Boris Johnson

The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism

by Adrian Wooldridge  · 7 Apr 2026  · 342pp  · 129,097 words

his first term Trump failed to fulfil his promise to build a wall or dismantle crony capitalism but succeeded in providing tax cuts for billionaires. Boris Johnson not only failed to deliver on his promise to ‘level up’ the country but proved to be such an abysmal prime minister that his own

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a combination of the two. Populist movements are rooted in their local soil. Donald Trump is an archetypical American huckster – big, brash and loud-mouthed. Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn could not be anything other than British: Johnson the bastard offspring of Bertie Wooster and Oswald Mosley, Corbyn a Britain-hating bearded

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ultimate sin in a democracy of refusing to accept the result of an election and organizing a mob to prevent the certification of the result. Boris Johnson was very much a little Caesar to Trump’s big Caesar. He was also a very different character from the American, despite their shared distinctive

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with no concern for truth and propriety. ‘I have never encountered a senior British politician who lies and fabricates so shamelessly and so systematically as Boris Johnson,’ wrote Peter Oborne, a one-time Brexiteer and Boris booster who was so infuriated by his behaviour that he wrote a book to catalogue the

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’ or ‘ethics’ or anything else that reeked of the 1950s. The copybook headings proved to be right: you cannot study the careers of Trump or Boris Johnson without being struck by the way that their horrible characters (serial adultery, compulsive lying, extreme narcissism) led inexorably to their appalling political behaviour. A glance

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pause while they digest the people they have taken in. Post-Brexit Britain introduced a points system modelled on those of Canada and Australia, though Boris Johnson suspended it to respond to short-term labour-market pressures. Spain and Portugal give preferences for people from Latin America. The job of sensible liberals

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, Napoléon le Petit (London, Jeffs, 1852) 12 Ferdinand Mount, Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall – From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson (London, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2023) 13 Quoted in Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism, p. 182 14 Alexander Hamilton or James Madison, Federalist No. 55 (15

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Triumph of the Dark, p. 1044 27 Ferdinand Mount, Big Caesars and Little Caesars: How They Rise and How They Fall – From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson (London, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2023), p. 199 28 Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York, Random House, 2002), pp. 306–22

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Government Endangers Our Future (Cambridge, Polity, 2024), p. 92 11 Rachman, The Age of the Strongman, p. 10 12 Peter Oborne, The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism (London, Simon & Schuster, 2021), p. 18 13 Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, The Divider: Trump

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019

by Stewart Lee  · 2 Sep 2019  · 382pp  · 117,536 words

the Daily Mail Can Harry and Meghan make Britain whole again? How Toby Young got where he isn’t today My desperate bid to match Boris Johnson’s colossal lies Satire only makes Jacob Rees-Mogg stronger Is a sci-fi-style dystopia such a bad outcome for Brexit? The Brexit

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seemed sincere in their beliefs, rather than selfishly using the nation’s concerns about its future to try and secure theirs. Indeed, the day when Boris Johnson cynically accused the pro-Europe and ‘part-Kenyan’ President Obama of being ancestrally ill-disposed towards Britain marks the moment at which the mayor of

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London changed from being merely a twat into a full-blown cunt. It is appropriate to describe Boris Johnson with pure witless swearing, for that is all he deserves. He is of a political class where any insult, no matter how vicious, is

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blinding them by feeding on the eye itself. But the fly has no quarrel with the child. It is merely following its nature. Likewise, Boris Johnson, a vile grub laying his horrible eggs in the soft jelly of the EU debate, has no agenda beyond his own advancement. He believes in

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like compacted pellets of Priti Patel’s shit. Even Remain’s Amber Rudd, the Countess Bathory of Energy and Climate, seemed clever by comparison to Boris Johnson, who managed to make the word ‘expert’ a pejorative term. Nonetheless, it was bleakly obvious that the audience’s disillusion led them to favour the

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Michael Gove put his penis into a Daily Mail journalist. And to render both his rivals irrelevant, to do something even more disgusting and demented, Boris Johnson allowed himself to be put into the role of foreign secretary, a camp-guard punishment beating for the world.4 But, in a plot twist

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mentality’, the resentful jealousy of the ‘ill-born, meek’ man, imagining that one day the world will see that he was right all along.6 Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, however, fulfil the criteria of what Nietzsche names, in the same essay, ‘blond beasts’. Not only are they both blond and beastly

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that she had seen The Quicksilver Messenger Service live, back in the psychedelic day. America obligingly became what we had hoped it would be. 2 Boris Johnson, the Goves’ former dinner-party guest, is also twenty-four years older than the woman he left his last wife for, though admittedly he was

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that had he made that suggestion in India, the foreign secretary would have been killed immediately. Another successful Boris Johnson PR exercise. That said, I don’t think Boris Johnson was seeking to pique the Sikhs. Indeed, Boris Johnson’s own wife, Marina Wheeler QC, is half Sikh, though it is not clear which half, so

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perfect example of that Political Correctness Gone Mad™ that they have now. In respect of his pernicious Brexit lies, it is not necessarily wrong that Boris Johnson should be punished indiscriminately by the full force of whatever belief systems are most unforgiving, but he shouldn’t be slain for saying ‘whisky’ to

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a Sikh. No one should. Nonetheless, an expensively educated hominid like Boris Johnson, doing the sensitive job he does, should have a subliminal awareness of cultural taboos. The Sikhs’ offence is Eton College’s failure. Perhaps fewer soggy

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biscuit competitions after lights out, and more comparative religion, headmaster! And gurdwara-gate definitely calls into question Boris Johnson’s fitness for the role of foreign secretary, a position he is unlikely to occupy after 8 June anyway, especially in the event of a

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Corbyn win.3 But Boris Johnson’s biggest cultural cringe happened earlier in the week, in faraway Newport, South Wales. The Conservatives consider Wales invisible to mainstream media, which is

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Hulk gets!” I thought you might like to know. Nos da.’ Sure enough, Wales Online was now reporting the story of Boris Johnson™’s disastrous visit to the Gwentish market. Apparently, Boris Johnson™ declined to eat a suspected hash cake; said, ‘This is one of those cakes that you can both have and eat

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, if you don’t mind me saying, Boris.’ Pow! In less than a minute, I found four interviews, from 2009 to 2015, in which Boris Johnson™, each time citing the comic-book quote ‘The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets’, said he would like to be the Incredible Hulk™. Perhaps

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quoting a comic book is one of those little tricks clever Boris Johnson uses to appear down with the normal people, irrespective of his actual feeling for the work itself, having long since made the concepts of truth

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Countryside Alliance’s misappropriation of their album The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks to soundtrack its campaign against rural post-office closures. And likewise, Boris Johnson™ absolutely cannot have our Incredible Hulk™ – no way, man! You’ve taken our future. At least leave us our comic books, dude. I emailed

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various comics creatives to solicit their opinions on Boris Johnson™’s desire to actually be the actual Incredible Hulk™, the most succinct coming from exiled Hulk artist Gary Frank. ‘I can’t help feeling that

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Hulk’s alter ego, Bruce Banner, doesn’t actually want to get angry, become stupid and then smash everything to fuck. Do you think Boris Johnson™ misread the Hulk comics as a sort of Tony Robbins self-help guide to fulfilling your potential?’ But dig a little deeper into the Hulk

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’s genesis, and it seems Boris Johnson is right to identify with the creature, but not for the reasons he imagines. The early American comic-book superheroes were authored almost exclusively by

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of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the character is best understood through the sixteenth-century tale of the Golem of Prague, as, indeed, is Boris Johnson™ himself.5 Having made a man-monster from magic mud to protect his community, Rabbi Loew soon finds he, like Bruce Banner after he unleashes

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always the Hulk, all along. And he always was the golem. The ancient legend claimed him at birth, and it knew Boris Johnson better than Boris Johnson knew himself, as legends are wont to do. And now his attic awaits. Wow. I guess most posters here would have sided with the

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Sikh culture more than the hand wringing Guardianistas. Ever been to a Sikh wedding? Not much abstinence there. Nidoc10 1 17 May 2017. 2 Boris Johnson and Marina Wheeler split in 2018, after she became bored of his infidelities. You can’t have your cake and eat it after all, it

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paranoid novelist, I have been selling the same stand-up routine nightly to audiences, advancing the idea that the secret Tory steering committee always intended Boris Johnson to be leader of the party, and that Theresa May had been put in place only as a kind of palate cleanser, a nasty-tasting

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the character from specific details. It may have been folly to hitch my story wagon to a character so clearly inspired by Boris Johnson, even though his future once seemed secure. Boris Johnson will be a forgotten casualty of the crisis his own lying Daily Telegraph columns created; the mad scientist, raging at his

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current near-three-hour run-time uses topical material as feeder routes into the main narrative thrust. For simplicity’s sake, I could do with Boris Johnson and Donald Trump still being around in September, as the similarities between them dovetail the two acts together neatly, but every night in the interval

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Minotaur 1 In the end, despite the promise of a payment from Channel 4 for the finished pilot script, I had to abandon this project. Boris Johnson no longer seemed charming enough to be a plausible anti-hero, and the full horror of the extent of Brexit’s failure overtook the project

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attend, in a building named after our national saint, a man famous for fighting something that didn’t exist: a dragon as unreal as Boris Johnson’s Daily Telegraph vision of a banana-hating EU. The chapel’s roof is decorated with heraldic animals. Guests might find themselves staring up at

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Dr Fortrero plot to wipe out the black population and claiming it’s research for a forthcoming speech. If Boris Watermelon Smile Johnson’s brother, Boris Johnson Junior, intended the appointment of the Maverick Toadmeister to the universities regulator to counteract the influence of the Political Correctness Gone Mad brigade, it’s

