Boris Johnson should be worried about the nail-biting battle for second place – Michael Gove just might win

The home secretary has been knocked out – so will it be Jeremy Hunt or the environment secretary to take on the frontrunner in the final vote of Conservative Party members?

The fourth round of the game show known as the Tory leadership contest has set up a thrilling cliffhanger for the next episode this evening, with Michael Gove moving into a wafer-thin lead over Jeremy Hunt for second place.

Just as game show producers are often accused of manipulating reality TV and talent shows to produce an exciting finale, Boris Johnson’s campaign has been accused of skulduggery and manipulation to secure a contest between Johnson and the opponent he would rather face, namely Hunt.

If so, Johnson’s team are not manipulating it well, because Gove – the candidate Johnson is supposed to fear most – seems to have the edge going into the last round of the MPs’ votes.

You can see why people thought Gavin Williamson, the former chief whip who is the organiser of Johnson’s campaign, was up to something. The fall in Rory Stewart’s support, from 37 in the second ballot to 27 in the third, was strange.

Of course, some of his supporters may have decided that he didn’t stand a chance and switched their vote to someone else, but there were suspicions that some Johnson supporters boosted Stewart in the second round with the intention of knocking Dominic Raab out. Raab was Johnson’s rival for the hard-Brexit ticket in this contest, and it certainly suited Johnson to have him out of the field in time for the BBC TV debate on Tuesday night.

Raab’s absence from the contest allowed Johnson to sound a little less definite about taking Britain out of the EU on 31 October, come what may – a scuttle that is likely to turn into a grand betrayal as soon as Johnson has his feet under the No 10 table.

But if these clever games are being played, they aren’t working now. Everyone can see that Johnson would rather face Hunt than Gove in the final ballot of Tory party members. This is not just personal – although Johnson wouldn’t be human if he didn’t resent the way Gove has not just betrayed him, but taunted him about it since.

The most important factor is that Hunt voted Remain in 2016, and that makes him unacceptable to a large majority of Tory party members. They may change their minds once they have seen the final two candidates campaigning over the next few weeks, but it seems unlikely. They have already had a Remainer who promised to deliver Brexit as prime minister and they didn’t like the way it worked out.

The real reason Johnson would rather not face Gove is that he was his co-leader of the Leave campaign. Indeed, as Gove pointed out, at his current campaign launch – with the possibly unwise intention of teasing his rival – it was he who declared for Leave first, and Johnson who joined him later.

None of this is likely to make a difference to the eventual outcome. Johnson’s supporters will still try to portray Gove as a compromiser and a sellout because he stayed in government while Theresa May tried to promote what so many Tory party members now call the “surrender treaty”. Johnson, for all his equivocations, is still seen as the “true Brexit” candidate.

If Johnson fails to win, it will be because he has managed to trip himself up.