isn't a broadcast by the media that doesn't have some remoaner speaking about cliff edges, crashing out of the EU, peoples votes, confirmatory votes, etc.

Who was it that coined that colony status position? Oh yes; it was some tosser underling in Verhofstadt's office.

If you can't accept that the WA isn't a FTA, then I'm wasting my time trying to explain it to you.

Because in the last poll today, the candidates are reduced to a final two. As Boris has a vote total higher than the other two combined, there is nothing they can do to prevent him being in the final two, unless those who voted for him didn't support him all along, for some reason. Even Javid's votes added in can't stop Boris being in the final two going before the membership. The members will vote overwhelmingly for Boris, so as leader of the Party, he gets to choose his cabinet. Goodbye to Hammond, Gauke, Clark and Rudd. No reason for Hunt and Saj not to remain in the cabinet, but Gove might be retained where he is, or ditched, unless he promises to behave himself and Stewart gone as a wet remoaner.

The WA is dead. The EU say they won't change it, and we won't accept it as it stands. Therefore we leave on WTO terms and if the EU want a FTA, which is in the interests of both us and them, then the ball is in their court. If they insist that we accept colony status under the surrender treaty in its current form, then it isn't going to happen.

Because it is not. The clue is in the name. It is a transition period until we agree a FTA or leave without one.

I don't think that you quite understand how this all works.

Now that Stewart the clown has received his marching orders, they can take down the Big Top and allow the circus to move on without him. It is a pity that a lot of the entertainment value will leave with him. A shame that we won't see some flesh added to his bizarre citizens' assembly plan. It would have been fun seeing how it would all have been arranged, who would have been chosen, what bizarre solutions that they would have come up with, and what authority that decision would carry over the House, when they can't even be entrusted to enact the clear instructions given to them to leave the EU in the Referendum. Why would they then accept the decision of a few thousand of the electorate when they have chosen to ignore 17.4 million of them? But there is some sunshine on the horizon for Stewart's political career; he could yet fulfil his ambition to lead a political party. The Change UK Party, (or whatever they are called this week), should be a pushover for him when his main opposition is Sourbry.

Who said satire was dead? You and Soggy crack me up with your far right Conservative Party routine

We're in the twenty first century, mate. One doesn't need to read books to assimilate information on current affairs any longer. HTH

Yes, thanks for the link. It proves that the whole report is a massive stitch up, akin to the BBC responding to complaints about their bias towards remain.