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be honest. What a corner he has backed himself into, with all his stupid cheap shit. My desperate bid to match Boris Johnson’s colossal lies 28 January 2018 When Boris Johnson announced in a press conference on Thursday his intent to fly to the moon in a basket carried by enormous swans, as

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do the thing I thought I’d spend my retirement doing, and I am only fifty. 2 This paragraph is a mixture of comments Boris Johnson has made about homosexuals and black people and mangled quotes from a transcript of a phone call with his friend, the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy

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ancient weapons will not work upon his impervious hide, their keen blades blunt upon the armour of his cruel certainties. This Rees-Mogg is no Boris Johnson, the blowhard balloon animal who eventually blew himself up, spattering onlookers with a residue of sticky lies. It’s impossible to imagine now that once

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leadership. Journalists and wits! TV panel-show satirists!! And all the historic enablers of Have I Got News for You, unwitting celebrity engineers of the Boris Johnson golem!!!2 To rankle Rees-Mogg you need a charm word even more powerful than John Crace’s ‘Maybot’, which damned an already doomed leader

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eighteenth century!’ You will have to do better than that. For Rees-Mogg is upon us, his cold breath on our heels. Eventually, as Boris Johnson has shown us, even a public raised on Britain’s Got Talent and tomato sauce-flavoured crisps tires of empty novelty, and the allure of

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reckon with the lying Brexiteers. 4 As I write these notes, in February 2019, it seems Rees-Mogg’s stealth strategy has paid off. Boris Johnson has blown himself out, but Rees-Mogg’s European Research Group is a powerbroker in the Brexit clusterfuck. Is a sci-fi-style dystopia such

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there be nuclear power stations abandoned in dangerous disrepair? Would the oceans choke on plastic? Would secure housing be a pipe dream for millions? Would Boris Johnson still be free to scatter his lies at midnight into sleeping children’s eyes? For many of the disenfranchised and disenchanted Britons who voted for

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driving me bananas 4 March 2018 On 10 May 2016, in the closing days of the Brexit campaign, during an impromptu speech in Cornwall, lying Boris Johnson again invoked the Brexiteers’ foundation myth that the EU sought to ban bendy bananas. But voters who backed leaving the EU in order to get

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Brexiteer or a diehard traitor Remoaner, the precision-applied works spanner of Corbyn’s Own Brexit Fudge™® means hard Brexit is far less likely. Banzai! Boris Johnson’s dream of bendy bananas for ever withers on the banana vine, a cowed people cowering for eternity beneath the blow of the straight banana

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I don’t remember. 3 Lunn is in fact the world’s leading expert on novelty bicycles. 4 Wheeler, second wife. 5 Wyatt, Spectator columnist. Boris Johnson lied about his affair with her, and so was sacked as shadow arts minister in 2005. Toby Young, Spectator critic, who was later appointed to

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the board of the Office for Students by Boris Johnson’s brother Jo, co-wrote a play about the scandal called Whose the Daddy? Sometimes it seems that, for the tight-knit circle of

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but for different reasons. Enemies of Putin expire and nuclear threats are proliferating across the Earth. Perhaps the trademark robust diplomacy of the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, deployed via scatological limericks in his chicken-feed Telegraph column, might defuse the tension?2 Needless to say, shameless Remoaners are already exploiting the Salisbury

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the international community’s anxieties, and the deceased, all part of his brilliant strategy of organised chaos and confusion. How he must love Brexit. 2 Boris Johnson had a limerick about the president of Turkey having sex with a goat published in the Spectator. 3 I am very lucky that the Observer

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buttered up, and in a brief respite from pornography, the first family will proceed to the otter enclosure at London Zoo, where the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, dressed as a glistening wet otter,5 will cavort and frolic to the Trumps’ delight with real otters in their pond and toss a stone

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people because of what we do. I think I should get a sense of perspective. 5 Writing in the Telegraph about the Olympics in 2012, Boris Johnson, then mayor of the host city, said, ‘There are semi-naked women playing beach volleyball in the middle of the Horse Guards Parade immortalised

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of Seven Samurai in Japanese, with English subtitles. Don’t you, again, wish I was your dad? 3 Earlier that week, Boris Johnson had said that Muslim women looked like letterboxes. Boris Johnson doesn’t say anything by accident. Eight months later, when Muslims were massacred by a neo-Nazi in New Zealand, he

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While recognised as a twentieth-century design classic, in 2004 the enclosure was emptied of penguins, who didn’t like swimming in it as, like Boris Johnson, it was too shallow to be of any use to anyone. Having frustrated generations of sea birds for more than eighty years, Lubetkin’s white

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in his sleigh, scattering valuable medicines and tinned foods to the bedraggled people traversing the ruined Mad Max wasteland of post-Brexit Britain. Or perhaps Boris Johnson could be Santa. He has the physique, and the international aspect of the job would give him a chance to display his well-loved facility

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to a woman who once worked at the Daily Mail, but only as a temp who ended up staying and operating beyond her portfolio. 9 Boris Johnson had described the newly disgraced columnist and educationalist Toby Young’s approach to humour as ‘caustic wit’. 10 While this may have been arguably

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but I suppose the key thing here is that bendy bananas were one of the main thrusts for leaving the banana-regulating EU, for both Boris Johnson and the kind of people in the Question Time audience who speak out without any apparent point. And yet the regulation no longer applied at

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Ian’ did not, in fact, concede that he would remain in the original shatted bed, and finds the idea that Brexit voters were duped by Boris Johnson’s lies as patronising to working-class people. He voted Leave in order to cause total social anarchy, an admirably extremist position in some ways

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles

by Fintan O'Toole  · 5 Mar 2020  · 385pp  · 121,550 words

.’ JONATHAN SWIFT, ‘The Art of Political Lying’, The Examiner, 9 November 1710 INTRODUCTION Before the Golden Age Early in the morning of 13 December 2019, Boris Johnson made his victory speech. He had used the simple thirteen-letter slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’ to transform the electoral map. Parts of the English Midlands

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They had no self-control, could not restrain Themselves from wreaking outrages and pain.7 The ancient poet may not have foreseen the coming of Boris Johnson, but this does serve as fair warning. And Johnson’s evocation of the Golden Age is in fact wonderfully evasive. He does not actually say

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, but when they come to power in the autumn they will be the establishment they have told everybody not to believe. Prime minister-in-waiting Boris Johnson is merely the winner of a Winston Churchill impersonation contest. He has a streak of Churchill’s brilliant opportunism and reckless charm, but he does

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’s current situation that his earlier hyperbole: ‘That England, that was wont to conquer others, / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.’ 2 July 2016 Boris Johnson’s campaign to succeed David Cameron collapses in farce. Donald Trump is looming as the most likely next president of the United States. We are

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up. Brexit, to its leading champions a mere linguistic construct, has become a real-world event. The transformative moment has arrived. And then their leader, Boris Johnson, walks away, tacitly admitting that his successful advocacy of this great upheaval was no more serious than winning a debating competition at the Oxford Union

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conclusion’. 23 September 2017 Theresa May delivers a big Brexit speech in Florence, formally asking for a transition period after March 2019. Her foreign secretary Boris Johnson goes on manoeuvres with a big essay of his own, staking out a hardline position. Brexit is written in binary code. It is all zeros

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ones – out of the European Union or in. In his long Telegraph essay last weekend, the British foreign secretary and totem of the Leave campaign Boris Johnson reiterated the iron imperatives of last year’s referendum: ‘The choice was binary. The result was decisive. There is simply no way – or no

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Ireland in trying to do so. 12 November 2017 The British ministers for defence and international affairs resign in separate scandals and the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, is proving to be openly incompetent. A leaked EU position paper is scathing on the failure of the British side to come up with credible

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with other countries. The ministers in charge of two of them – Priti Patel and Michael Fallon – are gone from the cabinet. Whatever shred of credibility Boris Johnson had as foreign secretary has been stripped away. One of the most basic functions of any country’s foreign office is to come to the

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’s grand self-delusions. TIMELINE 18 January 2018: The European Union (Withdrawal) Bill has its First Reading in the House of Lords. 14 February 2018: Boris Johnson gives a major speech on Brexit. 28 February 2018: The European Commission publishes the draft withdrawal agreement. 2 March 2018: May gives a speech at

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of Rockall. Denmark, Iceland and Ireland will withdraw their rival claims and issue a joint statement recognising the inalienable Britishness of the rock. A helmeted Boris Johnson will be winched on to Rockall from a helicopter, waving a Union flag in each hand. He will be granted the title of sovereign lord

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drivers will not be forced to give up rashers and eggs for muesli and croissants. (None of these things ever happened, but, largely thanks to Boris Johnson, people believe they did, so the ‘concessions’ will feel like a victory.) 15. The people of Paris will agree to stop being rude and

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of it at last?’ / Quoth little Peterkin. / ‘Why that I cannot tell,’ said he, / ‘But ’twas a famous victory.’ 25 February 2018 On 14 February, Boris Johnson, Theresa May’s foreign secretary, gave a big speech in London on his ‘vision for Brexit’. It assured Remainers that their feelings of ‘grief and

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customs union even after it departed from both. It was they who would provide the lubrication for the zipless, frictionless Brexit of the Leavers’ dreams. Boris Johnson encapsulated the proposition in the BBC’s big set-piece final debate before the referendum in June 2016. ‘Everyone knows this country receives about one

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to the hope that some as yet uninvented technologies can keep the border invisible even while the UK leaves the customs union and single market. Boris Johnson explains that it can all be done as simply as the congestion charge in London. Many unionist politicians are people of deep faith. After this

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exchange to happen over and over again, it can withstand everything its enemies throw at it. 12 June 2018 Buzzfeed releases a secret recording of Boris Johnson addressing a private dinner for Brexit supports in London. As well as suggesting that Donald Trump would be the man to negotiate Brexit with the

