In July this year David Cameron personally told the Conservative National Convention that Mark Clarke’s now disbanded RoadTrip campaign would continue until 2020. According to a post at the time on Clarke’s Facebook page, the PM said of RoadTrip:

“For the first time we had a deployable resource. That’s why we are going to keep it going for 2020.”

Guido understands that on 1 July, far from jettisoning RoadTrip, senior figures at CCHQ told Clarke that the campaign had been a success and that they wanted to set up a successor campaign group called RoadTrip 2020. Despite widespread knowledge at the time of some of the scandalous goings on that had taken place. So not only were the Tories backing Clarke’s campaign four months ago, he also had the personal endorsement of the PM…