For some disgruntled Gove supporters the stench of skulduggery hung thick over Westminster last night.

“The black arts were in full swing,” noted one MP, who had backed the defeated Scot.

A Gove campaign source noted: “Boris and Michael were getting half of Sajid’s votes each, few were going to Hunt. So what happened? You join up the dots. If you’ve got a big lead, you can do what you want with that. No, it’s not cricket but it is politics”.

Sir Alan Duncan, one of Jeremy Hunt's supporters, suggested Mr Johnson might have been out for revenge. "There's talk of one team using proxies designed for their candidate being used for another to boost them. Well, y'know, this happens in all leadership contests," he told Channel Four News.

And Simon Clarke, a Johnson supporter, suggested a number of MPs might have "freelanced" outside the official campaign.

“Some people might have taken it upon themselves to try and steer the outcome," said the Middlesbrough MP.

However, other Gove supporters disagreed.

One told The Herald: “The final vote was well-managed by Boris’s team. He won fair and square. And he will win overwhelmingly with the members.”

Indeed, Mel Stride, who ran the Environment Secretary’s campaign, also downplayed talk of tactical voting to benefit Mr Hunt at the expense of Mr Gove. "It doesn't seem to me on first observation of this that there has been.

"Because we didn't see a situation where, as some had speculated, a very large number of votes might have transferred from, say, Boris Johnson to Jeremy Hunt.

"It would appear to me everybody has behaved pretty much as one would hope they would," he added.

And the Johnson camp denied any strategy to aid Mr Hunt by lending him votes.

Key aide Conor Burns said: “The message came from Boris: if people want to support me they vote for me, no pissing around. We wanted at every stage to make progress. We wanted to go to the members with more than half of the party voting for Boris. That’s a really strong mandate and message from our parliamentary colleagues to our members in the country; get on board and let’s bring it all together.”

Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, had been eliminated earlier in the day when he picked up just 34 votes.

The expectation among many Westminster-watchers was that most of his supporters would split between Brexiteers Mr Gove and Boris Johnson.

After Mr Javid’s elimination in the fourth round, just a few hours of frantic phone calls and pleading texts lay before the final vote as the three camps sought to entice Mr Javid and his 33 supporters over to their campaigns.

In the committee corridor it was noticeable how the crowds of Tory MPs was thinner than usual. Apparently scores had got colleagues to vote for them by proxy; a number had skipped off to Ascot.

Whispers zipped around the corridors that a deal of tactical voting was going on. “Some pretty shoddy stuff going on,” noted one Tory MP.

Just after 6pm, the grandees of the 1922 backbench committee slowly and silently walked into the Gladstone Room with its oak panels and tall windows. When Dame Cheryl Gillan read out the numbers, there was an audible intake of breath from the throng of MPs and journalists at the closeness of the result.

Surprisingly, the former Foreign Secretary picked up just three votes, bringing his total to 160. Mr Gove increased his tally by 14 to post 75 yet Mr Hunt notched up an extra 18 to give him 77. There was one rejected ballot paper.

The truth is that from the very first round when Mr Johnson picked up 114 votes, 71 votes ahead of his nearest rival, there was talk of tactical voting, especially when Gavin Williamson, the former Chief Whip, dubbed a “modern day Machiavelli,” was brought in to run the former Foreign Secretary’s campaign.

Tactical voting, of course, is nothing new to politics. Ordinary voters do it all the time at elections to try to keep one candidate out and put another one in.

It seemed clear that in terms of opponents the former Foreign Secretary superficially would have rather faced the urbane and bland Mr Hunt, “Theresa May in trousers,” over the articulate and combative Mr Gove.

And, of course, it was the Scot who, three years ago destroyed Mr Johnson’s campaign to succeed David Cameron in the most dramatic way.

And yet, the arithmetic seems to argue against tactical voting. A case could have been made if Mr Hunt had beaten Mr Gove by 20 votes or more. But just two? Such tactical precision would surely have been impossible to achieve.

The fact that Mr Hunt pipped Mr Gove to the post might also have had something to do with the fact that Tory MPs did not want the “personal psychodrama” between the two leading Leavers displayed for a month before the party membership and the general public.

Now the battle is before the grassroots with Mr Hunt portraying himself as the trusted diplomat with the safe pair of hands and Mr Johnson insisting he has the energy and vision to deliver a sunlit post-Brexit Britain.

As ever, the contest appears to be in Boris’s hands and whether he can, for a month, carry that priceless Ming vase safely across the wooden floor to victory. It’s his to lose.