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man with a self-consciously orotund vocabulary, mad hair and a great line in sacrificing the young generation for his bonkers beliefs – Christopher Lee as Boris Johnson, in other words. But the most interesting parallel is the arrival on Summerisle of Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Neil Howie, innocently intent on doing his

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negotiations with the EU. 9 July 2018: David Davis resigns as secretary of state for exiting the European Union and is replaced by Dominic Raab. Boris Johnson resigns as foreign secretary and is replaced by Jeremy Hunt. 24 July 2018: UK government publishes white paper on future UK–EU relations. 23 August

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the UK will seek to remain closely aligned to the customs union and single market after Brexit. David Davis resigns as Brexit secretary, followed by Boris Johnson as foreign secretary. The best headline about British prime minister Theresa May’s short-lived triumph over the hard Brexiteers last Friday was undoubtedly the

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that their heads can be pulled out of the jar without her premiership getting scratched to death. The only problem is that David Davis and Boris Johnson, having been successfully extracted, decided to bare their claws again. As any possum or two-year-old child will tell you, sticking your head

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’) and ‘the barbarous clangour of a gong’(‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’)? Yeats even anticipated the trend for stupid hair among right-wing male politicians (Trump, Boris Johnson, Geert Wilders) in ‘The Tower’: There lurches past, his great eyes without thought Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks That insolent fiend… We

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dinner. There is deep dismay that she does little more than read woodenly an op-ed article already published in Die Zeit. 15 September 2018 Boris Johnson is manoeuvring ever more openly against Theresa May. As Winston Churchill did not say, never in the field of human conflict has so much harm

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Irish dimension of Brexit, we’ve become inured to magical thinking (the wonderful efficacy of not-yet-invented technological solutions), blithe misapprehension and sheer fatuousness (Boris Johnson’s insistence that the border is just like that between two London boroughs). This has been oddly comforting. Since this stuff is so evidently childish

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poor historians trying to make sense of Brexit, this assumption will be mistaken. There is, of course, plenty of straightforward mendacity for them to identify. Boris Johnson’s whole journalistic and political career has been driven by his talent for taking minor regulations and distorting them into wildly exaggerated claims of oppression

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. This in turn raised two big questions. First, could the Brexiteers in fact come up with some other solution? After all, two of their leaders, Boris Johnson and David Davis, were then senior members of Theresa May’s cabinet (though you would not know it, from his subsequent complaints, Davis was actually

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logic of dreams, where things seem to flow from one another in some rational sequence but also leap from impossibilities to absurdities. In July, when Boris Johnson with his usual propensity for walking away from the trouble he has created, resigned from Theresa May’s cabinet, he lamented in his letter to

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and stealthily) by the Germans. These are very, very strange things for a country to do to itself and they require some explanation. So after Boris Johnson’s claim that ‘the dream is dying’ I decided to write a short book exploring what I call English Dreamtime, that mental landscape of heroic

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dramatic: nothing. May had said that her government owed it to everyone on the island to see through the commitments she (and her government, including Boris Johnson and David Davis) had made to ‘everyone on the island of Ireland’. But the British did damn all. Again, don’t trust my interpretation on

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wasn’t in it. It was a breathtakingly cynical calculation driven by a raging lust for power – no less reprehensible, if somewhat more devious, than Boris Johnson’s more overt cynicism. And, of course, it paid off. When Johnson and Michael Gove did their Laurel and Hardy act and pushed each other

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), wheelchair users in the army (sniff) and the stability and durability of married life, embodied presumably by such fine characters as Gove’s then buddy Boris Johnson, forever gone (sniff, sniff). At least now we know – it was Class A thinking from a Class A mind. These insights from the Boy

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become prime minister. How does such an egregious liar rise so far? If lies were flies, the swarm around him would be so thick that Boris Johnson would be invisible. His gruff, mock-jovial Etonian tones would be drowned out by their incessant, deafening hum. There is ordinary political lying – evasions, circumlocutions

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acquires the aura of inevitability, his books give us some sense of who he is. In his only novel, Seventy-Two Virgins, published in 2004, Boris Johnson uses a strange word. The hero, like Johnson himself at the time, is a backbench Conservative member of the House of Commons. Roger Barlow is

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see the kingdom of Brexit. A little over a year ago, when Theresa May browbeat her recalcitrant cabinet into endorsing her Brexit plan at Chequers, Boris Johnson, then foreign secretary, repeatedly complained that arguing for the plan would be like ‘polishing a turd’. He added sarcastically: ‘Luckily we have some expert turd

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not been for Johnson’s magnificent last-minute dorodango, all would have been lost. Hold your nose and pass the polish. TIMELINE 24 July 2019: Boris Johnson formally takes over as prime minister. 25 July 2019: Johnson makes a statement in the House of Commons and commits to the October date for

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. 8 October 2019: The government publishes the No-Deal Readiness Report, detailing the UK’s preparedness ahead of Brexit on 31 October. 10 October 2019: Boris Johnson and Leo Varadkar engage in three hours of Brexit talks in Liverpool. They later release a statement saying ‘they agreed that they could see a

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such gusto at the final hustings of the leadership campaign. Very soon, this pantomime of national liberation will find there is one rule that even Boris Johnson cannot evade: the tyranny of fact. 10 August 2019 The reasons why Ireland cannot give in to Johnson’s pressure to ditch the backstop are

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that outweighs their economic significance. They embody an identity. The H&W workers have occupied the yard and they staged a protest last week when Boris Johnson visited Stormont. But who is leading them and speaking for them? The regional organiser of their union, Unite, Susan Fitzgerald. You don’t have to

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exit taking place now, more than one union that is about to be left behind. One certainty in these days of confusion is that whatever Boris Johnson is camping up most ludicrously is the thing that is in deepest trouble. When Johnson, like some tinpot dictator awarding himself decorations and accolades, granted

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the democratic world. Well, it sure looks like the mother of all something right now, but it’s not parliamentary democracy. Consider what has happened. Boris Johnson was elected leader of the Tory party by 92,153 people. He was then appointed prime minister by a hereditary monarch with no parliamentary involvement

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READ-Y!’ ‘NO DEAL IS COMING!’ Or, as the Westminster parliament put it instead: no it’s not. So while the Get-Ready Men – Gove, Boris Johnson and the prime minister Dominic Cummings – were bawling out their warnings through an incredibly expensive megaphone, a little bit of King Lear was playing out

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acceptable by the assurance that the ‘citizens of nowhere’ will suffer even more. It will be very nasty. Get ready. 1 October 2019 Last month, Boris Johnson, anticipating an imminent general election, sprayed a golden shower of money all over the various departments of the British state. I have an unhealthy interest

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idea that the UK, including Northern Ireland, can leave the customs union and single market and yet not create a hard border in Ireland. When Boris Johnson described his long-awaited proposals for changes to the Brexit withdrawal treaty as a compromise, he was not wrong. Two questions arise, however. What is

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imagine a new Brexit referendum in which the question is: do you want to be in Crossroads or do you want to be in Emmerdale? Boris Johnson is currently an Emmerdale man. When Emmerdale was in need of an extreme reboot in 1993, the scriptwriters went all apocalyptic. A passing plane exploded

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such a mess is that the British government has seriously confused these two attitudes to Northern Ireland. It has managed, under both Theresa May and Boris Johnson, simultaneously to abandon its duty to be disinterested and to be fundamentally uninterested. If a Brexit deal is finally to emerge, it will be because

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a bespoke version. Its Brexit suit cannot be off the peg – it must be made to measure. If a deal is now to be possible, Boris Johnson must restore some semblance of disinterestedness by acknowledging that Northern Ireland is not the DUP. And he must, however belatedly, try to seem interested in

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Ireland from the rest of the UK. Brexit trumps the union. Johnson betrays the DUP. So the backstop has become the frontstop. British prime minister Boris Johnson and his allies will claim victory: the hated backstop has been ditched. It is in Ireland’s interests not to contradict that claim too vehemently

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laugh-a-minute literary pageant The Victorians, whose dead white males are paraded as the exemplars and progenitors of the post-Brexit future. There are Boris Johnson’s literary and rhetorical Churchill impersonations. There are the zombie refrains of empire in the dream of Global Britain. Above all, there is the constant

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former secretary of state for Northern Ireland and an ardent Brexiteer, recently cited Collins when explaining to the House of Commons why he would support Boris Johnson’s revised withdrawal agreement, even though he was not happy with it. Collins, the effective leader of the IRA at the time, negotiated the compromise

Very Bad People: The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption

by Patrick Alley  · 17 Mar 2022  · 384pp  · 121,574 words

the minister or to No. 10. We got Conservatives in the House of Lords to write to No. 10.’ Together we succeeded in holding the Boris Johnson government to Cameron’s original pledge. But then another curveball came in the form of Covid-19, which completely subsumed parliamentary business. We hope that

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World

by Tom Burgis  · 7 Sep 2020  · 476pp  · 139,761 words

and servicing new, private empires. Their new populist rulers take money and inspiration from the Ur of Kleptopia, post-Soviet Moscow. Nigel Farage salutes Putin. Boris Johnson enjoys the amity – and his party the seven-figure munificence – of Alexander Temerko, whose self-professed connections to the Kremlin’s security agencies go back

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times

by Lionel Barber  · 5 Nov 2020

reflects on these events and features exchanges with Prime Minister Theresa May and other political actors leading up to her exit and the arrival of Boris Johnson, someone I have known since my days in Brussels as a correspondent for the FT almost 30 years ago. Other power portraits include a three

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. This will be my first trip to India, a chance to glimpse the economic transformation of the subcontinent first hand. Jo Johnson, younger brother of Boris Johnson, is our bureau chief in New Delhi. He’s polished and well connected, an ambitious 35-year-old often described as the real brains in

