It’s been an embarrassing weekend for Housing Secretary Simon Clarke – backing a candidate for the Tory leadership who didn’t turn out to be a candidate after all.

Clarke – who was a strong supporter of outgoing Prime Minister Liz Truss until she resigned – then turned into an outspoken advocate of Boris Johnson in the Tory leadership race. 

Clarke changed his Twitter profile to show him and Johnson. He then issued a statement co-authored with the Tees Valley Metro Mayor – Tory Ben Houchen – saying: “Boris is the person we need to lead our country and our party. He won the greatest election victory for years on a mandate to unite and level up the UK, and inspired millions of people who had never voted Conservative before to get behind a generous, optimistic vision of what Britain can be.   

“People on Teesside love Boris because he recognised that while talent is evenly distributed across the country, opportunity is not. Boris gave us that opportunity.”

Then yesterday morning Clarke tweeted: “Boris is the person trusted by voters to level up opportunity across the country, from north to south.”

The only problem for Clarke was that Boris Johnson has turned out not to be a candidate at all, having been widely judged to have failed to get enough definite supporters to pass a 100-MP threshold required for the Tory leadership.

The Tory race continues today with what appears to be a two-horse race between Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt.