Boris Johnson

Politics on the Edge: The Instant #1 Sunday Times Bestseller From the Host of Hit Podcast the Rest Is Politics
by Rory Stewart
Published 13 Sep 2023

Every poll now showed that Boris Johnson had three times the Conservative Party votes of Jeremy Hunt. And Boris Johnson had inherited my lead in the broader country too. I, and what remained of the One Nation tradition, declared for Jeremy Hunt. But it was no longer up to us, the vote now rested with the Conservative Party members. And they would vote for Boris Johnson. Five months later, I travel up to Penrith to march alongside Sasha in the Remembrance Day parade, with my one medal on, behind veterans who are wearing many. Shoshana and Ivo are already in the church. Boris Johnson, having failed to prorogue Parliament, or deliver Brexit by 31 October, has called an election for December.

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While we were on the plane, Cameron announced his resignation as prime minister. Turning on my phone on landing, I found messages from three different leadership teams. Michael Gove wanted to convince me to support Boris Johnson, who had been back in Parliament for a year. I rang Michael to remind him that he had once told me Boris Johnson was chaotic and unsuitable. ‘I have changed my mind, Rory. Boris Johnson would be an excellent prime minister. We need a Brexiteer. And we need you. You are a man of remarkable talent. We are not making use of your talents: it is like leaving the Duke of Wellington in the ballroom during the Battle of Waterloo.’

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Relieved to have a chance to stand by Theresa May, after the One Nation, I said that I thought she was honourable and the best prime minister we were likely to find. He nodded warmly, ‘And what do you think of Boris Johnson?’ I said I thought Boris Johnson was a chaotic and tricky confidence artist, entirely unfit to be prime minister. ‘Don’t you think he did a good job as mayor of London?’ ‘Only by making it a purely ceremonial role.’ ‘I see,’ he replied, and giving his name to the clerk at the voting desk, passed smoothly on behind the Speaker’s Chair. A few days later, a newspaper article appeared revealing that Grant had recruited a tight group of chief agents for Boris Johnson, and was sending them out to cultivate targets, testing their loyalty, probing for weak points.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan
Published 2 Jan 2020

The IEA’s Mark Littlewood would later tell Greenpeace’s undercover reporter that Singham spoke with Michael Gove “every three or four days, along with David Davis, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox”.23 In July 2017, Singham was the only think tanker invited to the Brexit department’s summit of business leaders at Chevening, the foreign secretary’s grace and favour pile in the Kent countryside.24 A few months later, Singham wrote a letter signed by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove calling for May to adopt a harder Brexit strategy.25 Singham was particularly well known in the Brexit departments. Trade Minister Liam Fox appointed him to a committee of experts.

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In December 2019, shortly after the British general election, Tim Montgomerie, an advisor on social justice to Boris Johnson, addressed a Danube Institute meeting in Budapest. Montgomerie praised Hungary’s “interesting early thinking” on “the limits of liberalism”. “I think we are seeing that in the UK as well,” he said, adding that Britain should forge a “special relationship” with Hungary after Brexit.98 It’s hard not to see traces of Orbán’s ostentatious populism in Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Orbán, however, demurred when Brexiters called on him to come to their aid. Despite pleas from his long-time ally Nigel Farage, Orbán refused to block the European Union’s extension to Brexit in September 2019.

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, Spectator, July 2019. 62 Jacob Granger, ‘2019 Reuters Digital News Report finds that trust in the media continues to fall’, journalism.co.uk, June 2019. 63 Sam Knight, ‘The Empty Promise of Boris Johnson’, New Yorker, June 2019. 64 ‘Debunking years of tabloid claims about Europe’, The Economist, June 2016. 65 Andy Bounds, ‘Sun boycott reduced Euroscepticism on Merseyside, study shows’, Financial Times, August 2019. 66 ‘New Report: Who Owns the UK Media?’, Media Reform Coalition, March 2019. 67 Chris Cook, Defeated by Brexit (London, 2019), p. 9. 68 Sarah Provan, Adam Samson, Charlotte Middlehurst, Philip Georgiadis and Myles McCormick, ‘General election 2019: Boris Johnson declares “powerful mandate to get Brexit done” – as it happened’, Financial Times, December 2019. 69 Ibid. 70 Patrick Grafton-Green, ‘Boris Johnson “orders review of BBC licence fee” amid “boycott” of flagship Radio 4 Today programme over “pro-Remain bias”’, Evening Standard, December 2019. 71 Paul Simpson, ‘Nigel Farage exclusive: “Advertising?

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019
by Stewart Lee
Published 2 Sep 2019

6 The Treachery of Images, René Magritte, 1929. 7 Imagine being able to just say such hilariously banal things naturally, as Mr May does here, without spending hours, like I do, trying to think up hilariously banal things on purpose. When Boris Johnson’s inner monster goes on the rampage 21 May 2017 Last Wednesday,1 our chief Brexiteer, Boris Johnson, dressed up in a Sikh costume to visit a Bristol gurdwara. There he told the alcohol-abstaining supplicants to take bottles of Johnnie Walker to Indian relatives to speed up post-Brexit booze exports, leading one to comment 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 it is difficult to deduce anything from this.2 It might be just her leg and some bits of one of her arms.

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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 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 Boris Johnson™ slightly missed the point of it all,’ wrote Frank, ‘in that 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?’

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In torn rags, he says, ‘Tell me – quickly – what happened? I – I can’t remember – it’s like an ugly fading nightmare!’ Banner’s haunted face recalls nothing so much as the face of Boris Johnson, as he emerged the morning after the Brexit vote, in denial of the destruction that his own inner Hulk had wrought. Boris Johnson was 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 attackers of Charlie Hebdo too.

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 5 Mar 2020

At the end of the ‘scepter’d isle’ speech Gaunt says something that may in fact be more pertinent to England’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 living with the politics of the fake orgasm. The leaders of the Brexit campaign are obliged to join in with the ecstasies of their followers. They must let out a few polite yelps of satisfaction. But a week on, it is increasingly clear that theirs is a phoney consummation. The earth may have moved – but not for them. As shown by Boris Johnson’s retreat from the prospect of having to actually govern the new kingdom he did so much to create, it was all a performance.

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No one can, or will, ‘reach any 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 and 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 good way – of being 52 per cent out and 48 per cent in.’

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TIMELINE 26 June 2018: The European Union (Withdrawal) Bill receives Royal Assent and becomes an Act of Parliament. 6 July 2018: The cabinet meets at Chequers to agree a collective position for the future Brexit 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 2018: UK government publishes the first collection of technical notices providing guidance on how to prepare for a no-deal Brexit. 10 July 2018 On 7 July Theresa May holds a cabinet meeting at Chequers and pushes through an agreement that 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.

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem
by Tim Shipman
Published 30 Nov 2017

Determined to close down the story, Baker messaged all 170 MPs and peers on an old mailing list he had used to stage EU rebellions against David Cameron and said, ‘This is an attack on Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson’s view hasn’t changed, he’s in favour of migration under democratic control. Nothing has changed.’ He sent the same message to the European Research Group WhatsApp group and then tweeted his support for Johnson, urging others to do the same. ‘The result was that within fifteen minutes we’d destroyed that operation against Boris,’ a leading Eurosceptic said. ‘What they were hoping for was Eurosceptics turning on Boris Johnson and tearing him limb from limb.’ Baker had turned his Eurosceptic shock troops from a guerrilla unit fighting his own government into a praetorian guard for hard Brexit.

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Unless … Tim Shipman Westminster, Preggio, Camerata, San Nicolo,Church Knowle, Studland and Blackheath July–October 2017 Timeline 2016 23 Jun – Britain votes to leave the European Union by a margin of 52 per cent to 48 per cent 29 Jun – Other 27 member states agree a ‘no negotiations without notification’ stance on Brexit talks and Article 50 13 Jul – Theresa May becomes prime minister and pledges to create ‘a country that works for everyone’ 7 Sep – May insists she will not give a ‘running commentary’ on Brexit negotiations 24 Sep – Jeremy Corbyn re-elected as Labour Party leader 30 Sep – Carlos Ghosn, Nissan’s CEO, says he could scrap potential new investment in its Sunderland plant 2 Oct – In Brexit speech to party conference, May says she will trigger Article 50 before the end of March and create a Great Repeal Bill to replace the 1972 European Communities Act 5 Oct – In main speech to party conference, May criticises ‘citizens of nowhere’ 6 Oct – Keir Starmer appointed shadow Brexit secretary 27 Oct – Nissan says it will build its Qashqai and X-Trail models at its Sunderland plant, protecting 7,000 jobs 2 Nov – At Spectator awards dinner May compares Boris Johnson to a dog that was put down 3 Nov – High Court rules that only Parliament not the government has the power to trigger Article 50 4 Nov – Daily Mail calls the judges ‘enemies of the people’ 8 Nov – Donald Trump elected the 45th president of the United States 14 Nov – FT reveals the EU wants a €60 billion exit bill from Britain 15 Nov – Boris Johnson tells a Czech paper the UK will ‘probably’ leave the customs union and is reprimanded by May 19 Nov – Johnson accused of turning up to a cabinet Brexit meeting with the wrong papers 20 Nov – Sixty pro-Brexit Tory MPs demand Britain leaves the single market 21 Nov – Trump calls for Nigel Farage to be made British ambassador to Washington 7 Dec – MPs back government amendment to opposition day debate saying the government must set out its Brexit plans but also that Article 50 should be triggered by the end of March 8 Dec – Johnson calls Saudi Arabia a ‘puppeteer’ in the Middle East, sparking a rebuke from Downing Street and fears he will resign 11 Dec – Fiona Hill’s ‘Trousergate’ texts to Nicky Morgan, banning her from Downing Street, are published 15 Dec – BBC reveals that Sir Ivan Rogers has privately warned ministers a post-Brexit trade deal might take ten years 2017 4 Jan – Ivan Rogers resigns 10 Jan – Corbyn announces a wage cap in his ‘Trump relaunch’ 17 Jan – In speech at Lancaster House May announces Britain will seek a hard Brexit leaving the single market, the customs union and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

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Having seen off the two most awkward female backbenchers, Morgan and Soubry, she now had to deal with the two men who, in their very different ways, had become the biggest headaches in her government: Boris Johnson and Ivan Rogers. 5 How Do You Solve a Problem Like Boris? Open with a joke, they say. Theresa May’s gag certainly got a big laugh when she began her party conference speech. It was the perfect way to break the ice with the party faithful. In retrospect it might have been better not to choose as her joke the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson. Clearly revelling in her big moment, May strode to the mark and said, ‘When we came to Birmingham this week, some big questions were hanging in the air.

Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To)
by Chris Grey
Published 22 Jun 2021

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 delay’ Sky News 21 October 2019 https://news.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 Tonge, Stuart Wilks-Heeg and Louise Thompson (eds), Britain Votes: The 2019 General Election (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) 106 Dominic Wring and Stephen Ward, ‘From Bad to Worse?