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ahead to the 2012 games. David Beckham featured, backed up by Jimmy Page on the guitar, a red double-decker bus and Mayor of London Boris Johnson, hands in pocket, jacket flapping, bounding on stage to wave the Olympic flag. The Chinese media later upbraided Johnson for ignoring protocol. As usual he

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’. Like the FT, the Standard has to concentrate on a few things that it does better than everyone else. The arts, culture, the property market, Boris Johnson’s mayoralty. Evgeny nods in agreement, casually dropping that his father thinks that more coverage of Russians in London might be a winning strategy. This

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really care what kind of Tory he was. Then a colleague showed me a photograph of a youthful Jonathan in full Bullingdon dress, sitting alongside Boris Johnson on the steps of Christ Church in 1987. David Cameron is standing haughtily in the middle. Jesus (and I don’t mean the college). Jonathan

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Cameron are centrists so on a personal level there is no political chasm between them. The issue is whether they can control the likes of Boris Johnson, who has called the coalition a cross between a bulldog and a chihuahua. Tory instincts are for single-party rule. To Lucy Kellaway’s book

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draw on an extensive network of correspondents led by Peter Spiegel in Brussels. Peter’s Spanish was passable and his French sounded as bad as Boris Johnson’s, but he dominated the eurozone story. TUESDAY, 10 JANUARY A nervous debut in front of the Leveson inquiry at the Royal Courts of Justice

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, businesswoman, philanthropist, New York socialite and Republican heavyweight, has asked me to put together a dinner with an ‘interesting’ British politician. My first choice is Boris Johnson. Thankfully, London’s mayor is up for joining us at Scott’s in Mayfair. On arrival, I ask to be taken to Boris’s table

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? PM: ‘Maybe. But it’s not a question of how many but who.’ LB: ‘Theresa May?’ PM: ‘She is a committed pro-European.’ LB: ‘And Boris Johnson? Is he on a tight leash?’ PM: ‘Boris will be Boris but he’s never given an “Out” speech. I expect he’ll give a

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’ enthusiasm for a ‘People’s Vote’ or a second referendum. THURSDAY, 30 JUNE British politics has been half Shakespeare, half Marx Brothers since the referendum. Boris Johnson, the face of Vote Leave and hot favourite in the race to succeed David Cameron, has withdrawn today. Boris turned out to be more Falstaff

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austere, more serious, more uptight. Some seem to think a joint is another name for a night club. WEDNESDAY, 20 JULY A rare text from Boris Johnson, our new foreign secretary: ‘When is your side going to admit that you lost the argument and stop treating Brexit as the new cancer? I

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was left unsaid. Two years later, his last act as Commission president was to broker a deal in the Brexit negotiations, a big favour to Boris Johnson who never had any time for him. The Luxembourger was a deal-maker from a bygone era. Even if he liked a tipple, preferably two

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a small circle, and impossible to penetrate. She owes her leadership victory to the Cameron political machine. As for the rest of the Tory contenders, Boris Johnson is ‘well placed’, Philip Hammond is ‘not trusted’ and George Osborne will find it hard being simultaneously editor of the Evening Standard, an MP and

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high-powered, expensive lawyers would no longer be able to keep stories of abuse and sexual harassment out of the public domain. SATURDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER Boris Johnson has published a 4,000-word manifesto in the Daily Telegraph, a naked power grab for leadership of the Conservative party. I got wind of

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of Mr Trump.’ MONDAY, 2 OCTOBER To Manchester for the Conservative party conference, including a session with the PM. I’m too late to meet Boris Johnson which is probably a relief to both of us. I’m still mightily jetlagged from my trip to Tokyo; he’s still mighty suspicious of

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about the government’s negotiating position on Brexit. I offer a tour d’horizon before asking, point-blank, why the PM does not simply sack Boris Johnson or ‘dump him in the East River’, a strained reference to my favourite Marlon Brando movie On the Waterfront.fn4 May, staring blankly, says that

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Lunch with David Davis and his minder at Roux Brothers. The Brexit minister has cancelled on me three times but it’s worth the wait. Boris Johnson is ‘out for himself’, Philip Hammond ‘antsy’, Michael Gove ‘a freelancer’. How about the future of Damian Green, de facto deputy prime minister, who’s

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identities and reputations. The charity has raised more than £20m over the past 33 years; Thursday night alone raised £2m. Auction items included lunch with Boris Johnson and tea with the governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney (who later denied any knowledge). But we have eyewitnesses to ritual humiliation of

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PM’s closest aides and cronies and ranked in notoriety alongside Harold Wilson’s in 1976. Ian Taylor died in June 2020. MONDAY, 9 JULY Boris Johnson has stepped down as foreign secretary. His resignation letter claims May’s proposal for a common rule book with the EU would leave Britain with

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risk, high reward. And then there was a long-sought interview with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. At home, Theresa May would step aside for Boris Johnson, the opportunist par excellence. He rammed a Brexit deal through Parliament after winning a thumping election victory against Corbyn’s hard-left Labour party. By

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political reporter, is hunting down Tory leadership candidates for me to meet. Michael Gove might be up for an evening drink. Jeremy Hunt is biddable. Boris Johnson is lying doggo. I will pass on Dominic Raab.fn1 First audition over dinner at the Cinnamon Club is Sajid Javid, appointed today as home

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no wiggle room, I protest. On the contrary says Hunt, the EU would cut some slack for a new Tory leader, with the exception of Boris Johnson. ‘He has no friends in Europe,’ says Hunt, who succeeded Johnson as foreign secretary. On that last point, we are in broad agreement. Johnson was

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Corinthia hotel. The chancellor, accompanied by his special adviser Sonia Khan,fn2 has abandoned all pretence. He wants revenge against the Brexit rebels led by Boris Johnson who have toppled Theresa May and are about to shunt him from office. Hammond has been defence minister, foreign secretary and chancellor of the exchequer

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in his own Cabinet. From his new position on the backbenches, he is determined to mete out the same treatment to the new government under Boris Johnson. TUESDAY, 23 JULY One of the most difficult decisions of my editorship. I have called in RPC, an independent law firm, to investigate Wirecard’s

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fraud, the equivalent of Germany’s Enron. It was one of my proudest moments. WEDNESDAY, 24 JULY I still find it hard to believe that Boris Johnson has made it to Downing Street. He was an agreeable buffoon in Brussels as the Daily Telegraph correspondent, though adept at hiding his ambition. Maybe

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leaving the country for a new life. I doubt this story will move sterling but it will certainly rock the British establishment. WEDNESDAY, 28 AUGUST Boris Johnson wants to prorogue Parliament for five weeks in order to curtail debate on the Brexit deal he hopes to strike with Brussels. Dominic Cummings is

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leave me shocked and depressed. The space for rational debate in British politics has vanished. Maybe Jeremy Hunt was right after all. FRIDAY, 18 OCTOBER Boris Johnson has struck his Brexit deal. He has antagonised and charmed the Europeans, stared down the Brexiters and sold the DUP down the river. The Irish

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prevent a hard border between north and south. Late in the afternoon, long after the dirty deal was struck, my mobile phone rings. It is Boris Johnson. He is courteous to a fault, abandoning the faux bonhomie usually reserved for me and fellow journalists. Do I have a few seconds to discuss

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ratings soared, a remarkable comeback from the twilight zone. Other women leaders, from New Zealand to South Korea and Taiwan fared well. In the UK Boris Johnson dithered until he found himself virus-stricken and the economy slumped, a double shock alongside Brexit. President Trump too remained in denial, triggering a sharp

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and steps towards a closer political union. The foreign policy dilemma for the UK, having chosen to abandon membership of the EU, will remain acute. Boris Johnson’s government once invoked a ‘Global Britain’ liberated from the legal and political constraints of Brussels. But trade agreements with individual countries, let alone the

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to be CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal (2014–20). 6 Lebedev was nominated as a crossbench life peer by Boris Johnson in July 2020, a move which drew charges of cronyism. 7 The Tobin tax was a small levy on foreign currency exchanges aimed at reducing

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Cabinet. 2 Sonia Khan, treasury political adviser, worked for Hammond and his successor Sajid Javid until she was abruptly and publicly fired by Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s top adviser, for disloyalty on Brexit. Escorted under armed guard from Downing Street, she became unwillingly the first example of the US-style ‘perp

Failed State: The Sunday Times Bestselling Investigation Into Why Britain Is Struggling

by Sam Freedman  · 10 Jul 2024  · 368pp  · 101,133 words

to focus on the problems of our times and the triumphs of the past.4 When we look around us at the detritus of the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss premierships, an economy that has been stagnant for over fifteen years, failing public services, record levels of child poverty, overcrowded prisons,

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populist backlash. The Labour version argues responsibility lies with reckless Tory austerity, compounded by the self-inflicted injury of Brexit and the breathtaking incompetence of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. The far left think all the mainstream parties are to blame for their embrace of neoliberal economics; the radical right that we

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in the Cabinet Office, while she was campaigning for her Brexit deal around the country. Dominic Cummings had plans to do the same permanently, but Boris Johnson refused to countenance moving. None of these plans have stuck due to a curious mix of nostalgia, convention and inertia. The small group of

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or David Miliband and Andrew Adonis running the Policy Unit. You can tell how much this frustrates prime ministers as they keep bringing Barber back – Boris Johnson asked him to review overall government delivery, and Rishi Sunak the delivery of skills reform.23 Reviews of the centre of government typically revert back

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the original team was largely replaced and May’s focus was on survival in the face of opposition to her Brexit deal from all sides. Boris Johnson, following the 2019 election, had the majority May wanted and a deal with the EU, but none of the attributes required to do the

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too big. There is a longstanding debate among political scientists as to whether Britain has drifted into a presidential system. This was exemplified by Boris Johnson and his supporters claiming it was undemocratic for Tory MPs to remove him as prime minister because he had a personal mandate. But we’ve

