The post you are reporting:
Courtesy of the Times.
File this under “tweets you don’t expect from former permanent secretaries at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office”: “Is there Cabinet Office guidance on how long former @foreignoffice permanent secretaries have to go on biting their tongue about @BorisJohnson?” Granted, Sir Simon Fraser, formerly perm sec at thperhaps, quite as he might like to be. He cannot help himself, demanding a “full British Brexit” — whatever that means — and, reportedly, responding to business concerns about a no-deal outcome with the pithy and entirely grown-up comeback, “F*** business”.
To think that he once seemed likely to be prime minister. Mr Johnson’s moment has been and gone. His goose is cooked. And you sense that he must know it too. His supporters — which is to say his former supporters — at Westminster certainly think so. Ask them about Mr Johnson’s leadership aspirations and you will receive a look that says nothing so much as, “Ah, come on, let’s be serious about these things”A reminder too, if it were really needed, that the wheels are off the government bus. Theresa May is not known as a sadist but there is an exquisite cruelty about keeping Mr Johnson in place at the Foreign Office. The FCO has become a gilded cage for a moulting bird of paradise. Granted, this comes at a price, chiefly the diminishment of what was once one of the great offices of state, but for a government in which survival is the chief order of business this is a price worth paying. The country’s mileage may differ but that’s not the prime minister’s principal concern.