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fbclid=IwAR0RsJm881CRltt9vkOGIzlLmhmayHH_aY6lW_6YBJUK2q3WDFaGbMJkU1c 120 Adrian Zorzut, ‘Video resurfaces of Iain Duncan Smith trying to stop MPs scrutinising Brexit agreement he now wants rewritten’ New European 5 August 2020 https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit-news/video-of-ids-commons-speech-against-wa-scrutiny-found-on-85954 121 Michael Savage and Toby Helm, ‘Top lawyers slam Suella Braverman for wrecking UK’s reputation’ The Observer 12 September 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/12/top-lawyers-slam-suella-braverman-for-wrecking-uks-reputation 122 Dr Brigid Fowler, ‘Parliament’s role in scrutinising the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement is a farce’ Hansard Society 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 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 barrier 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 Monbiot, ‘Brexit stems from a civil war in capitalism – we are all just collateral damage’ The Guardian 24 November 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/24/brexit-capitalism 128 Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988) 129 Jonathan Coe, Middle England (London: Penguin Random House, 2018) 130 Flexcit: A plan for leaving the European Union The Leave Alliance 2018 (updated edition) http://www.eureferendum.com/documents/flexcit.pdf 131 David Davis, Tweet 26 May 2016 https://twitter.com/DavidDavisMP/status/735770073822961664 132 Steve Baker, ‘Boris: take back control’ The Critic 24 May 2020 https://thecritic.co.uk/boris-must-take-back-control/ 133 Jonathan Portes, ‘After Brexit, Britain’s hard line on immigration won’t hold’ The Guardian 29 January 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/29/brexit-britain-hard-line-immigration-openness 134 Robert Saunders, ‘Brexit in Historical Perspective.

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uri=CELEX%3A12012M050 50 HMG, ‘Prime Minister’s letter to Donald Tusk triggering Article 50’ 29 March 2017 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/prime-ministers-letter-to-donald-tusk-triggering-article-50/prime-ministers-letter-to-donald-tusk-triggering-article-50 51 Henry Mance, ‘David Davis warns Brexit timetable will be “row of the summer”’ Financial Times 14 May 2017 https://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/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 point is adapted from my article ‘The ultimate Brexit counterfactual’ Prospect 1 August 2018 https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/the-ultimate-brexit-counterfactual 56 Daniel Boffey, ‘How Juncker’s Downing Street dinner turned sour’ The Guardian 1 May 2017 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/01/how-junckers-downing-street-dinner-turned-sour 57 Faisal Islam, ‘No signed “future” trade deal within two years, says Theresa May’ Sky News 5 April 2017 https://news.sky.com/story/no-signed-future-brexit-deal-within-two-years-says-theresa-may-10824347 58 See, for example, Tim Shipman, Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem (London: William Collins, 2017), Tim Ross and Tom McTague, Betting the House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election (London: Biteback, 2017) 59 ‘Theresa May’s general election statement in full’ BBC News 18 April 2017 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39630009 60 I am only going to talk about the broad features of the national campaign, but I’d argue the same was true in Scotland and Wales though perhaps slightly less true in Northern Ireland.

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 22 Jan 2018

, The Times, 14 June 1996, p. 20. 6 Edward St Aubyn, Some Hope, Picador, London, 2012, p. 4. 7 George Orwell, ‘The English People’, in Essays, Everyman’s Library, Knopf, New York, 2002, p. 610. 8 Thompson’s essay is transcribed at https://againstreactionblog.wordpress.com/2017/08/28/going-into-europe-an-essay-by-e-p-thompson-1975/ 9 ‘Eurobeer Menace’, Daily Mirror, 25 June 1973. 10 ‘Your Shopping Basket and the Market’, Daily Mirror, 30 May 1975. 11 Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000, Macmillan, London, 2002, p. 514. 12 ‘That Tory “have cake and eat it” Brexit strategy explained in all its humiliating glory’, by Dan Bloom, Daily Mirror, 29 November 2016. 13 ‘We’ll Have Our Cake and Eat It’, by Tom Newton-Dunn, Sun, 1 October 2016. 14 ‘Boris Johnson’s top 50 quotes’, by Alice Audley, Daily Telegraph, 18 June 2014. 15 Stanley Johnson, Stanley, I Resume: Further Recollections of an Exuberant Life, Biteback, London, 2014. 16 Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000, Macmillan, London, 2002, p. 505. 17 ‘Boris in row over Jamie remarks’, BBC News, 3 October 2006. 18 Robin Young, ‘MEPs rally to defend flavoured crisps’, The Times, 29 April 1991, p. 2. 19 ‘The nasty taste of Brussels directives’, Daily Mail, 30 April 1991. 20 ‘I’m no longer Nasty, but please stop lying about Nice by Boris Johnson’, Daily Telegraph, 17 October 2002. 21 Boris Johnson, Friends, Voters, Countrymen, pp. 218–19. 22 Ibid., p. 37. 23 ‘Great-uncle Ernest Thesiger’s army camp’, letter by John Thesiger, Guardian, 27 April 2014. 24 Edward St Aubyn, Bad News, Picador, London, 2012, p. 41. 25 Weight, Patriots, p. 724. 26 ‘Hunger for beef is a part of British pride’, by Ross Benson, Daily Express, 30 March 1996, p. 11. 27 Christopher Hope, Daily Telegraph, 5 June 2018. 28 Jacob Rees-Mogg, ‘My nanny made me the man I am’, Daily Telegraph, 14 March 2014. 29 Alan Bennett, Keep On Keeping On, Farrar Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2016, p. 193. 30 Boris Johnson, Friends, Voters, Countrymen, p. 20. 31 Nigel Farage, tweet, 9 November 2017. 32 https://www.petebrown.net/2014/06/16/why-farages-foaming-pint-is-testamen/ 33 Farming for the next generation: Secretary of State Michael Gove sets out his vision on the future of our farming industry at the Oxford Farming Conference 2018, published by DEFRA, 5 January 2018. 34 ‘If your child is fat then you are a bad parent’, by Julia Hartley-Brewer, Daily Telegraph, 10 November 2015. 35 Tower Hamlets Police @MPSTowerHam, tweet, 3.10 p.m., 20 February 2018. 36 @GMPWhitefield, tweet, 10.49 p.m., 20 February 2018. 5.

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, Fintan O’Toole finds himself discovering how trivial journalistic lies became far from trivial national obsessions; how the pose of indifference to truth and historical fact has come to define the style of an entire political elite; how a country that once had colonies is redefining itself as an oppressed nation requiring liberation; the strange gastronomic and political significance of prawn-flavoured crisps, and their role in the rise of Boris Johnson; the dreams of revolutionary deregulation and privatisation that drive Arron Banks, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg; and the silent rise of English nationalism, the force that dare not speak its name. He also discusses the fatal attraction of heroic failure, once a self-deprecating cult in a hugely successful empire that could well afford the occasional disaster: the Charge of the Light Brigade, or Franklin lost in the Arctic.

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In 1989, for example, the Bruges Group of anti-European Tories heard Professor Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics tell them that ‘the European institutions were attempting to create a European Union, in the tradition of the mediaeval popes, Charlemagne, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler’.11 The sleight of hand was not subtle: Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefore the EU is a Hitlerian project. But the lack of subtlety did not stop the trope from being used in the Brexit campaign: ‘Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this [unifying Europe], and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,’ Boris Johnson told the Daily Telegraph on 15 May 2016, a month before the referendum. That Napoleon and ‘various people’ were not the point of the argument became clear in Johnson’s reiteration of the real point: that the EU was ‘pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate’. While Harris was writing Fatherland in 1990, the British secretary of state for trade and industry, Nicholas Ridley, a close friend and ally of the prime minister Margaret Thatcher, told the Spectator that the European Monetary System being introduced by the EU was ‘all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe… I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot.

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire
by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson
Published 15 Jan 2019

, New Statesman, 26 January, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2018/01/has-uk-economy-really-shrugged-impact-brexit-vote 37 Wallace, T. and McCann, K. (2018) ‘Is Mark Carney right about Brexit?’, Daily Telegraph, 22 May, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2018/05/22/mark-carney-right-brexit/ 38 BBC (2018) ‘Boris Johnson says he “probably needs” a private plane’, BBC News, 23 May, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-44221524 39 Cockburn. P. (2018) ‘Brexiteers like Boris Johnson must realise that past British successes were based on creating alliances, not breaking them up’, The Independent, 21 July, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/boris-johnson-brexit-churchill-ww1-napoleon-british-history-a8456916.html 40 YouGov (2018) ‘Voting Intention: Conservatives 42 per cent, Labour 39 per cent (11–12 June)’, https://yougov.co.uk/news/2018/06/15/voting-intention-conservatives-42-labour-39-11-12-/ 41 Fransham, M. and Dorling, D. (2017) ‘House prices can keep rising only if the Government backs mass buy-to-let’, Daily Telegraph, 8 April, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/investing/buy-to-let/oxford-academics-house-prices-can-keep-rising-government-backs/ 42 Britain Elects: ‘Having greater control over immigration is more important than having access to free trade with the EU: Agree: 38% (-5), Disagree: 48% (+4), Record high for the % who disagree’, https://twitter.com/britainelects/status/1016357278612623360?

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A quote appearing in: Evans, G. (2018) ‘The unwelcome revival of “race science”’, The Guardian, 2 March, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/02/the-unwelcome-revival-of-race-science 39 Tomlinson, S. (1990) Multicultural Education in White Schools, pp. 85–6, London: Batsford. 40 See the graphs and tables in: Dorling, D. and Tomlinson, S. (2016) ‘The Creation of Inequality: Myths of Potential and Ability’, op. cit. 41 Dorling, D. (2013) ‘Rising cornflakes – or Boris Johnson’s faux pas’, New Internationalist blog, 2 December, https://newint.org/blog/2013/12/02/boris-johnson-elite 42 Eyres, H. and Myerson, G. (2018) Johnson’s Brexit Dictionary: Or an A to Z of what Brexit really means, London: Pushkin Press, p. 116. 43 As one commentator writing under one particular blog by a person who attempts to measure potential put it: ‘Just so glad you’ve simplified the system so everyone knows the true value of the results… slightly tongue in cheek.’

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Had Joris been writing a few days earlier, he might also have asked why the British Ambassador had to tell the British Foreign Secretary to shut up when he started quoting Kipling in that temple in Myanmar. Was it because Boris Johnson didn’t understand just how offensive it was for him to recite a poem that mocked reverence to a statue of the Buddha, and reminisced about a British soldier kissing a Burmese girl (too young to be called a woman), or because he supports Rudyard Kipling’s British imperialist values? For Kipling, ‘East of Suez’ was where you could find relief from both the English weather and English morality (hence the girls). Boris Johnson’s imperialist stunt is unfortunately indicative of a wider issue. Almost two centuries ago, sometime around 1805, the artist James Gillray drew a cartoon of William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte desperately attempting to carve up the world, represented as a plum pudding (Figure 4.4).

Routes to Rejoin
by Stay European
Published 3 Oct 2021

But it is time to vote with your head as well as your heart, John Major, Guardian, 6 December 2019 Anna Soubry on Conservative policies under Boris Johnson, BBC News, 15 July 2021 Millions in UK face disenfranchisement under voter ID plans, Guardian, 4 July 2021 Electoral Commission to investigate Boris Johnson’s Downing Street flat renovations, 28 April 2021 Parties call for inquiry into Boris Johnson’s ‘failure to be honest’, Guardian, 19 April 2021 Electoral Commission to be stripped of power to prosecute after probe into Boris Johnson’s flat makeover, Independent, 18 June 2021 We lost the Brexit fight – now we must listen to voters, Ed Davey urges Lib Dems, Observer, 26 September 2020 96 Lib Dems ‘very pro-European’ but ‘not a rejoin party’ – Ed Davey, New European, 18 January 2021 Chapter 7 Europe is leaving a light on for Scotland, SNP, snp.org Tusk: EU would be enthusiastic if Scotland applied to rejoin, Guardian, 2 February 2020 The EU must welcome an independent Scotland, Letters, Guardian, 29 April 2021 Irish reunification, Institute for Government, 18 June 2019 FactFind: How could a border poll happen?

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Naomi Long of the cross-community Alliance Party said: “They denied the existence of borders, even as those borders were being erected. I think that that dishonesty, and the lack of clarity around these issues has contributed to a sense of anger in parts of our community.” On an Irish Sea border, Theresa May said “No UK prime 20 minister could ever agree to it.” But in the end Boris Johnson did agree to exactly that. He appears to have taken a similar position to his then-adviser Dominic Cummings, who allegedly once said that he doesn’t care if Northern Ireland “falls into the fucking sea”. Yet whatever the UK’s position, the EU – heavily aware of its obligations to member state Ireland and never cavalier with peace processes – is not so irresponsible.

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Long term, the only realistic alternative to that position is Irish reunification (see chapter 7). Dealing with dishonesty Here’s a dilemma: how do you do a deal with someone who you know will turn around shortly afterwards and try to break their word? That is the problem the EU faced as they negotiated the Brexit deal with Boris Johnson’s government. To add to the initial lies of the referendum, the government had gone into the 2019 general election with a new fraud, the ‘oven-ready deal’. For this to work, they had to act like Brexit had no significant problems left to resolve. They made it screamingly obvious that their intention was to sign a deal, almost regardless of what it said, in order to ‘get Brexit done’ and then try to wriggle out of it later.

The Politics of Pain
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 2 Oct 2019

, The Times, 14 June 1996, p. 20. 6Edward St Aubyn, Some Hope, Picador, London, 2012, p. 4. 7George Orwell, ‘The English People’, in Essays, Everyman’s Library, Knopf, New York, 2002, p. 610. 8Thompson’s essay is transcribed at https://againstreactionblog.wordpress.com/2017/08/28/going-into-europe-an-essay-by-ep-thompson-1975/ 9‘Eurobeer Menace’, Daily Mirror, 25 June 1973. 10‘Your Shopping Basket and the Market’, Daily Mirror, 30 May 1975. 11Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000, Macmillan, London, 2002, p. 514. 12‘That Tory “have cake and eat it” Brexit strategy explained in all its humiliating glory’, by Dan Bloom, Daily Mirror, 29 November 2016. 13‘We’ll Have Our Cake and Eat It’, by Tom Newton-Dunn, Sun, 1 October 2016. 14‘Boris Johnson’s top 50 quotes’, by Alice Audley, Daily Telegraph, 18 June 2014. 15Stanley Johnson, Stanley, I Resume: Further Recollections of an Exuberant Life, Biteback, London, 2014. 16Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000, Macmillan, London, 2002, p. 505. 17‘Boris in row over Jamie remarks’, BBC News, 3 October 2006. 18Robin Young, ‘MEPs rally to defend flavoured crisps’, The Times, 29 April 1991, p. 2. 19‘The nasty taste of Brussels directives’, Daily Mail, 30 April 1991. 20‘I’m no longer Nasty, but please stop lying about Nice by Boris Johnson’, Daily Telegraph, 17 October 2002. 21Boris Johnson, Friends, Voters, Countrymen, pp. 218–19. 22Ibid., p. 37. 23‘Great-uncle Ernest Thesiger’s army camp’, letter by John Thesiger, Guardian, 27 April 2014. 24Edward St Aubyn, Bad News, Picador, London, 2012, p. 41. 25Weight, Patriots, p. 724. 26‘Hunger for beef is a part of British pride’, by Ross Benson, Daily Express, 30 March 1996, p. 11. 27Christopher Hope, Daily Telegraph, 5 June 2018. 28Jacob Rees-Mogg, ‘My nanny made me the man I am’, Daily Telegraph, 14 March 2014. 29Alan Bennett, Keep On Keeping On, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2016, p. 193. 30Boris Johnson, Friends, Voters, Countrymen, p. 20. 31Nigel Farage, tweet, 9 November 2017. 32https://www.petebrown.net/2014/06/16/why-faragesfoaming-pint-is-testamen/ 33Farming for the next generation: Secretary of State Michael Gove sets out his vision on the future of our farming industry at the Oxford Farming Conference 2018, published by DEFRA, 5 January 2018. 34‘If your child is fat then you are a bad parent’, by Julia Hartley-Brewer, Daily Telegraph, 10 November 2015. 35Tower Hamlets Police @MPSTowerHam, tweet, 3.10 p.m., 20 February 2018. 36@GMPWhitefield, tweet, 10.49 p.m., 20 February 2018. 5.Sadopopulism 1Independent, 27 March 2017. 2Andrew Gimson, Boris: The Adventures of Boris Johnson, Simon & Schuster, London, pp. 111–12. 3‘Grundy Banned, Today team accused’, Guardian, 3 December 1976. 4Great Interviews of the 20th Century, Guardian booklet no. 8, 2007, p. 10.

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More strangely, those who led what was in effect a peaceful revolution in 2016, could not actually take power. The insurgent United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which, under its former leader Nigel Farage created the demand for the referendum, actually lost virtually all of its vote in 2017. The leading Brexiteers in the ruling Conservative Party – most notably Boris Johnson – were unable to assume control of government, leaving it instead to the lackluster Theresa May, who had played no significant role in the referendum. There is something both very odd and highly distinctive about this – a revolution at once triumphant and timid, boldly self-assertive in principle but in practice tentative and hesitant to the point, ultimately, of complete paralysis.

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In 1989, for example, the Bruges Group of anti-European Tories heard Professor Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics tell them that ‘the European institutions were attempting to create a European Union, in the tradition of the mediaeval popes, Charlemagne, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler’.11 The sleight of hand was not subtle: Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefore the EU is a Hitlerian project. But the lack of subtlety did not stop the trope from being used in the Brexit campaign: ‘Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this [unifying Europe], and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,’ Boris Johnson told the Daily Telegraph on 15 May 2016, a month before the referendum. That Napoleon and ‘various people’ were not the point of the argument became clear in Johnson’s reiteration of the real point: that the EU was ‘pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate’. While Harris was writing Fatherland in 1990, the British secretary of state for trade and industry, Nicholas Ridley, a close friend and ally of the prime minister Margaret Thatcher, told the Spectator that the European Monetary System being introduced by the EU was ‘all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe… I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot.

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus
by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott
Published 18 Mar 2021

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. 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 to 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.

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, 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 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” Boris Johnson got coronavirus when he failed to “practise what he preached”, scientists say’, Evening Standard, 28 March 2020. 4.

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Italy was already in lockdown and infections were so widespread that Sileri had 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 immunity.”’ Sileri thought this was foolhardy. ‘I said, “Look, right now I’m in bed with a 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 countries.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
by William Davies
Published 28 Sep 2020

But until some of the political representatives of that 70 per cent construct some kind of coalition, and identify the language and overlapping policies that it shares (in spite of its deep heterogeneity), then the alliance of the nostalgic rentiers will succeed. The Johnson Press Over the course of Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign, Britain has been treated to a fresh media spectacle, marking a new low in the slow decline of an autonomous press. The Daily Telegraph, which has employed Boris Johnson off and on for over thirty years, and currently pays him £275,000 a year as a columnist, has put its full editorial and journalistic resource behind his bid to become leader of the Conservative Party, and therefore prime minister.

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, openDemocracy (30 June 2016); ‘The Crisis of Statistical Fact’, see ‘How statistics lost their power – and why we should fear what comes next’, Guardian (19 January 2017); ‘Strong and Stable’ see ‘Theresa May’s vapid vision for a one-party state’, New York Times (11 May 2017). Chapter 2: ‘The Corbyn Shock’ see ‘Reasons for Corbyn’, London Review of Books (13 July 2017); ‘The Riddle of Tory Brexitism’ see ‘What are they after?’, London Review of Books (8 March 2018); ‘The Revenge of Sovereignty on Government’ see ‘Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Rise of Radical Incompetence’, New York Times (13 July 2018); ‘The Lure of Exit’ see ‘Leave, and leave again’, London Review of Books (7 February 2019); ‘The Demise of Liberal Elites’ see ‘Why we stopped trusting elites’, Guardian (29 November 2019); ‘Comedy or Demagoguery’ see ‘The funny side of politics’, openDemocracy (9 April 2019).

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, Guardian (19 September 2019); ‘Mutations of Leadership’ see ‘How to be prime minister’, London Review of Books (26 September 2019); ‘The Party of Resentment’ see ‘The Tories have lost their ideology. Now they are merely the party of resentment’, Guardian (1 October 2019); ‘The Berlusconification of Britain’ see ‘How Boris Johnson and Brexit are Berlusconifying Britain’, Guardian (4 December 2019); ‘The Johnson Victory’ see ‘For Johnson’s Tories, the collapse of public trust isn’t a problem – it’s an opportunity’, Guardian (13 December 2019). All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-090-7 ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-101-0 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-100-3 (UK EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays Contents Introduction 1.

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe
by Denis MacShane
Published 14 Jul 2017

6 THERESA MAY: HOW MUCH BREXIT DOES SHE REALLY WANT? Every EU leader from Angela Merkel downwards has said flatly that the UK cannot have its gateau and eat it. Will Boris Johnson, who wrote of a ‘Gestapo-controlled Nazi EU’, really sway Angela Merkel and her ministers? Will Boris Johnson’s crude anti-German insults charm the strongly pro-EU German politicians from the Social Democrat Party, who chose as their champion for the 2017 federal elections the passionately pro-EU politician Martin Schulz? Will demands from Boris Johnson and the other Germanophobe Tories persuade the pro-EU Free Democratic Party or even those in the anti-Muslim, racist Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) that they should tear up their values and common rule book to appease UKIP and anti-Europeans in the British government?

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They did much better with the unambiguously pro-EU manifesto than Labour candidates in the Midlands and the North where MPs stood on a manifesto which supported immigration controls and in some cases lost their seats. It should not be forgotten that in June last year there was a clear majority of Remain MPs in the Commons even if the BBC and the press bigged up the loudmouthed anti-Europeans like Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith, Andrea Leadsom and David Davis. MPs from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (other than Unionist supremacists) were all opposed to amputating Britain from Europe. So too were most Labour MPs and more than half of Conservative MPs. In nominal terms there is no election until 2022 though given the absence of a majority for the Conservatives the possibility of an earlier election remains a likely possibility.