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by insisting that further devolution, and funding, was dependent on agreeing to elected mayors. He had London in mind, where Labour dominated central London but Boris Johnson had managed to win, and hold, the mayoralty through his appeal to the more Conservative suburbs. As Harrison told me: ‘There was a lot of

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designed not to achieve any real-world goal, but to give the impression of activity. Both of the Immigration Acts passed by the governments of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak fall into this category and yet had immensely serious potential consequences that consumed a vast amount of parliamentary and government effort. The

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focus groups is ‘they’re all in it for themselves’ – the 2009 expenses scandal supercharged a sense that MPs were all venal and corrupt. Neither Boris Johnson’s escapades, nor the succession of by-elections caused by inappropriate behaviour, have done anything to dispel this impression. Yet, in reality, most MPs work

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a ‘wider payroll’ vote. Cameron created ‘big society ambassadors’; Theresa May added ‘trade envoys’ to various countries which also offered the promise of exotic junkets; Boris Johnson threw in multiple ‘vice-chairs’ of the Conservative party. This trick doesn’t always work. The former Tory MP Charlotte Leslie told me about the

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to avoid scrutiny altogether. Which represents a fundamental system failure for the British state. Avoiding scrutiny The most extreme example of this new approach was Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament in 2019, to avoid MPs undermining his Brexit strategy. Prorogations are normally an uncontroversial means to end a session of

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was not substantially different in intent from all the other ways that governments have tried to reduce the ability of MPs to scrutinize their actions. Boris Johnson and his senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, neither of whom had the slightest interest in the spirit of the rules, were just so aggressively blatant

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Commission was introduced in 2000 to vet new peers, in a very light-touch way, but even then, the prime minister can overrule them. Boris Johnson did so in 2021 when he appointed Peter Cruddas, a major Tory donor. Cruddas had been forced to resign as party treasurer in 2012 over

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instruments laid under this Act were used for the next two years to regulate every aspect of our lives. The first arrived three days after Boris Johnson announced the initial lockdown. Things were so chaotic that no one had started writing them yet when he made the speech, and they became

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debased the Lords, filling it with partisan cheerleaders. And it has used delegated powers to make massive changes to our lives without even consulting MPs. Boris Johnson tried to shut Parliament down altogether and was only foiled by the courts. Successive governments have made it clear they consider Parliament an unhelpful nuisance

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three High Court judges as ‘enemies of the people’ on their front page. The second case, in 2019, saw Supreme Court judges rule unanimously that Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament was unconstitutional (Miller 2). During the pandemic, as government again did their best to sideline Parliament, there were a series

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to buy protective equipment (PPE) for the NHS to be unlawful.4 And judges ruled that the government had to hand over documents, including Boris Johnson’s notebooks and diaries, to the Covid Inquiry.5 In 2023, the Supreme Court blocked the government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda

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of judicial review, which he called the ‘judicialisation of politics’ in a speech while still in the role, and incorrectly advised the cabinet that Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament was constitutional.49 He was still not pliant enough for Johnson, who didn’t consider him enough of a ‘team player

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to limit judges’ discretion in overturning government decisions but these were, again, defeated in the Lords and watered down.59 This was not enough for Boris Johnson, who fired Buckland while ratcheting up the rhetoric against ‘liberal lawyers’ and ‘do-gooders’ trying to stop his plans to deport immigrants to Rwanda.

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like. When Stowell stood down in 2021, the government failed to appoint anyone for a year, and then chose Martin Thomas, a friend of Boris Johnson, who had to resign four days later after it was revealed multiple complaints had been made against him by women while he was chair of

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a series of racists and anti-Semites also spoke.75 Perhaps the biggest fiasco was over the chairmanship of Ofcom, which became vacant in 2020. Boris Johnson made it clear that he wanted Paul Dacre, the long-term editor of the Daily Mail, supporter of Johnson, and serial critic of the

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chair of the BBC had to resign after it emerged that during his appointment process he had helped to arrange a large personal loan for Boris Johnson.78 Meanwhile, another BBC board member, Robbie Gibb, a former director of communications for Theresa May, has been accused of trying to interfere with

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people, making unreasonable and repeated demands – behaviour that created fear and that needed some bravery to call out.’8 A review by Sir Alex Allan, Boris Johnson’s independent adviser on standards, found that allegations of bullying were correct and Patel had broken the ministerial code.9 Johnson chose not to sack

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HR, could greatly improve quality of management.’11 That was written in 2013 but his views had hardened even more by the time he was Boris Johnson’s chief adviser. A few weeks after the 2019 election victory, he wrote a notorious blogpost asking for people to write to him directly

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and see through change when there are usually more pressing political challenges. As Jonathan Slater, the permanent secretary at the Department for Education fired by Boris Johnson, succinctly put it: ‘If you just leave it to ministers, you’re never going to really get any change or you’re very unlikely

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quasi-ministerial role, interjecting themselves between ministers and officials, in the style of Ed Balls. The most extreme example is Cummings himself, when he was Boris Johnson’s chief adviser in No. 10. For instance, in their biography of Johnson, Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell record that during the attempt to prorogue

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Government’s views was the key criterion and that capability . . . and performance were not’.36 While Truss went further than anyone else, before or since, Boris Johnson had ‘moved on’ multiple permanent secretaries, with twelve being replaced in 2020 alone. Cummings was a key figure in determining these changes, even though SPADs

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. Historically they were heavily guided in that choice by the outgoing cabinet secretary. But in recent years that process has broken down. In 2020 Boris Johnson forced Sedwill out of the post and after a convoluted and messy process ended up choosing Case, who had never run a department before, and

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in a genuinely politicized senior civil service like America’s. Simon Case’s WhatsApp messages released during the Covid Inquiry indicate his deep unhappiness with Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings. In a lengthy exchange with Sedwill just before the latter quit Case wrote, ‘I’ve never seen a bunch of people

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was him who came up with the term ‘random announcement generator’ as a way of describing the Grid in the Cameron era. When he became Boris Johnson’s senior adviser in Downing Street he largely ignored the Grid. But it was still there, sucking the life out of departments, and spewing

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to its lack of effectiveness. Cameron passed legislation to force the government to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on overseas aid but when Boris Johnson chose to drop that commitment in 2021, he just used a large loophole in the initial Act to do so. In 2010 the chancellor

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profile (Gauke was widely attacked in the Tory press), they are rarely in post long enough to see any reform through. Gauke left government when Boris Johnson became prime minister, and his successors scrapped the reform, reverting back to endless press releases and legislation about being tough on sentencing, despite an unsustainable

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and ITV’s Paul Brand, spend months uncovering the Partygate scandal, with a succession of revelations that built into the storm that eventually finished off Boris Johnson. As Waugh says, this hunting for exclusives ‘is the lifeblood of what we do in the sense that you want to be not just first

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the competition.’12 As a mentality, this is important, if what you are doing is covering political stories like the Blair/Brown disagreements or a Boris Johnson scandal. These things really matter. But when political correspondents are asked to cover complex and long-running policy stories it is much less helpful. For

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of touch . . . But it was highly influential on policy development, because the prime minister had a kind of oedipal relationship with The Daily Telegraph.’14 Boris Johnson made his name as a Telegraph journalist, reporting, with wild inaccuracy, on the EU. More recently he had been a highly paid columnist for the

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home scheme will always be loathed by the Left – and loved by voters’ ‘I saw how Margaret Thatcher flashed her steel against the unions. Now Boris Johnson must show his mettle, writes former Tory minister’ ‘Why there was only one Iron Lady, by Henry Kissinger’ ‘Rishi Sunak should follow Margaret Thatcher

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that individuals don’t matter too. Having sharper, more thoughtful, emotionally intelligent people, with integrity, in high office will always makes things better. Conversely having Boris Johnson and Liz Truss in charge will always make things worse. But individuals are highly constrained and incentivized by the system they are working within. Even

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Guardian, 20 January 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jan/20/ministers-attempting-blackmail-colleagues-who-might-oppose-pm-alleges-tory-mp-william-wragg-boris-johnson 24 Ibid. 25 Public Administration Select Committee, ‘Too Many Ministers?’, 11 March 2010, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmpubadm/457/457.pdf

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Owen Bowcott, ‘Gina Miller to continue “fight for democracy” after prorogation ruling’, The Guardian, 6 September 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/06/boris-johnson-prorogation-of-parliament-is-lawful-high-court-rules 34 Meg Russell and Lisa James, The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit (OUP, 2023), p. 112. 35 Ibid

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, volume 94, issue 1, January/March 2023, pp. 16–25, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-923X.13233 41 Nicola Slawson, ‘Boris Johnson faces legal action over peerage for billionaire Tory donor’, The Guardian, 12 June 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/12

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/boris-johnson-faces-legal-action-over-peerage-for-billionaire-tory-donor-peter-cruddas 42 Ross Kaniuk, ‘Queen “asked to block Lebedev’s peerage over security fears”’,

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webflow.io/our-plan 14 James Tapsfield, ‘Ministers “could use legislation to strike out judicial rulings they don’t like” under reforms being pushed by Boris Johnson’, Daily Mail, 6 December 2021, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10279363/Ministers-use-legislation-strike-judicial-rulings-dont-like.html 15 Judicial Independence

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“Liberal lawyers” will make Rwanda plan difficult but “we will get it done”’, The Independent, 4 May 2022, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/boris-johnson-rwanda-priti-patel-north-yorkshire-downing-street-b2071595.html 61 Faulks Committee, p. 131. 62 Malleson, p. 149. 63 Matthew Gill and Grant Dalton, ‘Reforming

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Alan Rusbridger, ‘Was there an attempt to “fix” who became head of Ofcom?’, Prospect Magazine, 17 November 2023, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/63982/boris-johnson-nadine-dorries-ofcom 80 John Kingman, ‘5 Years of UKRI’, transcript of speech given on 14 July 2021, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/3372

