North Yorkshire's Carl Les call for Tory leadership election should worry Boris Johnson - The Yorkshire Post says

Quoted in the Guardian, Coun Les aired his displeasure at the party’s losses in last month’s local elections, when the county’s Conservative seats dropped from 55 seats to 47.

“I am very disappointed that the strong majority we had in North Yorkshire has diminished down to a working majority, but only just, and a lot of the comment we were getting on the doorstep was about the impact of Partygate,” he told the newspaper.

It is a scandal that simply will not go away for Mr Johnson.

The fact is that he is the first sitting Prime Minister to have been found to have broken the law after being handed a fixed penalty notice for breaking his own lockdown rules.

At the least, statements he has made in Parliament have been shown to contradict what formal investigations later discovered.

The experienced Coun Les’s call chimes with others from party colleagues, one being Julian Sturdy, Conservative MP for York Outer, who in light of the Sue Gray report – which described “failures of leadership and judgment" in No 10 and the Cabinet Office – said “it is now in the public interest for the Prime Minister to resign”.

It could be getting close to the point of Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, receiving the benchmark 54 letters needed trigger a vote over whether Mr Johnson should lose his premiership.

Only Sir Graham will know how near that eventuality is, but when Conservatives of decades-long allegiance to the party appear to be coming out in droves – more than 20 MPs have now publicly called for Mr Johnson to go, according to reports – the PM must feel that he is on notice.