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In fact it has been a core argument of Brexit anti-Europeans that a British rupture with the EU would be the first move in the collapse of European integration, such as has been in place since 1945 and given effect by a succession of sovereignty-sharing treaties with their common rule book and enforcement mechanisms. This was put with startling arrogance by Boris Johnson in a speech just before the referendum when he said English nationalist Brexit demagogues and populists were ‘speaking for hundreds of millions across Europe who agree with us but who currently have no voice’. This is ‘nonsense on stilts’, to paraphrase Jeremy Bentham. Anti-Europeanism politics is strong and has been so since the 1950s, fuelled by extremist ideologues of both left and right.

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story
by Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja
Published 15 Jan 2021

Both were hospitalised in Newcastle, in north-east England, on 31 January as a precaution and discharged after a mild illness. That friction, between waiting and wading in, led to a palpable tension between Patrick and Chris in the early weeks of 2020, particularly given the apparent absence of political leadership in that period. Boris Johnson, the prime minister, did not attend the first five COBR meetings on coronavirus in January and February 2020. Chris, though, had more experience than Patrick of operating in political circles: he was in government in 2009, during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic. It was projected to lead to 65,000 deaths; in the event, there were fewer than 300.

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It is distinct from suppression, which means trying to stop spread in the first place. Mitigation and suppression are captured distinctly in epidemiological modelling: suppression indicates a strategy to keep R below 1, to shrink the epidemic; in mitigation, R can rise above 1, representing a spreading epidemic. Boris Johnson certainly did not sound as if he wanted to stop the epidemic in its tracks. He was clear to the nation, as he presented the Coronavirus Action Plan, that ‘for the vast majority of the people of this country, we should be going about our business as usual’. John was surprised at the announcement: ‘I went back to the minutes to see if we had ever properly discussed that four-phase strategy.

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On the same day, he told BBC News: ‘There’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows, as we think it probably will do, where you’ll want to cocoon, you’ll want to protect those at-risk groups so they basically don’t catch the disease, and by the time they come out of their cocooning herd immunity’s been achieved in the rest of the population.’ This was never the view of SAGE. The day after, Boris Johnson told breakfast television that one possible strategy was ‘perhaps to take [the virus] on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease … to move through the population, without taking as many draconian measures’. Patrick gave an interview in which he said: ‘Our aim is to try to reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission, at the same time we protect those who are most vulnerable to it.’

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
by Lionel Barber
Published 5 Nov 2020

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 backstop has been lost in a mist of claim and counterclaim. Under the deal, Northern Ireland will be subject to EU Single Market rules, at best legally semi-detached from the rest of the UK. An inevitable but (constitutionally) dangerous outcome to 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.

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During this period, I was privileged to serve as editor during an extraordinary period of upheaval with Brexit, Trump, the US–China trade war and the fraying of the post-war alliance system. The final section 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-hour interview in Kigali with President Paul Kagame; a conversation with Carrie Lam in Hong Kong; an interview with Donald Trump in the Oval Office (March 2017) and a rare interview in the Kremlin with Vladimir Putin (June 2019), which made world headlines.

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Against that, my job title opened doors and the trips offered a chance to work with local correspondents, promote the FT’s brand and, hopefully, produce some great journalism. 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 the Johnson clan.fn17 Jo has drawn up a mouth-watering schedule which balances high-level business and political appointments with cultural and social delights. We’ll be dropping in to see Manmohan Singh, the Indian technocrat prime minister in his official residence at 7 Race Course Road.

Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published 25 Mar 2024

[Twitter post] (4 June 2023), https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1665370246126125060. 8 Ibid. 9 ‘Arnaud Montebourg demande au gouvernement d’“interdire” le rachat d’une PME par un groupe américain’, Capital [website] (11 April 2023), http://tinyurl.com/u5m97k39. 10 Ibid. 11 Quoted in Jack Maidment, ‘Boris Johnson promises not to “jeopardise” UK national security ahead of crunch decision on whether to allow Huawei to help build Britain’s 5G network as PM hints at compromise’, Daily Mail (27 January 2020), https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7933473/Justice-Secretary-Robert-Buckland-warns-against-trying-bully-Britain-Huawei.html. 12 Quoted in Adam Payne, Thomas Colson and Adam Bienkov, ‘Boris Johnson defies Trump and gives Huawei the green light to develop Britain’s 5G network’, Business Insider [website] (28 January 2020), http://tinyurl.com/mst4494p. 13 Quoted in James Pearce, ‘UK government approves limited 5G role for Huawei’, IBC [website] (28 January 2020), https://www.ibc.org/trends/uk-government-approves-limited-5g-role-for-huawei/5394.article. 14 Quoted in ‘Reaction to UK allowing Huawei a role in 5G network’, Reuters [website] (28 January 2020), https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1ZR1FU/. 15 ‘Trump “apoplectic” in phone call with Johnson over Huawei decision, report claims’, Independent (7 February 2020), https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/trump-boris-johnson-huawei-phone-call-angry-5g-a9322826.html. 16 Newt Gingrich, ‘British decision to accept Huawei for 5G is a major defeat for the United Statees [sic] […]’ [Twitter post] (28 January 2020), https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1665370246126125060. 17 Quoted in Ashley Cowburn, ‘Donald Trump official issues veiled threat to Boris Johnson over Huawei 5G decision’, Independent (17 February 2020), https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/trump-boris-johnson-huawei-5g-china-brexit-phone-call-a9338791.html. 18 Quoted in Leo Kelion, ‘Huawei set for limited role in UK 5G networks’, BBC News [website] (28 January 2020), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51283059. 19 Quoted in Anna Mikhailova and Mike Wright, ‘Boris Johnson fails to stave off Huawei rebellion as Tory MPs call for tougher measures’, Daily Telegraph (14 July 2020), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/07/14/boris-johnson-fails-stave-huawei-rebellion-tory-mps-call-tougher/. 20 Quoted in ‘Defence sub-committee oral evidence: the security of 5G, HC 201’, House of Commons [website] (16 June 2020), https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/534/html/. 21 Quoted in ‘Huawei to be removed from UK 5G networks by 2027’, Gov.uk [website] (14 July 2020), https://www.gov.uk/government/news/huawei-to-be-removed-from-uk-5g-networks-by-2027. 22 Quoted in Lily Kuo, ‘Chinese media calls for “pain” over UK Huawei ban as Trump claims credit’, Guardian (15 July 2020), https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/15/huawei-china-state-media-calls-for-painful-retaliation-over-uk-ban. 23 Quoted in Harriet Brewis, ‘Mike Pompeo claims WHO chief was “bought” by China leading to “dead Britons”’, Evening Standard (22 July 2020), https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/mike-pompeo-who-bought-china-a4505081.html. 24 ‘Banning TikTok would boost Alphabet, Meta and Snap – here’s how much their stocks could jump’, Forbes [website] (23 March 2023), https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2023/03/23/banning-tiktok-would-boost-alphabet-meta-and-snap-heres-how-much-their-stocks-could-jump/. 25 ‘UK chancellor welcomes Huawei’s investment’, Fibre Systems [website], https://www.fibre-systems.com/news/uk-chancellor-welcomes-huaweis-investment. 26 Patrick Wintour, ‘David Cameron’s appointment to investment fund “part engineered by China”’, Guardian (14 July 2023), https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/14/david-camerons-appointment-to-investment-fund-part-engineered-by-china. 27 ‘Inflation Reduction Act’, Wikipedia [website], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act. 28 Victoria Waldersee, ‘Tesla scales back German battery plans, won over by US incentives’, Reuters [website] (22 February 2023), https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-scales-back-german-battery-plans-won-over-by-us-incentives-2023-02-21/; Richard Milne, Patricia Nilsson and Peter Campbell, ‘VW puts European battery plant on hold as it seeks €10bn from US’, Financial Times [website] (8 March 2023), https://www.ft.com/content/6ac390f5-df35-4e39-a572-2c01a12f666a. 29 Ibid. 30 Quoted in ‘Extradition Act 2003: David Davis excerpts’, Parallel Parliament [website] (21 January 2021), https://www.parallelparliament.co.uk/mp/david-davis/debate/2021-01-21/commons/commons-chamber/extradition-act-2003. 31 David Davis MP, ‘David Davis MP holds adjournment debate on the operation of the Extradition Act 2003’ [video], YouTube [website] (21 January 2021), https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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It is fair to ask whose interests are served by this and whether it allows for adequate funding of the things that matter most to British people – chief among them the NHS. 8 The NHS Cash Cow The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed, my friends. – Boris Johnson, March 20211 The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020–22 was an era of risk and fear, of human losses and business profits. Speaking with MPs one spring evening in 2021, UK prime minister Boris Johnson credited the profit motive with helping to deliver Britain safely through the crisis by prompting the effective development and distribution of vaccines. His comment in defence of ‘greed’, Downing Street later clarified, was just a joke.

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38055-1/presidential-economic-address. 23 ‘Global advisory board’, Pimco [website], https://www.pimco.co.uk/en-gb/global-advisory-board; ‘Alistair Darling elected to Morgan Stanley board of directors’, Morgan Stanley [website] (8 December 2015), https://www.morganstanley.com/press-releases/alistair-darling-elected-to-morgan-stanley-board-of-directors. 24 ‘George Osborne’, 9Yards Capital [website], https://theorg.com/org/9yards-capital/org-chart/george-osborne. 25 Mark Sweney, ‘Former chancellor Sajid Javid takes new role at JP Morgan’, Guardian (18 August 2020), https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/18/former-chancellor-sajid-javid-role-jp-morgan-adviser-us-bank-mp-conservative. 26 ‘Kwasi Kwarteng’, Wikipedia [website], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwasi_Kwarteng. 27 Annabelle Dickson, ‘Boris Johnson’s parting shot: “Stay close to the Americans”’, Politico [website] (20 July 2022), https://www.politico.eu/article/stay-close-americans-boris-johnson-parting-shot/. 28 ‘Chancellor Rishi Sunak held US green card until last year’, BBC News [website] (8 April 2022), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61044847. 29 Peter Walker et al., ‘Akshata Murty may have avoided up to £20m in tax with non-dom status’, Guardian (7 April 2022), https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/07/rishi-sunaks-wife-says-its-not-relevant-to-say-where-she-pays-tax-overseas. 30 Rupert Neate, ‘Rishi Sunak and Akshata Murty join UK rich list with combined £730m fortune’, Guardian (20 May 2022), https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/20/sri-and-gopi-hinduja-named-uk-richest-people-james-dyson. 31 Kiran Stacey, ‘Labour accuses Rishi Sunak of angling for job after Elon Musk interview’, Guardian (3 November 2023), https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/nov/03/labour-accuses-rishi-sunak-of-angling-for-job-after-elon-musk-interview. 32 Tomas Malloy, ‘Tata Somerset gigafactory: UK government’s huge “£500m” battery plant subsidy explained’, SomersetLive [website] (22 July 2023), https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/somerset-news/tata-somerset-gigafactory-uk-governments-8616044. 33 House of Commons International Trade Committee, ‘Inward foreign direct investment: third report of session 2021–22’ [PDF], Parliament.uk [website] (21 September 2021), https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmintrade/124/report.html. 34 House of Commons International Trade Committee, ‘UK investment policy: seventh report of session 2017–19’ [PDF], Parliament.uk [website] (24 July 2019), https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmintrade/998/998.pdf, quoted ibid. 35 David Ricketts, ‘City stalwart Lord Grimstone lands Bain advisor role’, Financial News [website] (28 September 2023), https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/city-stalwart-lord-grimstone-lands-bain-advisor-role-20230928. 36 Joanna Partridge, ‘Behold London’s “landscraper”!