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15 Daisy Stephens, ‘PM refers to Telegraph as his “real boss”, Dominic Cummings claims’, LBC News, 20 July 2021, https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/boris-johnson-refers-telegraph-real-boss-dominic-cummings-claims/ 16 Vanessa Thorpe, ‘“He wants to shape wider culture”: Why Paul Marshall is turning from GB News to

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Thatchers-Right-Buy-home-scheme-hated-Left-writes-DANIEL-JOHNSON.html; David Mellor, ‘I saw how Margaret Thatcher flashed her steel against the unions. Now Boris Johnson must show his mettle’, Daily Mail, 22 June 2022, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10943479/DAVID-MELLOR-saw-Margaret-Thatcher-flashed-steel-against

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who threatened to car-bomb female Labour MPs jailed’, The Independent, 18 June 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/rakeem-malik-boris-johnson-jess-phillips-car-bomb-labour-a9573946.html 33 Isabel Hardman, Why We Get the Wrong Politicians (Atlantic Books, 2019), p. 165. 34 Ibid. 35

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org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/whatsapp-in-government.pdf 37 Esther Webber, ‘The perils of Boris Johnson’s government by WhatsApp’, 18 June 2021, Politico.eu, https://www.politico.eu/article/dominic-cummings-screenshots-reveal-boris-johnson-government-by-whatsapp/ 38 UK Covid-19 Inquiry, ‘Transcript of Module 2 Public Hearing on

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus

by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott  · 18 Mar 2021  · 432pp  · 143,491 words

things you’ve read’; the broadcaster Piers Morgan called it straightforwardly ‘a scandal’; and the writer Caitlin Moran said it read like ‘the obituary of Boris Johnson’s government’. The Press Gazette said the article was ‘the first major national press investigation to cast serious doubt over the government’s handling of

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of the virus and its conclusions suggested it was comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed between 17 and 100 million people. Unusually, Boris Johnson had been absent from the first Cobra meeting. The committee – which includes ministers, intelligence chiefs and military generals – gathers at moments of great peril such

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not the Cobra one. In the morning, he had also found the time to tweet a jokey video of himself answering questions, such as ‘Is Boris Johnson for or against Brexit?’ to promote the fact that Britain would be officially leaving the European Union in two days’ time. He once again left

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to our article in order to downplay his warnings. He then makes a reference to a televised address by the prime minister on 10 May. ‘Boris Johnson spoke to the nation,’ Horton writes. ‘He said of Covid-19, “We didn’t fully understand its effects.” His plaintive excuse will likely become the

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crisis or even to visit the affected areas. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, said: ‘In refusing to visit flood-hit communities, nowhere-to-be-seen Boris Johnson is showing his true colours by his absence.’ He went on: ‘Failing to convene Cobra to support flood-hit communities sends a very clear message

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thing. We’ve lost the plot here. We haven’t taken the action that we should have taken four or five weeks ago,’ he said. ‘Boris Johnson should have convened Cobra at the outset when it became clear what was cooking up. Countries that took firm action at the time – if you

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caught the virus himself. He rang Conte to tell him that he had just tested positive. ‘And he told me that he had spoken with Boris Johnson,’ recalls Sileri, ‘and that they had also talked about the situation in Italy. I remember he said, “He [Johnson] told me that he wants herd

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fever. But this isn’t a normal influenza. It’s something more.” I remember that after hanging up I said to myself, “Today, I hope Boris Johnson goes for a lockdown.”’11 It was also claimed that Hancock discussed herd immunity with Italy’s representative during a conference call between the G7

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Cameron or Theresa May they knew what was going on. They’re on top of the briefs,’ the source said. ‘The impression I got was Boris Johnson was winging it a bit. He hadn’t seen the data. He wasn’t fully aware of the number of cases or what was happening

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Jean Quatremer, the European affairs correspondent of the French newspaper Libération. This is Quatremer’s account: ‘Macron loses his temper on Friday morning. He calls Boris Johnson. “Look here. Our police have been instructed to close the border with the United Kingdom. Friday evening at midnight. Everything is ready to go unless

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day the prime minister himself was admitted to hospital. Vivien says the contrast in care the two men received could not have been more stark. ‘Boris Johnson came out with this whole thing about them holding his hand 24/7. But that’s not what I saw. I just felt really angry

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team’. His fiancée, Symonds, tweeted a celebratory painting of a rainbow with two lines of clapping emojis. There was relief everywhere. ‘Great News: Prime Minister Boris Johnson has just been moved out of Intensive Care. Get well Boris!!!’ tweeted the US president Donald Trump. Downing Street said the prime minister was in

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now big-business Conservative donors are impatient to reverse a shutdown so contrary to Brexiteer dreams,’ Fionnuala O’Connor wrote in the Irish News newspaper. ‘Boris Johnson needs all his showman’s tricks now to sell the phasing out of a lockdown which was less than effective, at least in part, because

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the meeting meant that discretion was vital. When the experts dialled in to the Zoom call at 6 p.m. the next day they found Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak at the end of the long mahogany cabinet room table in Downing Street. The presence of the chancellor with no sign of

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to do for it to work. They don’t do that … It’s been wishful thinking all the way through. I think that probably characterises Boris Johnson, frankly.’ The split between No. 10 and its chief medical and scientific advisers had never been more apparent. At 11 a.m. the next morning

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the delays before the second lockdown. Doctors were reporting that bed capacity was running dangerously low and protective equipment was still often in short supply. ‘Boris Johnson had not learned from his mistakes in the first wave at all,’ he said. ‘He was clearly ignoring the scientific advice given to him in

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FINAL RECKONING 3 December 2020 to January 2021 15 Plague Island A modern version of Charles Dickens’s famous story, A Christmas Carol, might depict Boris Johnson on the night of Thursday 24 December 2020 in his nightshirt tossing and turning in a four-poster bed. There would have been champagne that

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: Did the government get it wrong?’, Dispatches, Channel 4, 3 June 2020. 5: Holiday 1. The Andrew Marr Show, BBC One, 12 April 2020. 2. ‘Boris Johnson and his “chino chancellor”’, Politico, 13 February 2020. 3. ‘Dominic Cummings said to be “writing budget” for Sajid Javid’, The Sunday Times, 19 January 2020

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. 4. ‘Why I broke with Boris Johnson’, New Statesman, 10 June 2020. 5. ‘“He’s a better ex than he was a husband”, says Boris Johnson’s ex-wife’, Evening Standard, 29 May 2012. 6. ‘The Boris I know: A loner who wants

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be loved’, Mail on Sunday, 27 March 2016. 7. ‘Bonking Boris’, Sun, 7 September 2018. 8. ‘Boris Johnson: Police called to loud altercation at potential PM’s home’, Guardian, 21 June 2019. 9. ‘Charlotte Edwardes on Boris Johnson’s wandering hands’, The Sunday Times, 29 September 2019. 10. ‘Hospitals prepare for coronavirus epidemic to

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February 2020. 11. ‘The prime minister’s vanishing briefs’, The Sunday Times, 23 February 2020. 12. ‘Where the floody hell is Boris? Angry residents blast Boris Johnson for refusing to visit flooded communities ravaged by Storm Dennis’, Sun, 18 February 2020. 13. ‘Boris and Jennifer Arcuri: Case not closed’, The Critic, 30

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deaths’, Guardian, 6 March 2020. 2. ‘Coronavirus: Did the government get it wrong?’, Dispatches, Channel 4, 3 June 2020. 3. Ibid. 8: Herd Immunity 1. ‘Boris Johnson heckled during visit to flood-hit Bewdley’, The Times, 8 March 2020. 2. ‘Coronavirus: Did the government get it wrong?’, Dispatches, Channel 4, 3 June

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game’, Financial Times, 16 July 2020. 3. ‘Coronavirus: Did the government get it wrong?’, Dispatches, Channel 4, 3 June 2020. 4. ‘How the future PM, Boris Johnson, and NHS boss, Simon Stevens, formed an unlikely bond at Oxford’, Telegraph, 7 August 2019. 5. ‘Coronavirus: Did the government get it wrong?’, Dispatches, Channel

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4, 3 June 2020. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 10: Disaster 1. ‘Coronavirus crisis: Sickness, fear and now isolation for Boris Johnson’, The Sunday Times, 29 March 2020. 2. ‘NHS staff feel like “cannon fodder” over lack of coronavirus protection’, Guardian, 22 March 2020. 3. ‘“No surprise

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” Boris Johnson got coronavirus when he failed to “practise what he preached”, scientists say’, Evening Standard, 28 March 2020. 4. ‘Coronavirus: Doctors “told not to discuss PPE

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, 15 May 2020. 5. ‘Coronavirus: NHS nurses told “lives would be made hell”’, BBC News, 21 July 2020. 11: Left to Die at Home 1. ‘Boris Johnson and coronavirus: the inside story of his illness’, Guardian, 17 April 2020. 2. ‘Hospital says baby of nurse who died from Covid-19 doing well

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risk a second major outbreak’, BMJ, 5 June 2020. 8. ‘Coronavirus lockdown: Now it’s the economy, stupid’, The Sunday Times, 7 June 2020. 9. ‘Boris Johnson is tied up in knots over the coronavirus’, The Sunday Times, 14 June 2020. 10. ‘Coronavirus: Government accused of ignoring experts as top advisers absent

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from press briefings’, Independent, 15 June 2020. 11. ‘Coronavirus: WHO warns against further lifting of lockdown in England’, Guardian, 15 June 2020. 12. ‘Boris Johnson is tied up in knots over the coronavirus’, The Sunday Times, 14 June 2020. 13. ‘Starmer overtakes Johnson as preferred choice for prime minister’, Guardian

