The Guardian reports:

The former Conservative leadership candidate Rory Stewart has resigned from the party, and announced plans to run for mayor of London as an independent.

Stewart, who was among 21 Tories who lost the whip for rebelling over a no-deal Brexit, announced in a tweet on Friday that he would stand down as an MP. He later told the Evening Standard newspaper he was sick of the “madhouse of mutual insults in the Gothic shouting chamber of Westminster”.

Stewart effectively announced his departure as an MP in front of an audience of thousands on Thursday night, during an event at the Royal Albert Hall in London where actors and others read famous letters to the audience.

Coming on stage to read a letter from Eton about the then-schoolboy Boris Johnson, sent to his father, Stanley, Stewart began: “This letter constitutes my resignation from the Conservative party.”

At the Letters Live event, Stewart read extracts from a 1982 letter to Johnson’s father, Stanley, from his teacher Martin Hammond. “Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies,” the letter begins.

Appearing on a bill that also featured the actors Olivia Colman, Jude Law and Benedict Cumberbatch, Stewart read: “Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility … I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.” [Continue reading…]