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain
by Robert Verkaik
Published 14 Apr 2018

When David Cameron announced he was resigning from parliament because he considered himself a ‘distraction’, the veil was lifted. The former member for Witney returned to his London club and the grouse moor. His friend and chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, capitalised on his position by taking six jobs, including the editorship of a national newspaper. They left Boris Johnson behind in charge of the country’s foreign affairs at a critical moment in the nation’s history. An Eton education teaches bombast, bluster and buffoonery. All harmless in the debating chambers of parliament and on TV game shows, but in the real world, where real lives are at stake, such playfulness can be catastrophic.

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The army, into which many of them went, was an institution on the fringes of English society and was not the nation in arms, as in France, or the embodiment of state as in Prussia.’13 Shrosbree argues that ‘men from the public schools formed a political elite whose membership was not dependent on knowledge, or ability, or democratic approval, but was buttressed and kept in place by a restrictive educational system, in which any equality of opportunity was stifled by the classical requirements of the public school system… The classics fulfilled the same sociological function in Victorian England as calligraphy in ancient China – a device to regulate and limit entry into a governing élite.’14 This, of course, explains why politicians like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg have such a fondness for Roman and Greek historians. Public schools had become specialists at turning out princes and prime ministers but not much else. According to David Turner, ‘Repeat custom from the families of Britain’s tiny political class, and those desirous of breaking into it, was not enough to prevent a marked slide in the already small number of boys entering the old public schools.’15 Their enterprise had become so niche that some of the best-known had come close to extinction.

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May’s chief adviser, Nick Timothy, responsible for putting the flesh on so much post-Cameron policy, stepped down from his post and any plans for a radical overhaul of the public schools disappeared with him. For the public schools, the rich irony was that they had been effectively saved from a radical education reform programme by their old enemy. PART TWO BAD EDUCATION Predicting his own (and David Cameron’s) future political success in 1988, Boris Johnson candidly described the realpolitik of winning votes to become president of the Oxford Union, long seen as a birthing pool for the nation’s politicians. In The Oxford Myth, a collection of essays edited by his sister Rachel, Johnson says the ‘most natural’ politicians come from ‘the Establishment’.

This Land: The Struggle for the Left
by Owen Jones
Published 23 Sep 2020

With May’s impending departure, the Tories had a clear route back, in the shape of front-runner Boris Johnson, whose Brexit populism would make large inroads into the 26 per cent of the vote gained by the Brexit Party.3 The Tories, in other words, were altering course dramatically in the wake of the EU election drubbing; Labour was not. As James Schneider put it to me: ‘We didn’t have an agreed position to deal with Brexit, and if you can’t deal with Brexit, how do you deal with Johnson?’ On 23 July, in London’s Queen Elizabeth Centre, the Conservative leadership contest reached its inevitable conclusion: Boris Johnson was proclaimed leader and Britain’s new prime minister.

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He told me he found a half-empty office, dotted with workaholic aides staying late into the night, desultory staffers who drifted in and clocked off at 5 p.m. and a miasma of bad morale. All this, when Boris Johnson had just become prime minister. ‘It did not feel like a place fighting for its survival and future,’ the aide tells me. One senior member of staff, he recalls, would get drunk every night at conference and struggled through a terrible hangover each day. Meanwhile, with Parliament deadlocked and Boris Johnson desperate to consolidate his position with a parliamentary majority, the spectre of another general election began to loom. If, as seemed increasingly likely, an election was going to happen later in the autumn, then Labour’s conference that September was realistically the party’s last chance to showcase itself to an increasingly sceptical public.

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I don’t want to, I resent it, and I work every day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure in office. Something, however small it may be – an email, a phone call or a meeting I convene – every day I try to do something to save the Labour Party from his leadership. – Peter Mandelson Introduction – A Nation in Turmoil ‘This is going to be a fantastic year for Britain.’ So proclaimed Boris Johnson’s Twitter account two days into 2020, accompanied by a picture of the British prime minister, thumbs up, suited and booted, conveying an air of workmanlike determination, ready to forge a new buccaneering post-Brexit Britain. Four months later, thousands of Britons were dead, the nation was in lockdown, the economy in collapse, unprecedented social upheaval beckoned, and Johnson was in intensive care.

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain
by Sathnam Sanghera
Published 28 Jan 2021

Elsewhere, the phrase ‘too clever by half’ is in common currency; Michael Gove famously stated when campaigning for Brexit that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’; during the coronavirus crisis a BBC Newsnight correspondent reported a ‘senior Tory’ calling opposition leader Keir Starmer a ‘smartypants’, as if, as Twitter wag @TobyonTV put it, ‘having someone smart in a position of responsibility is less preferable to someone who has been notoriously pantless’; Boris Johnson once dismissed his predecessor David Cameron in a leaked Cabinet memo with the insult ‘girly swot’; and while he himself managed a 2:1 at Oxford, Johnson became famous as a result of a series of media appearances where he wilfully played the role of a bumbling upper-class twit. Matthew Parris recently observed that ‘Regrettably, [Boris] Johnson has an Etonian distrust of intellect among colleagues,’ but might it be more accurate to say that Johnson displays an imperial distrust of cleverness, instilled in him at Eton?

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, Guardian, 24/05/2007, https://www.theguardian.com/travel/blog/2007/may/24/arethebritishreallythewor Ballantyne, Tony, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002 Bancroft, George, History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent, 10 vols., Little, Brown, 1844–75, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000333733 Banerjea, Surendranath, A Nation in Making: Being the Reminiscences of Fifty Years of Public Life, Oxford University Press, 1925 Bank, Andrew, ‘Of “Native Skulls” and Noble Caucasians: Phrenology in Colonial South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 1996, 22:3, 387–403, https://www.jstor.org/stable/i324968 Barczewski, Stephanie, Country Houses and the British Empire, 1700–1930: Studies in Imperialism, Manchester University Press, 2014 Barczewski, Stephanie, Heroic Failure and the British, Yale University Press, 2016 Barrie, Joshua, ‘How taxpayers were still paying for British slave trade nearly 200 years later’, Mirror, 13/02/2018, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/taxpayers-still-paying-british-slave-12019829 Barringer, Tim, and Flynn, Tom, Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, Routledge, 1998 Bartlett, Nicola, ‘Boris Johnson defends appointing aide who attacked “grievance culture” to race review role’, Mirror, 17/06/2020, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-defends-appointing-aide-22206451 Barton, Gregory, Informal Empire and the Rise of One World Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 Barua, Pradeep, ‘Inventing Race: The British and India’s Martial Races’, Historian 1995, 58:1, 107–16, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24449614 Bates, Crispin, Subalterns and Raj: South Asia since 1600, Routledge, 2013 Baxter, Peter, Gandhi, Smuts and Race in the British Empire of Passive and Violent Resistance, Pen & Sword History, 2017 Bayly, C.

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Investor returns to Indian railway companies in the age of high imperialism’, Journal of Institutional Economics 2019, 15:5, 751–75, https://econpapers.repec.org/article/cupjinsec/v_3a15_3ay_3a2019_3ai_3a05_3ap_3a751-774_5f00.htm Booth, Martin, ‘Anti-Slavery Day Marked by New Artwork in Front of Edward Colston Statue’, B24/7, 18/10/2018, https://www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/news/anti-slavery-day-marked-by-new-artwork-in-front-of-edward-colston-statue/ ‘Boris Johnson’s conference speech: Full text’, Spectator, 2/10/2016, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/full-text-boris-johnson-s-conference-speech Bowen, H. V., The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833, Cambridge University Press, 2006 Bowlby, Chris, ‘The Palace of Shame that Makes China Angry’, BBC News, 2/02/2015, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30810596 Boxall, Megan, ‘Lessons from history: “Prohibition makes anything precious”’, Investors’ Chronicle, 14/08/2020 Bradbury, Rosie, ‘Fact check: Jan Smuts portrait and bust were not “toppled” by Cambridge students’, Varsity, 6/08/2018, https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/15971 Bradshaw, Tim, Neville, Sarah, and Warrell, Helen, ‘NHS tracing app in question as experts assess Google–Apple model’, Financial Times, 6/05/2020, https://www.ft.com/content/d44beb06-5e3e-434f-a3a0-f806ce06576c Breckenridge, Carol A., ‘The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World Fairs’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 1989, 31:2, 195–216, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/comparative-studies-in-society-and-history/article/aesthetics-and-politics-of-colonial-collecting-india-at-world-fairs/173A0D542B56EE2124E1CC9E7F798E1B Bremner, Alex, ‘“Some Imperial Institute”: Architecture, Symbolism, and the Ideal of Empire in Late Victorian Britain, 1887–93’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 2003, 62:1, 50–73, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3655083?

Planes, Trains and Toilet Doors: 50 Places That Changed British Politics
by Matt Chorley
Published 8 Feb 2024

’ The Shakespearean political drama also continued, with young Anthony Blair taking the role of Mark Antony in Julius Caesar dressed in a red toga. In 1980 Anderson moved to Eton, to teach not one but two future PMs: David Cameron, who described him as one of the most popular headmasters in the school’s history, and Boris Johnson, who Anderson said was ‘without doubt’ the most interesting pupil he had ever had. Johnson’s future modus operandi was clear in his school days. Anderson bumped into him hours before a big essay was due, and he had not even started writing. When it arrived, it was ‘very stimulating’. When some students took on a staging of Richard III, Johnson – who had the childhood ambition of ‘World King’ – took the title role.

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Recent political history is littered with ditherers who hoped to obtain the crown while hoping someone else would do the dirty work – just ask David Miliband or Penny Mordaunt. Yet Gordon Brown spent a decade doing a lot of wielding while Tony Blair was in Number 10 before taking the crown himself. Boris Johnson’s weapon was rarely sheathed. Even Rishi Sunak, who was initially punished by Tory members for knifing Johnson in the summer of 2022, got there in the end. And if Major had had better teeth, he might have lost the keys to Number 10. Bathrooms 8 Patrick Jenkin’s toothbrush, Highgate Tuesday, 15 January 1974 People power is important.

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Now each Wednesday at noon, as the two rivals stand across the despatch box, the one thing of which they can be confident is that the worst that will be fired at them are some tough questions, some overworked soundbites and some lame jokes. 17 St George’s Chapel, Windsor Saturday, 20 January 1827 George Canning might have become prime minister sooner were he not so blatant about wanting it. Born in 1770, Canning could be seen as the Boris Johnson of his day: a troubled child packed off to Eton, emerging as a charismatic and funny one-time foreign secretary, prone to dramatic resignations and struggling at times to hide his ambition, even when it might have helped in its fulfilment. He courted the press, too, tearing around the country making speeches in the pursuit of popular appeal.