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Summer 1. ‘“Raise a glass”: UK Treasury faces backlash after hailing pubs reopening’, Guardian, 2 July 2020. 2. ‘Coronavirus: Boris Johnson criticised over “cowardly” care home comments’, BBC News, 7 July 2020. 3. ‘Boris Johnson indicates at PMQs he has not read winter coronavirus report’, Guardian, 15 July 2020. 4. ‘Saving lives or UK

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first meeting of the national emergency committee Cobra, which was held to coordinate Britain’s response to the virus. (© BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images) Boris Johnson and fiancée Carrie Symonds at Twickenham for the England v Wales rugby match on 7 March 2020. The prime minister was pictured shaking hands with

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from Sage after the Telegraph reported he had breached lockdown rules with a lover. (© Richard Pohle/The Times/News Licensing) ‘You must stay at home.’ Boris Johnson addresses the nation from 10 Downing Street as he announced the first UK lockdown on 23 March 2020. (© PA Video/PA Archive/PA Images/Alamy

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, Ben 316–17 Brexit 4, 5, 10, 76, 78, 81, 87, 90, 91, 101, 115–16, 138, 148, 153, 172, 230, 261, 383, 391, 397; Boris Johnson/UK government fixation with and appreciation of danger posed by Covid-19 4, 5, 6, 8, 15–16, 56–7, 64–5, 71–5, 76

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, 213 Cameron, David 66, 77–8, 88, 155, 199, 200–1, 213 care homes/sector 7, 10, 105, 203, 214, 269, 280–4, 366, 384; Boris Johnson lays blame for crisis in on workers 332–3; death toll within 238–9, 263–4, 267, 284, 290; government advice to in early days

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, 99, 102, 106, 107, 124, 126, 127, 147, 148–9, 152, 153, 154, 174, 190, 196, 199–200, 212–13, 214, 220, 285, 286, 384; Boris Johnson fails to attend first five meetings of during Covid crisis 8, 55–6, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 70, 71, 75–80, 102, 106, 107

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app 50 Crabtree, David 281, 282, 283 Cummings, Dominic 72, 106, 111–14, 120, 126, 138, 139, 140, 153, 171, 195–6, 208, 209–10; Boris Johnson, breakdown of relationship with 363; Covid infection 234–5, 277–8; flouts lockdown rules 234–6, 277–8, 311–16; lockdown measures, becomes believer in

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76, 110, 113 Hancock, Matt 55, 61–2, 65–6, 198–9, 249; background 65–7; big claims, propensity for making 141, 198, 238–9; Boris Johnson Covid infection and 256; Brexit and 68–9; care homes and 280; Christmas restrictions and 388; circuit breaker lockdown and 353, 368; Cobra committee and

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concept and 201–2; Christmas and New Year restrictions (2020–21) 356, 385–95, 404; curfews 362–3, 369; dither and delay over, UK government/Boris Johnson 4–5, 9–10, 152–7, 160–1, 167–220, 218, 223, 224, 260, 261, 263, 287, 296–310, 319–21, 323, 325–7, 333

The Dream of Europe: Travels in the Twenty-First Century

by Geert Mak  · 27 Oct 2021  · 722pp  · 223,701 words

-politics’ women, Ada Colau and Manuela Carmena, came from a standing start to win mayoral elections in Barcelona and Madrid. In Britain the chaotic Conservative Boris Johnson, with his knapsacks, his jokes and his flapping haircut, confounded expectations by winning the 2008 mayoral election in that Labour bastion, London. Yanis Varoufakis stole

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wavered, with many of his voters eventually opting for the Brexit camp. One important factor was an apparent U-turn by the charismatic London mayor Boris Johnson. It was only once he had joined that the Brexit campaign gained real momentum. Johnson was a theatre show in his own right. According to

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’. ‘The world is becoming a huge mess,’ he said. ‘Very, very dangerous.’ The class-ridden character of the campaign made it typically English. Important Brexiteers, Boris Johnson first among them, were products of the English elite, man for man. Eton, Oxbridge: they seemed determined to comply with every single one of the

…

preconceived notions about them. At Oxford, Boris Johnson – along with David Cameron and his later rival Jeremy Hunt – had been a member of the infamous Bullingdon Club, a student society founded more than

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1.5 billion messages. Truth and lies – about that threatening ‘wave’ of Turkish immigrants, for example – were artfully combined. All that mattered was the effect. Boris Johnson described with relish how ‘Eurobureacrats’ had now implemented a ban on much-loved prawn cocktail crisps. Everyone could see it was nonsense, since they were

…

more profound even than that between different religions, with a full 87 per cent of British people identifying as Remainers or Leavers. Families were split. Boris Johnson’s father and sister, for example, were active Remainers. In the Brexit novel Middle England by Jonathan Coe, Brexit crops up as an important factor

…

Alice in Alice in Wonderland they had fallen ‘through a rabbit hole’. Nigel Farage was jubilant, although he too could barely believe what was happening. Boris Johnson, half awake, started writing a new speech – he had only a text for defeat. When his former university friend David Cameron appeared in the doorway

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: its own internal cohesion. No exceptions could be made where that was concerned. But in May’s view, Rogers was too pessimistic, a fatalist. Brexiteers Boris Johnson and David Davis – neither of whom had any diplomatic experience – were now put in charge of the negotiations. Johnson set the tone immediately by likening

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for British politicians and diplomats to do, as time went on, other than panic. Most Britons still seemed unaware of the situation they were in. Boris Johnson and the other advocates of Brexit continued to insist they could retain access to the European single market, and Brexit would therefore bring only benefits

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, so it was not a particularly clever tactical move, for example, to dismiss EU citizens in Britain as ‘queue jumpers’ or, as David Davis and Boris Johnson proposed, to threaten to scrap all financial arrangements with the EU if they didn’t get their way. Relentless British goading kept the rest of

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here, with a weak prime minister and a totally confused Labour Party.’ ‘Perhaps Labour will change tack and there’ll be a second referendum.’ ‘But Boris Johnson has called his Brexiteers to arms, he’s talking about a “historic victory” that they mustn’t throw away.’ ‘Not a clue how this goes

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stays put, undecided, and glares at me when I finally push him outside.’ In June 2019, Theresa May at last resigned. The new prime minister, Boris Johnson, came to power after a party leadership election in which only members of the Conservative Party were allowed to participate: largely provincial, white, older Britons

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2019, Brexit, which sometimes looked rather like a polite coup d’état, was once again supported by British voters. In a general election called by Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party – using the simple slogan ‘Get Brexit done!’ – won such a comfortable majority in the House of Commons that his regime was guaranteed

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had a counterproductive effect, in that unity between EU member states became stronger than ever. Tensions rose to such a height that in mid-October Boris Johnson declared that the British must prepare themselves for a ‘no-deal’ scenario. The powerful part played by populist sentiments was clear from the fact that

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national crisis committee, COBRA, chaired by the prime minister. It held crisis meetings in London almost weekly from 24 January onwards, although with little result. Boris Johnson himself was nowhere to be seen until early March. ‘There’s no way you’re at war if your PM isn’t there,’ a senior

…

and eight days respectively.) It had thirteen coronavirus patients on 26 February. On Monday 2 March, five weeks after the crisis committee’s initial meeting, Boris Johnson chaired COBRA for the first time. He now started talking valiantly of a ‘full battle plan’. The main advice to the public was to wash

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swept aside, state support for private companies is no longer taboo, and in place of ‘more Europe’ there is now an opportunity for ‘less Europe’. Boris Johnson has abandoned his conservative principles; some British railway companies have been nationalized again, temporarily at least. The notoriously frugal Dutch government has scattered billions like

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, and Erik Vlaminck, Uit woede en onbegrip: Een pamflet over de schande van de armoede, Antwerp, Uitgeverij Vrijdag, 2019. Gimson, Andrew, Boris: The Rise of Boris Johnson, London, Simon and Schuster, 2006. Gross, Neil, ‘Are Americans Experiencing Collective Trauma?’, New York Times, 16 December 2016. Gruyter, Caroline de, ‘Misschien is het maar

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Books, 15 August 2019. ‘Post-Brexit Racism’, Institute of Race Relations, 7 July 2016. Purnell, Sonia, ‘Boris Johnson Is about to Inherit a Crisis His Euro-Bashing Helped Spawn’, The Guardian, 15 July 2019. Quatremer, Jean, ‘Boris Johnson Is the Epitome of What’s Worst about the English Ruling Class’, The Guardian, 16 July

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, What Happened, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2017. Danner, Mark, ‘The Magic of Donald Trump’, New York Review of Books, 26 May 2016. Davies, William, ‘Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Rise of Radical Incompetence’, New York Times, 13 July 2018. ‘Bagehot – Britain’s Decline and Fall: The Country Has Not Cut

Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To)

by Chris Grey  · 22 Jun 2021  · 334pp  · 91,722 words

book suggests, Brexit in reality could never deliver the Brexit promised. One of the commonly used terms during the Brexit process was ‘cakeism’, deriving from Boris Johnson having said that he favoured Britain ‘having its cake and eating it’. This meant, generally, having the benefits of EU membership without belonging to it

…

the people, such as Gina Miller, judges, civil servants, the Establishment, the liberal elite, and in due course Theresa ‘the Remainer’. In the end, even Boris Johnson was attacked by the most extreme Brexiters for what he delivered. It is this theme, more than any other, that has made the politics of

…

now to recreate the shock of the hours and days following the announcement of the 2016 referendum result. As the headlines went around the world, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, the leading figures in the Vote Leave campaign, appeared on television seeming bemused and, to many eyes, frightened by their victory. David

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one time or another by all three of the leading pro-Brexit figures whom Theresa May had appointed to her Cabinet in 2016. These were Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary, Liam Fox as International Trade Secretary, and David Davis as Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) and the man

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government allowed only a brief debate and the whole episode was a foretaste of the way that both she and, later (and even more so), Boris Johnson were to treat Parliament with contempt. In yet another irony, when the vote was actually held at the start of February MPs voted overwhelmingly in

