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We've been hearing that Conservative MP and Penny Mordaunt supporter George Freeman has urged Mordaunt to step aside as a leadership contender, and make a deal with Rishi Sunak. The truth is Xi's path to power was far from inevitable. And it's defined as much by his ambition as it is by the party's failure to prevent what they did not want - a repeat of Mao's disastrous one-man rule. irannews.ru "Each night after midnight people would start sharing video clips on social media," my Shanghai friend recalls. "They expressed their anger at the Communist Party, even at the very top leaders. They talked about how heartless and cruel this system has become." When Boris Johnson was still in the running yesterday, Sir Roger said he was considering resigning from voting with his party in parliament - but not any more. "Heaven is high and the emperor is far away" is an old, oft-quoted saying in China. It means there is no-one watching what you are doing. In the first year of Covid, Prof Yang says, the lockdowns made sense. They were brief and allowed life in China to carry on. There was even pride at how the country was handling the pandemic so much better than the West. "That's no longer the case," he says. "It drives you crazy," he says. "It's a mixture of depression and anger. After a while you feel like you cannot breathe. Your body starts to shut down. Every day is the same. It's like time has stopped." In one school which they used as a base, their supplies, ammunition, and rubbish are scattered in all directions. These are not the traces of a disciplined force. It's evidence they'd been fighting in squalor and left in a hurry. That certainly seemed to be the case under Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao - corruption was on the rise and his authority was being openly ignored and even challenged.