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together
by Philippe Legrain
Published 14 Oct 2020

download=true 15 ‘Far-right Sweden Democrats top opinion poll in historic shift’, The Local, 15 November 2019. https://www.thelocal.se/20191115/sweden-democrats-now-swedens-biggest-party-historic-poll 16 John Sides, ‘Race, Religion, and Immigration in 2016’, Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, June 2017. https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/race-religion-immigration-2016 17 ‘How Viktor Orban hollowed out Hungary’s democracy’, The Economist, 29 August 2019. https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/08/29/how-viktor-orban-hollowed-out-hungarys-democracy 18 May Bulman, ‘Boris Johnson faces backlash and claims of racism after saying migrants should not “treat UK as their own”’, Independent, 9 December 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/boris-johnson-eu-migrants-immigration-britain-general-election-a9238941.html 19 ‘Trump’s Executive Order Limiting Immigration: What You Need to Know’, Boundless, 23 April 2020. https://www.boundless.com/blog/donald-trump-suspends-us-immigration/ 20 Nicola Bartlett, ‘Theresa May boasted as home secretary that she would “deport first and hear appeals later”’, Mirror, 20 April 2018. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/theresa-boasted-home-secretary-would-12398544 21 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1150381394234941448?

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Executive Order 13769’, Federal Register, 27 January 2017. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/02/01/2017-02281/protecting-the-nation-from-foreign-terrorist-entry-into-the-united-states 23 Zachary Wolf, ‘Yes, Obama deported more people than Trump but context is everything’, CNN, 13 July 2019. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/13/politics/obama-trump-deportations-illegal-immigration/index.html 24 Henry Samuel, ‘Nicolas Sarkozy says immigrants must accept “your ancestors are the Gauls”’, Telegraph, 20 September 2016. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/20/nicolas-sarkozy-says-immigrants-should-live-like-the-french/ 25 Matthias Galante, ‘Presidential hopeful Fillon says France needs immigration quotas’, Reuters, 11 January 2017. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-election-fillon-immigration-idUSKBN14V0TN 26 Yonette Joseph, ‘In Their Own Words: Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron’, New York Times, 5 May 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/world/europe/emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen-quotes.html 27 William Booth, Karla Adam and Christine Spolar, ‘Boris Johnson praises immigrant nurses who saved his life, as Britain’s NHS becomes a rallying cry’, Washington Post, 13 April 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/boris-johnson-nurses-nhs/2020/04/13/51498d34-7bfa-11ea-a311-adb1344719a9_story.html 28 Philippe Legrain, Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, Abacus, 2007. 29 Open Political Economy Network’s website is http://www.opennetwork.net and on Twitter it is @open2progress. 30 Robert Guest, ‘Why people should leave the countryside’, The Economist, 14 November 2019. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2019/11/14why-people-should-leave-the-countryside 1 Why is Immigration So Unpopular?

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Jonathan Wadsworth, Swati Dhingra, Gianmarco Ottaviano and John Van Reenen, ‘Brexit and the Impact of Immigration on the UK’, Centre for Economic Performance Brexit Analysis 5, LSE, 2016 http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/brexit05.pdf 66 Home Office, ‘The UK’s points-based immigration system: policy statement’, 19 February 2020. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-uks-points-based-immigration-system-policy-statement/the-uks-points-based-immigration-system-policy-statement 67 Philippe Legrain, ‘Boris Johnson’s New Immigration Rules Will Harm Britain’s Economy’. Foreign Policy, 21 February 2020. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/21/boris-johnsons-new-immigration-rules-will-harm-britains-economy/ 68 Subclass 189 69 Australian Government Department of Home Affairs, ‘Points table for Skilled Independent visa (subclass 189)’. Accessed on 23 January 2020 at https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-listing/skilled-independent-189/points-table 70 Australian Government Department of Home Affairs, ‘SkillSelect.

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight
by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears
Published 24 Apr 2024

Id=65 32 Clive Aslet and Greg Hurst, ‘Eton’s £18m hall’, The Times, 9 June 2015. 33 Peter Hitchens, ‘The Oxbridge war on private schools doesn’t help the poor’, Mail on Sunday, 6 November 2022. 34 Sean Coughlan, ‘Thousand fewer UK students at Oxbridge’, BBC News, 26 February 2019. 35 Alastair McCall, ‘Top universities fall short’, Sunday Times, 17 September 2021; Hannah Richardson, ‘Oxbridge uncovered’, BBC News, 20 October 2017; The Sutton Trust, ‘Eight schools send as many pupils to Oxbridge as three-quarters of all schools’, Sutton Trust, 7 December 2018. 36 Adrian Wooldridge, The Aristocracy of Talent, London, Allen Lane, 2021, p. 312. 37 Simon Kuper, Chums, London, Profile, 2022, p. 3. 38 Peter Mair, Ruling the Void, London, Verso, 2013, p. 2. 39 Owen Jones, The Establishment, London, Penguin, 2014, pp. xvii, 15, 256. 40 Daily Mail, 4 November 2016; Daily Mail, 18 April 2017. 41 See Matthew Goodwin, The New Elite, London, Penguin, 2023; Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism, London, Penguin, 2019, pp. 3−4; and Alistair Heath, ‘The blob is taking back control’, Daily Telegraph, 24 November 2021. 42 See https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/academic-freedom-in-the-uk-2/ 43 Steve Hilton, ‘Steve Hilton: Yes there is a Deep State’, Fox News, 3 February 2018. 44 ‘Woke, Cancel Culture and White Privilege’, Ipsos Mori/King’s College, 12 May 2022. 45 Tim Shipman, ‘How the Tories weaponised woke’, Sunday Times, 13 June 2021; Rob Merrick, ‘Tory insiders’, Independent, 5 August 2020. 46 See: https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/academic-freedom-in-the-uk/; https://www.civitas.org.uk/publications/academic-freedom-in-our-universities/ 47 Anna Fazackerley, ‘Gavin Williamson using “misleading” research’, Guardian, 27 February 2021. 48 Sally-Anne Huxtable, Corinne Fowler, Christo Kefalas and Emma Slocombe (eds), Interim Report on the Connections Between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery, Swindon, National Trust, 2020. 49 The Common Sense Group, ‘Letters: Britain’s heroes’, Daily Telegraph, 9 November 2020. 50 Vanessa Thorpe and James Tapper, ‘National Trust sees off culture war rebellion in an AGM of discontent’, Observer, 30 October 2021; Jack Blackburn, ‘National Trust is building its reputation, poll shows’, The Times, 30 September 2023. 51 Jon Alexander and Ariane Conrad, Citizens, Kingston-upon-Thames, Canbury Press, 2022, pp. 180−6. 52 Robert Jenrick: ‘Keir Starmer’s Labour is complicit in the woke takeover of Britain’s institutions,’ Daily Telegraph, 26 January 2024. 53 James Delingpole, ‘BBC’s A Christmas Carol’, Spectator, 26 December 2019; Kevin Schofield, ‘BBC Director General Tim Davie to speak at private meeting of Tory MPs’, Huffington Post, 20 October 2023. 54 Peter Walker, ‘BBC Political Editor given bodyguard’, Guardian, 24 September 2017. 55 Sky News, ‘Lord Adonis: “BBC created Brexit and Farage” ’, YouTube, 8 April 2018. 56 Jim Waterson, ‘Emily Maitlis says “active Tory party agent” shaping BBC news output’, Guardian, 24 August 2022; Alex Farber, ‘BBC cuts make Have I Got News for You the last satire standing’, The Times, 31 March 2023; Jim Waterson, ‘BBC licence fee to be abolished in 2027 and funding frozen’, Guardian, 16 January 2022. 57 Gavin Cordon, ‘Boris Johnson: three decades of scandals, blunders and rows’, Evening Standard, 12 January 2022. 58 See https://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/blog-posts/loss-of-public-trust-in-government-is-the-biggest-threat-to-democracy-in-england/ 59 James Grant, ‘Letter Goes Viral’, Daily Mail, 13 January 2022; Max Hastings, ‘I Was Boris Johnson’s Boss’, Guardian, 24 June 2019. 60 Purnell, Just Boris, pp. 129–30. 61 Jin Pickard, ‘David Cameron and the Bullingdon Night of the Broken Window’, Financial Times, 4 April 2010. 62 See https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/student-numbers 63 Luke Harding, ‘Oxford University criticised for accepting oligarch’s £75m donation’, Guardian, 3 November 2015; Henry Foy and Max Seddon, ‘From Russian oil to rock’n’roll’, Financial Times, 6 June 2019; Figures for proportion of students from outside the UK and Europe are taken from https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/2020-21-annual-report 64 Andrew Jack, ‘Reuben brothers fund new Oxford college with £80m donation’, Financial Times, 11 June 2020. 65 Catherine Bennett, ‘Just what was it exactly that Oxford University saw in the billionaire boss of Ineos?’

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Multiplying global problems – the so-called ‘polycrisis’ of pandemics, mass migration, war and climate change – have pushed voters this way and that with many of them losing faith in politics to make any difference. It was in this context that England became fertile territory for myth-makers of all kinds and particularly for an angry kind of politics. And, while some of that heat might seem to have dissipated with the departure of polarising figureheads like Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn, there is little reason to suppose it has gone away entirely – and plenty to suggest it will come back soon. Even the remarkable success of the 2024 TV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, can be seen as once again demonstrating the potency of a particular idea of England – the opening episode shows Jo Hamilton running into her Hampshire village sub-post office with a tray of fresh baked scones – which has been betrayed by a remote politics and unfeeling globalised institutions.

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Ahead of the Brexit referendum campaign of 2016, Priti Patel, who would soon become home secretary, declared her support for leaving the EU by saying it would restore ‘values of democracy and self-determination which date back to the Magna Carta’.51 And when Covid struck in 2020, the then prime minister Boris Johnson answered a question about why Germany was doing better at ‘track and trace’ by telling MPs: ‘There is an important difference between our country and many other countries around the world: our country is a freedom-loving country … virtually every advance, from free speech to democracy, has come from this country.

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics
by Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce
Published 5 Jun 2018

Taylor, Empire Building: Unity of the English Speaking Races of the World (Hobart, Australia: The Mercury, 1913). 22  Clarke, Mr Churchill's Profession. 23  Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015). 24  Gilbert, Churchill and America, pp. 52, 102. 25  Ibid., p. 143. 26  Felix Klos, ‘Boris Johnson's abuse of Churchill’, History Today, 1 June 2017; www.historytoday.com/felix-klos/boris-johnsons-abuse-churchill. See also Klos, Churchill on Europe: The Untold Story of Churchill's European Project (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017). 27  Stephen Kinnock, ‘Brexit and Churchill's “three majestic circles” ’, Demos Quarterly, 9 May 2016; https://quarterly.demos.co.uk/article/issue-9/brexit-churchill-majestic-circles/. 28  Churchill, Winston Churchill's 9 October 1948 Speech to the 69th Annual Conservative Party Conference published in the Report of the Proceedings (London: National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, 1948). 29  See, for instance, Hugo Young, This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). 30  Ramsden, Man of the Century, p. 313. 31  Antoine Capet, ‘Review of Felix Klos's Churchill on Europe: The Untold Story of Churchill's European Project’, Cercles, www.cercles.com/review/r80/Klos.html.

