THE Conservative Party is a hostile environment for failing leaders. And Boris Johnson, who despatched Theresa May where Jeremy Corbyn would have done so but for Labour's fifth column, knows full well that when his leadership becomes a liability rather than an electoral benefit then he will be no less swiftly defenestrated.

It is not that there are not assassins waiting behind the curtains. Those who cast that serial betrayer Michael Gove in this role should remember that he who wields the assassin’s knife rarely takes the crown.

The government is in a real trap of its own making in denying the plain facts about the seasonal party of Christmas last — and this week Gove himself lent a tin ear to the controversy.

The estimable Richard Burgon MP spotted this and made the telling point in the Commons today: “The Prime Minister’s former spokesperson has resigned after being caught on video laughing and joking about a rule-breaking Downing Street party.

“The leader of the house also this week has been caught on video laughing and joking about rule-breaking whilst giving a speech at a lectern.

“She resigned. Surely the leader of the house should resign too, or isn’t it another case of ministers in this government believing it’s one rule for them and another rule for everyone else?”

Johnson’s former mouthpiece, Allegra Stratton, is the first and not the last to be sacrificed to save the Prime Minister’s skin. And less anyone waste sympathy on the tearful Tory, remember that she was paid to lie for Johnson and signed up willingly for the gig.

Stratton is married to the political editor of the Tory house magazine the Spectator and Rishi Sunak was best man at their wedding. That makes her as much the class enemy as any City fat cat or industry boss.

The only surprising thing about her tenure in the job is that Number Ten thought it worth paying her £126,000 for her skills when the Prime Minister himself possesses them in such extravagant abundance.

There are 361 Tory MPs, 274 men and 87 women. Long-serving MPs in safe Tory seats have mostly seen any ministerial ambitions already sated or left unsatisfied. In the main they have reaped the traditional rewards of faithful service to the ruling class in the consultancies, directorships, bunce and backhanders that bind the upper order in a casual confraternity of corruption.

This is where one fissure in Johnson’s crumbling edifice originated. Compelled by public pressure in the wake of Owen Paterson’s resignation to do something about MPs’ second jobs he has succeeded in alienating a group of people who have noting to lose in his departure.

Younger Tory MPs, many the beneficiaries of Keir Starmer’s sabotage of Labour’s 2019 election campaign, with slimmer majorities, without such sources of extra income, now convinced these prizes can only come after their political careers and mindful that ministerial salaries and sleek chauffeur-driven cars are the best they can expect in their middle years, are even more conscious that any slippage in the opinion polls threatens to pitch them into provincial obscurity.

These divisions in the Tory Party may look generational or simply sociological — but they reflect stark class realities. The more far-sighted Tories know that a submissive and slumbering Parliamentary Labour Party is not representative of Labour as a whole or of its working-class constituency.

They see threats as shamefaced Tory voters plump for Lib Dems and even the Greens.

And the subterranean shocks that shiver below the surface of the economy mean that Rishi Sunak’s austerity tendency will find a candidate — even if it isn’t himself.