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Hello and welcome to Coffee How Shots, the Spectators Daily and sometimes more than Daily Politics podcast.

I'm Kate Andrews and I'm joined by James Forsyth and Katie Balls.

We have some breaking news for you tonight. Boris Johnson is out of the Tory leadership race.

Although James has supposed one could argue he was never officially in it, this is still pretty big news.

Tell us what's happened tonight.

So tonight at around 9 o'clock, Boris Johnson issued a statement saying that he had the necessary nominations to stand for a Conservative Party leader.

And that he thought he had a good chance of winning the membership vote if this went to the country.

But he had decided that he needed to govern you, the unified parliamentary party behind you.

And so he was not going to put his name forward.

Now I think what this does is it obviously means that Boris Johnson is not going to be Prime Minister by the end of this week.

It also abuts a kind of nightmare scenario, which we increasingly, the risk of which to be increasingly large,

which was that Boris Johnson would get the support of around the third of MPs.

And then there was a chance that the members might choose a different outcome from the MPs.

And so you would have someone trying to lead the Tory party at Westminster when the vast majority of the parliamentary party preferred somebody else's leader.

And I think that would have just been a recipe for instability.

And so I think Boris Johnson's decision to step down has significantly reduced that risk.

And I think it was very telling this afternoon, but even allies of Boris Johnson were saying that they were saying privately,

but they hoped he wouldn't stand because they basically thought there was a kind of choice between Boris Johnson.

And be able to claim that his legacy was delivering Brexit, creating that new Tory electoral coalition in 2019,

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