Amber Rudd, back away from Boris Johnson – the last thing world needs is a ‘Bamber’ Tory leadership

The MP has moulded herself into a potential king, or queenmaker. She should use that power to become the champion of Remainers and the ‘Anyone But Boris’ faction

Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson leave the royal pavilion after attending the the Official Ceremonial Welcome for the Colombian State Visit at Horse Guards Parade (Getty)

Right, your starter for 10 (if not, God willing, for No 10).

Will they be “Bamber” as in Gascoigne? Or “Judd”, as in snooker virtuoso Trump?

“They” are the world’s worst Churchill impersonator Boris Johnson and the Windrush scandal's very own Amber Rudd. The dwelling on a Brangelina-esque portmanteau is inspired by reports that a leadership ticket is imminent.

The latest rumour concerning the small number of Tories (30 or 40, 50 at most) turning their minds to succeeding Theresa May hasn’t been officially confirmed by a categorical denial. But credible media outlets report that Bamber/Judd are close to forming what one calls, with no ironic intent, “a dream ticket”.

What you’d have to ingest for the subconscious to crank out that dream would exhaust the cheese counter at Tesco and several of the Netherlands’ more prolific magic mushroom fields.

So much more than enough has been written about Johnson's lack of suitability to be PM. I lack the strength to bolster the stockpile by reiterating a form book that includes the use, in print, of “piccaninnies”.

If I had to pick a ninny to be the next Conservative PM, and it was a binary choice between him and Johnson, I’d go for Mark Francois.

The ERG pitbull, as trained by the Army not to lose, seems an ideal reflection of the nation’s intellectual state. A man of adorably monumental stupidity even by Stupid Party standards, if Mark went for deed poll – to show his pride in being an Englisher and loathing for fancy French words – he’d plump for Mark Anglais.

But we must be realists. Francois isn’t going to get the top job.

Johnson, on the other hand, would romp home if his parliamentary colleagues put him in the final two. The membership deifies him. In a man observed by Have I Got News For You production staff diving beneath the presenter’s desk moments before filming to muss up his hair, they see authenticity.

Yet most Tory MPs are smarter than the average Wiltshire 79-year-old who hasn’t seen a brown or black face since 1973 (and even then, in a sugar fume hallucination while boiling the quince jam for the summer fete), but frets incessantly about the village being “swamped”.

Since the MPs have studied Johnson close up, the odds are stacked against him unless he finds a way of broadening his appeal beyond the crazies of the ERG.

This is where Rudd comes in. The de facto leader of the Remainiacs, she supposedly has the power, and also apparently the willingness, to legitimise the rogue, balance the Europhobia, and so move several dozen like-minded souls to his camp.

To her credit, Rudd hasn’t done the Jeremy Hunt crab-on-anabolics scuttle from arch stayer to no dealer. Since returning to the cabinet after taking the bullet for May’s home office wickedness towards the Windrush generation, she has stuck unflinchingly to her Remainer principles and blown up her own leadership chances.

Yet now, we read, she is thinking of teaming up with the guy she said you wouldn’t want driving you home at the end of the evening. Presumably in return for the chancellorship, she may be willing to hand him the keys and adopt the brace position on the back seat.

Any one of us could counsel here about that by analysing the historic value (think of a high tariff Reichsmark banknote in Weimar Germany) of any Johnson promise.

If he gave Rudd a solemn oath not to renege on any previously struck agreement with the EU, it would take him about 2.3 seconds to forget.

But three words of advice must suffice:

Don’t. Be. Daft.

Only a Corbyn sleeper, implanted under deepest cover within the Conservatives long ago after a show of hands above an Islington pub, could sensibly enable a Johnson premiership.

If the Tories have any residual short-term interest in surviving as a potential party of government, a “dream ticket” between the Bullingdon Bozo and a Cheltenham Ladies College alumna with the blood of Charles II in her veins would be a peculiar way to show it.

If we are on the edge of electing a Marxist-leaning government, it’s because so much of Britain is screaming in the dark for serious wealth redistribution.

The reason people hate and fear Corbyn isn’t any sympathies with terrorists or the tiny Jewish problem he inflated by inaction. It’s because they have money, and would like to keep it.

The reason 40 per cent went for Corbyn last time is that they have none or very little, and would like more.

This will strike professor John Curtice and other psephologists as simplistic. But it is also broadly true.

To have a prayer at the next election, which will not be a single-issue affair about you-know-what, they need a leader capable of feigning some faint appetite for a less brutally unequal society.

Johnson, who couldn’t, would be a secure-the-base candidate with minimal crossover into the floating vote, however tickled it may be by the well worn comic schtick.

As chancellor, Rudd might have the recognition to cling on in supermarginal Hastings. But she’d be sitting despondently on the opposition benches, probably under a viciously right wing new leader of a nationalistic rump, asking herself what she was thinking when she betrayed her judgment to land the party with Johnson.

By refusing to finesse her stance on Europe à la Hunt or Gove, she has moulded herself into a potential king, or queenmaker.

The wise way to use that power is to become the champion of not only of the Second Referendumites, but the Anyone But Boris faction. And anyone, for clarity and again without ironic intent, includes Mark Anglais.