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Huntington, ‘The West: unique, not universal’, Foreign Affairs, 75 (1996), pp. 28–46. 11  Rick Fawn, ‘Canada: outside the Anglo-American fold’, in Rick Fawn and Raymond Hinnebusch (eds), The Iraq War: Causes and Consequences (London: Lynne Rienner, 2006). 12  Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Vintage, 2007). 13  Ibid., p. 314. 14  Ibid., p. 95. 15  Perry Anderson, ‘American foreign policy and its thinkers’, New Left Review, no. 83 (2013) p. 122 [special issue]. 16  The UKIP Manifesto 2015, www.ukip.org/manifesto2015. 17  William Hague, ‘Britain and Australia: making the most of global opportunity’, John Howard Lecture, 17 January 2013, www.menziesrc.org/images/Latest_News/PDF/Britain_and_Australia__making_the_most_of_global_opportunity1.pdf. 18  Boris Johnson, ‘The Aussies are just like us, so let's stop kicking them out’, The Telegraph, 25 August 2013, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10265619/The-Aussies-are-just-like-us-so-lets-stop-kicking-them-out.html. 19  Boris Johnson, Speech at Bloomberg in response to the receipt of Dr Gerard Lyons's publication of ‘The Europe report: a win–win situation’, 6 August 2014, www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/gla_migrate_files_destination/bj-europe-speech.pdf. 20  Tony Abbott, Address to Queen's College, Oxford University, 14 December 2012, www.australiantimes.co.uk/tony-abbott-address-to-queens-college-oxford-university/. 21  See, for example, Owen Paterson, ‘The Anglosphere, trade and international security’, speech to the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC, 25 March 2015, www.uk2020.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/The-Anglosphere-Trade-and-International-Security-UK-2020-25.03.2015-FINAL.pdf. 22  Shashi Parulekar and Joel Kotkin, ‘The state of the Anglosphere’, City Journal (winter 2012), www.city-journal.org/html/state-anglosphere-13447.html. 23  Daniel Hannan, Why America Must Not Follow Europe (New York: Encounter Books, 2011). 7 Brexit: The Anglosphere Triumphant?

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This renewal of interest in his thinking reflects his iconic status among Conservatives in the years after his death and also says much about the desire for legitimation on a decision of crucial national importance. The appearance in mainstream Conservative circles, from 2010, of a reinvigorated version of the Anglosphere idea was a particular spur to this recent interest. This dynamic was taken to somewhat absurd lengths by Boris Johnson MP, whose hagiographic account of Churchill was widely viewed as an artless attempt to align himself with the wartime hero's ‘brand’.23 Whether today's sceptics can credibly claim Churchill as progenitor and inspiration is the source of much disagreement among contemporary historians. Some of his best-known pronouncements on this issue were offered in the unique circumstances of the 1940s, yet references to a United States of Europe pepper his speeches and writings from a very early stage in his life and were typically framed as compatible with some kind of alliance of the English-speaking peoples.

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic
by Rachel Clarke
Published 26 Jan 2021

The entire UK population is being treated, en masse, to two eminent doctors’ best bedside manner – and how the country has been aching for it. I can relax, I believe. Someone else has got this. Smarter, wiser, far more experienced doctors than me. It is going to be OK now. At one point in the press conference, my relief briefly falters. Boris Johnson, in replying to a journalist’s question, reassures him that everything will be fine because ‘We have a fantastic health service and it is well capable of handling the most tremendous pressures, as everyone knows.’ I cannot help but wince at this. We are indeed depressingly familiar with the pressures under which the NHS delivers care.

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In times of uncertainty, we rely, do we not, on our leaders’ lead? The Prime Minister has only recently chosen to spend a Saturday afternoon watching the England v. Wales Six Nations international, alongside 82,000 other rugby fans crammed into the stands at Twickenham. It generates approving headlines from some of the press – ‘Boris Johnson Braves Coronavirus Outbreak with Pregnant Fiancée to Support England’ in the Daily Express, for example – but many doctors, myself among them, are distraught at the symbolic defiance. Official medical guidance not to shake each other’s hands and keep a cautious distance means nothing when the PM himself ignores it.

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Even intensive care, in the end, is only a temporary holding measure, a means of supporting failing organs until – we hope – the body eventually recovers from the damage the virus has inflicted. I cannot help but fear that the government is pinning everything on an as-yet non-existent science. That evening, Boris Johnson appears once more in Downing Street, flanked by his Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, and Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance. Gone is the Prime Minister’s former bonhomie. He wears his gravity awkwardly, like an ill-fitting suit. This is the ‘worst public health crisis for a generation’, he tells us.

Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now?: The Facts About Britain's Bitter Divorce From Europe 2016
by Ian Dunt
Published 11 Apr 2017

(www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/07/03/ government-faces-worldwide-hunt-for-trade-negotiators-experts-wa/) Almost as soon as this structure was set up, divisions emerged. Boris Johnson and Liam Fox clashed after the trade secretary tried to poach some of his colleague’s remit, forcing the prime minister to break away from her holiday to scold them both. (http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/08/theresa-may-wont-surprised-liam-fox-boris-johnson-already-battling/) What is the single market? After all, what was the point of ensuring qualifications for services like dentistry or hairdressing were recognised all over the Continent if people couldn’t travel to sell them?

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And that’s why it was so jaw-droppingly unhelpful when Nigel Farage headed to the European Parliament after the Brexit vote with a mean-spirited victory speech in which he mocked MEPs: ‘You’re not laughing now, are you?’ The UKIP leader is at least a known quantity and outside of government. But the three Brexit ministers – Liam Fox, David Davis and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson – all have a history of tub-thumping eurosceptic rhetoric. As soon as he was appointed, Fox was forecasting that the European Union would ‘sacrifice at least one generation of young Europeans on the altar of the single currency’, then ‘rip out the social fabric from so much of Europe’ before ‘imploding’.

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At least initially, few fancied dedicating a core part of their career to delivering something they didn’t support. The third side of the triangle was the Foreign Office, which has long been considered the home of the most capable British civil servants. But its role in Brexit was mercurial. What would it really be doing? The fact that Boris Johnson was put in charge surprised many. Was he being put out to pasture in foreign fields, or did the prime minister envisage him sweet talking important world figures ahead of detailed negotiating work? It was unclear. Cross-departmental coordination would be handled by the Cabinet Office. May made herself chair of three Cabinet Office committees covering every aspect of Brexit (The Economy and Industrial Strategy, International Trade, and Exiting the European Union), the last of which she packed with die-hard Brexiters alongside a few moderates.

Journey to Crossrail
by Stephen Halliday

The first shaft for the construction of the tunnels was sunk at Canary Wharf on 15 May 2009 in the presence of Transport Secretary Lord Adonis and the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and the tunnelling was finished at Farringdon on 23 May 2015 when the TBM Victoria broke into the eastern ticket hall of Farringdon’s new station. The end of tunnelling was officially acknowledged on 4 June 2015 in the presence of Prime Minister David Cameron, with Boris Johnson once again in attendance as Mayor. On 23 February 2016 the Queen attended a ceremony at the newly completed Bond Street station and unveiled a plaque revealing that, from the time it enters service in autumn 2019, the line will be known as the Elizabeth Line, with a London Transport roundel and bar to match.

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The line will be operated by MTR Corporation (Crossrail) Ltd on behalf of Transport for London, which is also responsible, under the Mayor of London, for the London Underground, the London bus services, taxis, river transport, the Docklands Light Railway and the suburban rail routes into the capital known as London Overground. It also administers the congestion charge and the so-called Boris Bikes (actually the brainchild of Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson’s predecessor as Mayor), which are now sponsored by Santander. Services will begin from the central area in December 2018 and the entire system, from Reading and Heathrow to Shenfield and the rebuilt Abbey Wood station, is expected to be in operation by December 2019. The so-called Boris bikes, which were actually conceived by Boris Johnson’s predecessor as Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, as a low-tech, pollution-free answer to London’s congested streets. Now sponsored by Santander.

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The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea also campaigned for a station on the former site of the Kensal Gasworks near Ladbroke Grove, possibly called Portobello station, believing that it would regenerate an ill-favoured area in the north of that wealthy borough which later suffered the tragic Grenfell Tower fire. Boris Johnson was a strong advocate, arguing that it would generate 5,000 new homes and 2,000 jobs, but in 2013 Transport for London reached the view that it was not financially feasible and Sadiq Khan, Boris Johnson’s successor, did not share his enthusiasm. The Crossrail Route as finally determined after much debate. Brunel’s Paddington station, now joined by Crossrail’s. (Elahuguet via Wikimedia Commons CC SA 1.0) Portobello Road is home to a famous street market but not, despite its best efforts, to a Crossrail station.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

Our research spanned Brexit, the governments of Theresa May and Boris Johnson, the pandemic, and the beginning of the post-pandemic recession. The lack of effective opposition was a concern throughout the process. Respondents mistrusted Jeremy Corbyn’s ability to handle the economy and saw Keir Starmer as ineffective. In our follow-up round in early 2022, we asked whether they thought the country had been changed politically by COVID-19. Michael, a 49-year-old, engineer just in the top 10% living in the south-west, who spoke with us a few months before Boris Johnson’s resignation, responds: ‘[W]hile the current incumbent is untrustworthy, corrupt […] you could not accuse them of doing nothing.

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However, this diagnosis does not answer why the most affluent constituencies in England voted in huge numbers for the Conservatives after Boris Johnson purged the party from moderates and populated it with Brexiteers, or why Trump voters in the US were more affluent than the national average.48 The left-of-centre ideas on culture and right-of-centre ones on the economy that high-income earners seem to favour appear to be under attack. Yet, when they had to choose, a majority seems to have chosen the economy. Why is that? We would argue that 2019 was a watershed. In front of the country and high-income earners were Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson. Corbyn was portrayed as a radical left-winger and irresponsible on the economy, though his programme would have been considered a normal social democrat one in much of Europe – indeed, his spending proposals were almost identical to Germany’s in 2019.49 Johnson is an openly mendacious politician who opportunistically positioned himself on the right of the right wing of his party and, while pursuing Brexit, seemed to propose little to no change on the economic front.

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Website. www.ox.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/full-versionfacts-and-figures University of Southampton (2016) The rise of anti-politics in Britain. Southampton: University of Southampton. Van Lerven, F. and Jackson, A. (2018) A government is not a household. Positive Money. https://positivemoney. org/2018/10/a-government-is-not-a-household Walker, A. (2019) Two-thirds of Boris Johnson’s cabinet went to private schools. The Guardian. 25 July. www.theguardian.com/ education/2019/jul/25/two-thirds-of-boris-johnsons-cabinetwent-to-private-schools Walker, A. (2022) Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget was a reckless gamble. Letters. The Guardian. 25 September. www.theguardian. com/politics/2022/sep/25/kwasi-kwarteng-mini-budget-wasa-reckless-gamble Ward, D. and Chijoko, L. (2018) Spending on and availability of health care resources: How does the UK compare to other countries?

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 1 Sep 2020

The help we are able to get is from the East.”5 When the Floyd protests erupted, with four in five Americans thinking their country was “spiraling out of control,” the Chinese sarcastically compared protesters in Minneapolis and other cities to the pro-democracy ones in Hong Kong.6 On the last day of June, with American officials confessing that the virus was “going in the wrong direction,” Boris Johnson having to re-lockdown the city of Leicester, and Emmanuel Macron preparing to sack his entire government in Paris, China felt confident enough to impose a harsh new security law on Hong Kong. By then, a virus that in January had looked as if it might be “China’s Chernobyl” looked more like the West’s Waterloo.