…

underpinned the GFA and, with it, the wider peace process. During the referendum campaign Brexiters dismissed these concerns as – yet again – Project Fear. More specifically, Boris Johnson said that the existing situation with the Irish border would be ‘absolutely unchanged’ by a vote for Brexit, a claim echoed by the pro-Brexit

…

and the future – especially trade – terms would be conducted within the two-year time frame of the Article 50 process. For example, in December 2016, Boris Johnson had claimed that eighteen months would be ‘absolutely ample’ for both.48 Indeed, as noted earlier, the Vote Leave campaign had gone even further and

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Britain’ following Brexit,71 against the advice of civil servants who had realised that there would be a problem about eligibility, and that Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, in particular, had wanted bids to be made. So this was a microcosm of Brexit. In pursuit of its post-Brexit global future the UK

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the EU. But that proved to be an entirely vain hope. Almost immediately, David Davis, who had been threatening to resign for weeks, did so. Boris Johnson followed, as did Steve Baker, the DExEU minister. In the years since, it has often been claimed that, with her Chequers proposal, May put forward

…

was the basis of a new white paper, but virtually everyone knew it would not be agreed by either the EU or the Brexit Ultras. Boris Johnson, in a predictably dishonest resignation speech, denied that the Irish border problem existed. The new Brexit Secretary, another Ultra, Dominic Raab, denied that any financial

…

’ them), it had two components.85 One was the idea of Britain ‘standing alone’ as in 1940, and the other a narrative that linked, as Boris Johnson had explicitly done, Nazi Germany’s attempt to subjugate Europe with the present-day EU’s actions. Such references took on a new life in

…

future trade terms. Of course, it was never going to do that. The demand of the Ultras was to ‘drop the backstop’, something repeated by Boris Johnson, who also called for half of the financial settlement to be made contingent on a future trade deal. None of this was remotely realistic and

…

Brexit might be abandoned entirely, partly because of Theresa May’s promise to resign if she got her deal approved, some of the Ultras, including Boris Johnson, this time voted in favour despite all the opprobrium they had heaped on it. But the self-styled ‘Spartans’, the most hardcore of the ERG

…

of Brexit was squandered and, instead, all the old saws about GATT Article XXIV and ‘alternative arrangements’ for the Irish border were out in force. Boris Johnson was always the favourite candidate, and in a contest rewarding whoever could shrug off practicalities and espouse hard-line rhetoric without regard for its consequences

…

, unlike Jeremy Hunt, his rival in the final vote amongst the party members, Johnson repeatedly refused to rule it out. To no one’s surprise, Boris Johnson was elected as party leader and on the afternoon of 24 July 2019 became the new Prime Minister. Within hours it became abundantly clear that

…

was published whilst the debate was in progress. CHAPTER FIVE BREXIT REDUX From Theresa May’s resignation to the 2019 general election The advent of Boris Johnson’s premiership marked at once a new beginning for the Brexit process and a re-run of much of what had already occurred. In some

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50 process until 31 January 2020. The Commons comfortably passed this on 4 September and on the same day refused to endorse an attempt by Boris Johnson to force a general election. Despite an attempted filibuster in the House of Lords, the Benn Act received Royal Assent on 9 September. On that

…

Moreover, the proposal also relied upon the still unproven possibilities of technology to minimise the extent of physical checks. However, shortly after publishing the proposal, Boris Johnson held an impromptu meeting with the Irish Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, following which it was suddenly announced that there was a ‘pathway to a deal’. In

…

never arise. CHAPTER SIX BREXIT GETS REAL From the 2019 general election to the end of the transition period Within days of the 2019 election, Boris Johnson’s Withdrawal Agreement Bill was passed, with minimal debate or detailed scrutiny, by a large majority. There was no opposition from his own MPs, for

…

businesses and others about the economic damage that Brexit was already causing, and what worse damage was in prospect. But the comment allegedly made by Boris Johnson in June 2018, ‘fuck business’, seemed to have now virtually become government policy.109 Unsurprisingly, at the time of leaving there was on all sides

…

of insisting that no deal was a perfectly possible outcome if it did not get what it wanted. This also explains the recurring pattern of Boris Johnson setting supposedly ‘final’ deadlines for a deal, or at least substantial progress towards one, which came and went with the talks still continuing. Thus in

…

– the vote was easily passed. The deal was done. It was also a fitting end that, even as the deal was done, the lies continued. Boris Johnson declared that the TCA meant there would be no non-tariff barriers to trade with the EU, which was self-evidently false.123 He went

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, she had begun to turn that Brexit into something that was practically deliverable, which became her Withdrawal Agreement. Until the Chequers proposal, the Ultras, including Boris Johnson and David Davis, had supported her. So the issue wasn’t that the Brexiters had been thwarted from the outset but that they had been

…

-evidently elite nature of its leaders. The idea that the largely male, public school and/or Oxbridge-educated Brexit leaders – a category that takes in Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Douglas Carswell, Nigel Lawson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Daniel Hannan, John Redwood and many other leading Brexiters – were anything other

…

been part of as an EU member. What under May’s government had been evident in the conduct of Brexiter ministers moved centre stage after Boris Johnson came to power and brought with him so much of the Vote Leave campaign team. Yet it also removed the possibility of Brexiter ministers resigning

…

May, seemed to think that the two-year Article 50 period would enfold both the exit talks and the future terms talks. Some, such as Boris Johnson, claimed that both could be completed well within that timescale. One consequence of this was the early dispute over the sequencing of the Article 50

…

scrapping the Withdrawal Agreement. Perhaps the worst example of conflating the two stages of the Brexit process came in the 2019 general election campaign when Boris Johnson campaigned on his ‘oven-ready deal’ – his Withdrawal Agreement – which he implied was ‘the’ Brexit deal that would ‘get Brexit done’, rather than just the

…

months is MORE than enough time to get “great” Brexit deal’ Express 6 December 2016 https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/740453/Brexit-News-Boris-Johnson-EU-chief-negotiator-Michel-Barnier-18-months-deal 49 Official Journal of the European Union C326/1 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN

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://www.ft.com/content/01396086-38ae-11e7-821a-6027b8a20f23 52 Ibid. 53 Hansard HC Deb, 24 January 2017, vol. 620, col. 169 54 Thomas Colson, ‘Boris Johnson promised frictionless trade after Brexit but now his government admits new border checks are “inevitable”’ Business Insider 11 February 2020 https://www.businessinsider.com

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/boris-johnson-michael-gove-admits-brexit-border-checks-are-inevitable-2020-2?r=US&IR=T 55 The ‘thought experiment’ in this sub-section up to this

…

normal transition of power. It’s a hard Brexit coup’ The Guardian 25 July 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/25/power-brexit-boris-johnson-radical-conservative-party 95 Tom McTague, ‘British Jacobins on the march in Brexit revolution’ Politico 16 September 2018 https://www.politico.eu/article

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/boris-johnson-brexit-fantasy-explained-britain-perpetual-revolution/ 96 ‘Dominic Cummings: Anger at MPs “not surprising”, PM’s adviser says’ BBC News 27 September 2019 https://www.

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/commentary/britain-brexit-failed-state-by-chris-patten-2019-08?barrier=accesspaylog 100 Peter Foster and James Crisp, ‘“Despairing” EU officials braced for showdown with Boris Johnson after combative Commons performance’ The Telegraph 26 September 2019 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/09/26/despairing-eu-officials-braced-showdown

…

-boris-johnson-combative/ 101 Andrew Woodcock, ‘Brexit: Boris Johnson accused of being “out of his depth” after rebuff in talks with EU’s Juncker’ The Independent 18 September 2019 https://www.independent

…

.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-boris-johnson-jean-claude-juncker-eu-meeting-negotiations-northern-ireland-a9110411.html 102 Alan McGuinness, ‘Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski defends bid to get Poland to veto Brexit

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.sky.com/story/tory-mp-daniel-kawczynski-defends-bid-to-get-poland-to-veto-brexit-delay-11841185 103 Sam Fleming, George Parker and Arthur Beesley, ‘Boris Johnson warns of return to Irish customs checks’ Financial Times 1 October 2019 https://www.ft.com/content/488cd226-e467-11e9-9743-db5a370481bc 104 David Allen

…

Green, ‘Boris Johnson subverts the rule of law’ Financial Times 11 September 2020 https://www.ft.com/content/5f57d498-d3e0-11e9-8367-807ebd53ab77 105 For which, see Jonathan

…

-July-20.pdf 119 John Longworth, ‘Why Britain must ditch the Brexit deal’ Politico 13 July 2020 https://www.politico.eu/article/why-uk-britain-boris-johnson-must-ditch-the-brexit-withdrawal-agreement-deal/?fbclid=IwAR0RsJm881CRltt9vkOGIzlLmhmayHH_aY6lW_6YBJUK2q3WDFaGbMJkU1c 120 Adrian Zorzut, ‘Video resurfaces of Iain Duncan Smith trying to stop MPs scrutinising

…

Blog 29 December 2020 https://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/blog/parliaments-role-in-scrutinising-the-uk-eu-trade-and-cooperation-agreement 123 Faisal Islam, ‘What Boris Johnson’s mistake tells us about our future’ BBC News 24 December 2020 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55442982 124 ‘Post-Brexit trade: UK

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having its cake and eating it, says Boris Johnson’ BBC News 30 December 2020 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-55486081 125 Martina Bet, ‘Brexit deal betrayal as Johnson’s non-tariff

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claims torn apart by experts’ Daily Express 26 December 2020 https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1376851/brexit-news-deal-eu-uk-trade-talks-boris-johnson-non-tariff-barriers-single-market-spt 126 Fintan O’Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (London: Head of Zeus, 2019) 127 George

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Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

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The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet

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