Boris Johnson’s campaign has too many cooks whipping up their own policy mixes. As a result, his team is sending confusing and conflicting signals on what he would do as prime minister.

The frontrunner in the Tory leadership race was thrown on to the defensive over a plan to hand out tax cuts for people earning over £50,000. He insists his priority is those on low incomes. He declined to endorse the promise of a pay rise for public sector workers by Matt Hancock, one of his cabinet supporters. He denied knowledge of plans for a cull of seven Whitehall departments floated by another ally.

Today Boris outlined proposals to review “sin taxes” on sugary and fatty foods, just as Hancock, the health secretary, plans to extend the “sugar tax” to milkshakes.

“There are too many freelance operations,” one Boris backer admitted. It’s not the message discipline for which Sir Lynton Crosby, Johnson’s adviser, is famous. It is part of a wider problem: some Tories project on to Johnson what they want him to be. His desire to please everyone will mean trouble ahead, and not just on Brexit.

Allies admit that his rival Jeremy Hunt is putting up a tougher fight than they expected. There are signs that some Tory members have decided to back Hunt, impressed by him after sizing up both candidates at hustings events. So the result might be closer than Johnson would like – ideally, a mandate from at least 60 per cent of the membership. One senior Tory told me: “I reckon it’s 55 per cent [for Boris] to 45 per cent [Hunt].” Another said: “I predict 52 to 48,” only half joking.

Biggest lies told by Boris Johnson Show all 5 1 /5 Biggest lies told by Boris Johnson Biggest lies told by Boris Johnson Made-up quote for The Times Johnson was sacked from The Times newspaper in the late 1980s after he fabricated a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, for a front-page article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace. “The trouble was that somewhere in my copy I managed to attribute to Colin the view that Edward II and Piers Gaveston would have been cavorting together in the Rose Palace,” he claimed. Alas, Gaveston was executed 13 years before the palace was built. “It was very nasty,” Mr Johnson added, before attempting to downplay it as nothing more than a schoolboy blunder. PA Biggest lies told by Boris Johnson Sacked from cabinet over cheating lie Michael Howard gave Boris Johnson two new jobs after becoming leader of the Conservatives in 2003 – party vice-chairman and shadow arts minister. He was sacked from both positions in November 2004 after assuring Mr Howard that tabloid reports of his affair with Spectator columnist Petronella Wyatt were false and an “inverted pyramid of piffle”. When the story was found to be true, he refused to resign. PA Biggest lies told by Boris Johnson Broken promise to boss In 1999 Johnson was offered editorship of The Spectator by owner Conrad Black on the condition that he would not stand as an MP while in the post. In 2001 he stood - and was elected - MP for Henley, though Black did allow him to continue as editor despite calling "ineffably duplicitous" PA Biggest lies told by Boris Johnson Misrepresenting the people of Liverpool As editor of The Spectator, he was forced to apologise for an article in the magazine which blamed drunken Liverpool fans for the 1989 Hillsborough disaster and suggested that the people of the city were wallowing in their victim status. “Anyone, journalist or politician, should say sorry to the people of Liverpool – as I do – for misrepresenting what happened at Hillsborough,” he said. PA Biggest lies told by Boris Johnson ‘I didn’t say anything about Turkey’ Johnson claimed in January, that he did not mention Turkey during the EU referendum campaign. In fact, he co-signed a letter stating that “the only way to avoid having common borders with Turkey is to vote Leave and take back control”. The Vote Leave campaign also produced a poster reading: “Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU”

No one knows. So Johnson allies are rattled by Hunt’s move on to their territory, with his hardening rhetoric about a no-deal exit, timed before members start to receive their ballot papers on Saturday. While some Hunt supporters are squeamish about the consequences of no deal, he calculates they have nowhere else to go, and is trying to neutralise his weakness amongst Tory members, two-thirds of whom back no deal.

Officially, the Johnson camp dismisses Hunt’s tougher language as more “flip-flopping”. But it has gone negative and personal, warning that Hunt would be a “pushover” for Brussels and would repeat Theresa May’s “disaster” by delaying Brexit beyond 31 October. Boris allies like to claim Hunt cannot believe in Brexit because, like May, he was a Remainer in 2016.

Andrea Leadsom, the former Commons leader, told Chopper’s Brexit podcast for The Daily Telegraph: “Not only is he [Johnson] a committed Brexiteer but he also believes in it. The thing I have learnt, is that if you didn’t believe in Brexit, it is very difficult to be a born again Brexiteer.” While she “admires” Remainers who respect the 2016 referendum result, she detects that their “heart is not in it”.

Kwasi Kwarteng, the Brexit minister, told Sky News: “The worry is that Jeremy Hunt is in exactly the same position as Theresa May was in ... someone who backed Remain and has now seen the error of his ways.”

Civil servants are also viewed as unbelievers. Olly Robbins, the outgoing Brexit negotiator, is branded one of “the mandarin class” who, like May, view Brexit as a blow to be softened rather than a golden opportunity. This is unfair, since Robbins did May’s bidding.

So we now have purism as well as populism as Johnson plays to the party’s base. He pledges to “unite the party and then the country” – a message he will underline at a hustings in Scotland on Friday. He dismisses the idea he is a right-wing populist as “complete hysteria”, saying he proved the same critics wrong as London mayor. Yet at the hustings, he does not talk about the 48 per cent. It sometimes feels as if they do not exist in Borisland.

Johnson is relying on the Tories doing what parties sometimes do – choosing a new leader to overcompensate for the mistakes of their predecessors. (Think Jeremy Corbyn and New Labour.)

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Johnson is “not May”, while Hunt is labelled “Theresa in trousers” and “May Mark 2”. Which is why Hunt tells Tory members he disagreed with May over the hated Irish backstop and never believed her deal would win Commons approval (but supported her as “a loyal foreign secretary”, unlike someone else he does not need to name).