…

He has made clear, in his repeated conversations with dictators, that human rights are not a priority. At home, populists have generally ducked the challenge of reviving the Western state. There are certainly reformers in their midst. The White House contains a small group of deregulators who have cut the number of pages in the Federal Register from its record under Obama. Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, sees the break with Europe as merely the first stage of bureaucracy-slaying that will eventually create a “meritocratic technopolis.” But these would-be reformers look outnumbered. For every Brexiteer who wants to build a Singapore-on-Thames, there are many more who want their newly independent state to protect them against globalization—and Johnson seems intent on building a bigger state for them.

…

The parties of the left in particular groomed a succession of working-class leaders, such as Ernest Bevin, who became Britain’s greatest postwar foreign secretary despite leaving school at eleven to work as a draper’s boy. Now long-established parties such as France’s Socialists and Greece’s Pasok are more or less disappearing. Boris Johnson leads a party of 150,000 Tories; his hero Winston Churchill could call on three million. More people vote in celebrity talent shows than in many elections. This helps explain populism, but it also explains why, in normal times, politics is the preserve of a narrow class who regard politics more as a profession than a calling: politicians who have had their eye on a seat since university, if not before, and a host of other careerists (pollsters, spin doctors, election agents, speech writers, psephologists, and the rest).

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 3 Mar 2020

About the Author Copyright Introduction The Tory triumph in the 2019 general election, the fourth election within ten years, bookends their assumption of power in 2010, but for many it means that the pain and dismay of the lost decade from 2010 to 2020 will extend long into the 2020s. During the campaign, Boris Johnson grandly pronounced the end of austerity but said nothing about repairing the damage done; he was highly selective about which cuts might be partially restored and who would receive his largesse. The UK economy is in trouble, financial sustainability under threat. It may be only a matter of time before his government resorts, again, to slash and burn.

…

Osborne himself was one of those who did very nicely, thank you, after being given a succession of handsomely rewarded jobs. As editor of the London Evening Standard, he first pursued a personal vendetta against his former boss, Theresa May, before returning the paper to Tory partisanship and savaging the Labour London mayor at every opportunity. His new boss was a pal of Boris Johnson’s who had sold part of the equity to the Saudis; the Standard slathered the new prime minister in treacle. The High Street Falls Low Median pay stood pat. An average worker’s total weekly pay fell in real terms from £525 in 2008 to £497 in 2019. As incomes idled and the use of contactless payments surged, people dealt with less physical cash.

…

However much of a minority their electors were, the Tories exuded the bogus confidence that they owned, represented, were the backbone of England, if not Britain – a sociological absurdity that could never have been sustained if the media had been differently configured and the biases of the press matched voting preferences rather than owners’ prejudices. It’s important to see the continuities between Cameron and Boris Johnson, their easy assumption about this natural order and its fixed electoral props across England, north as well as south, where sufficient numbers would always back them, come what may (except May), in Witham, Tarporley, Aylesbury, Maidstone, Howden, Horncastle and scores of other places outside the cities.

How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again)
by Nick Clegg
Published 11 Oct 2017

When I close my eyes and drag my mind back to those grim spring months of 2016, a red bus rolls into view and its infamous slogan blinks back at me once more: ‘We send the EU £350m every week. Let’s fund the NHS instead.’ I’m sure you remember it all too well. Not surprisingly, the promise of such riches for our National Health Service caught the public imagination. Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and the other leading Leave campaigners regularly appeared in front of banners that repeated the claim. Even after the UK Statistics Authority pointed out that the figure ‘was misleading and undermines trust in official statistics’,21 the pledge remained plastered to the bus’s side.

…

In part, the general-election result of June 2017 was a clear message from the electorate that it had grown tired of the long years of austerity. Despite numerous unanswered questions about Labour’s uncosted shopping list of promises, it is clear that many voters preferred Corbyn’s more optimistic pitch to the Conservative programme of further cost-cutting. Sensing the shift in mood, leading Brexiteers like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were quick to shed crocodile tears about the continuing restraints on public-sector wages. But the truth is that it is their determination to pull us out of the EU, and the consequences on inflation and prices, that have led to the new pressure on take-home pay. Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, has admitted that nobody voted to leave the EU to make themselves poorer.

…

A vote on 23rd June 2016, the Brexiteers insisted, was a chance to fight back against meddlesome Brussels bureaucrats and their pesky rules, regulations and red tape. Do you want your bananas to be bendy? Do you want to be free of EU rules determining the noise level of your Hoover? Do you want to rid Britain of intrusive EU regulations setting the maximum power for hairdryers? Then vote Leave. These were all examples given by Boris Johnson, when he attacked the EU because it wanted to ‘dictate to the British people’ how we live our lives. He famously urged voters to make 23rd June Britain’s ‘independence day’. The leading Brexiteers painted a bright future in which we could draw on our triumphant past – back to a glorious era when the Royal Yacht ruled the waves, Britain was a global, swashbuckling power and bluebirds sang merrily over the white cliffs of Dover.

The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again
by Richard Horton
Published 31 May 2020

The UK was slower than some of its European neighbours but eventually switched off its economy on 24 March. The British public already knew what was coming. They had begun to change their behaviour well before lockdown became official government policy. UK politicians were behind the public curve. On 27 March, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that he had contracted the infection. The response in the US was predictably unpredictable. The first imported case was reported from Washington state on 21 January. President Trump initially called SARS-CoV-2 ‘the new hoax’. By 30 January, he was describing the epidemic as ‘pretty much under control’.

…

From the last week in January, it took the UK government seven weeks to recognise the seriousness of COVID-19. It wasted the whole of February and most of March, when ministers should have been preparing the country for the arrival of a deadly new virus. Why? Inexplicably, medical and scientific advisers to the UK government ignored the warnings coming from China. Boris Johnson won a general election on 13 December 2019 on the promise that he would ‘get Brexit done’. Britain was leaving the European Union on 31 January, a day, the new prime minister said, that symbolised a moment for ‘national renewal and change’. On 26 February, less than a month after WHO had declared a PHEIC, he announced an integrated review of foreign policy, defence, security and international development.

…

King’s argument for setting up a rival body to SAGE was that ensuring public trust in the scientific advice given to government demanded that those giving advice should not be dependent on the government.18 Too many members of the official SAGE were government employees. Astonishingly, the official SAGE allowed the participation of the architect of Brexit, Dominic Cummings, who had been appointed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson as his chief political advisor. The official SAGE was impossibly compromised. This first meeting of an Independent SAGE set a new standard for science policymaking. The openness of the process, vigour of discussion, and identification of issues barely discussed by politicians injected much needed candour into public and political discussions about COVID-19.

We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent
by Nesrine Malik
Published 4 Sep 2019

v=XGNEZr11LFE [accessed on 25 July 2019] 103 ‘Right-wing media blogs as well as mainstream publications’: Claire Fox, ‘The dangers of illiberal liberalism’ (Economist, 17 August 2018), https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/08/17/the-dangers-of-illiberal-liberalism [accessed on 25 July 2019] 104 ‘… led to a spike in racist incidents’: Tell MAMA, ‘“Letterbox” insults against Muslim women spike in wake of Boris Johnson comments’ (Tell MAMA, 23 August 2018), https://tellmamauk.org/press/letterbox-insults-against-muslim-women-spike-in-wake-of-boris-johnson-comments/ [accessed on 25 July 2019] 104 ‘Deplorable to see’: Isabel Oakeshott (Twitter, 3:29 p.m., 10 August 10 2018), https://twitter.com/IsabelOakeshott/status/1027924888848396288?s=20 [accessed on 25 July 2019] 105 ‘the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life’: Liz Fekete, Director, Institute of Race Relations (Brief Letters, Guardian, 25 March 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/25/freedom-of-speech-or-freedom-to-life [accessed on 25 July 2019] 106 ‘has never accepted an absolutist interpretation of freedom of speech’: Christopher Wolfe, ‘The Limits of Free Speech (Book Review)’ (Review of Politics, Notre Dame, Ind.

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zd=1&zi=6ioipdib [accessed on 25 July 2019] 171 ‘Americans’ sketchy understanding’: Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (Atlantic Books, 2017), 13 172 ‘in order to save the 40 million’: Pankaj Mishra, ‘How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war’ (Guardian, 10 November 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war [accessed on 25 July 2019] 174 ‘They were not there on holiday’: Simon Akam, ‘Left Behind’ (The New Republic, 21 May 2011), https://newrepublic.com/article/88797/british-empire-queen-elizabeth-india-ireland-africa-imperial [accessed on 25 July 2019] 176 ‘But the research also found’: Sally Weale, ‘Michael Gove’s claims about history teaching are false, says research’ (Guardian, 13 September 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/13/michael-goves-claims-about-history-teaching-are-false-says-research [accessed on 25 July 2019] 177 ‘an inherent bias in the curriculum that runs the other way’: The Secret Teacher, ‘Secret Teacher: the emphasis on British history is depriving students of balance’ (Guardian, 26 May 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2018/may/26/secret-teacher-history-bias-school-fear-student-future [accessed on 25 July 2019] 179 ‘Anyone who suggests that the United Kingdom cannot be trusted’: Department for Exiting the European Union and The Rt Hon David Davis MP, ‘David Davis’ speech on the future security partnership’ (GOV.UK, 6 June 2018), https://www.gov.uk/government/news/david-davis-speech-on-the-future-security-partnership [accessed on 25 July 2019] 179 ‘The first Eurosceptic’: Jonathan Isaby, ‘Jacob Rees-Mogg identifies the three historical heroes from his constituency who will be his political inspiration’ (Conservative Home, 8 June 2010), https://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2010/06/jacob-reesmogg-identifies-the-three-historical-heroes-from-his-constituency-who-will-be-his-politica.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 179 ‘we survived our break from Europe’: Giles Fraser, ‘The English Reformation was the first Brexit – we survived our break from Europe then, and we’ll do so again’ (Telegraph, 18 August 2018), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/14/english-reformation-first-brexit-survived-break-europe-do/ 179 ‘showed the world what a free people could achieve’: Michael Gove, ‘EU referendum: Michael Gove explains why Britain should leave the EU’ (Telegraph, 20 February 2016), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/12166345/European-referendum-Michael-Gove-explains-why-Britain-should-leave-the-EU.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 180 ‘it will be like Dunkirk again’: Andrew MacAskill, Anjuli Davies, ‘“Insecurity is fantastic,” says billionaire funder of Brexit campaign’ (Reuters, 11 May 2016), https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-donations-hargreaves/insecurity-is-fantastic-says-billionaire-funder-of-brexit-campaign-idUKKCN0Y22ID [accessed on 25 July 2019] 180 ‘Thirty-five years ago this week’: Owen Bennett, ‘“We Will Go To War With Spain Over Gibraltar”’ Warns Ex-Tory Leader Lord Howard (Huffington Post, 2 April 2017), https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/gibraltar-war-falklands-lord-howard_uk_58e0ed0ee4b0c777f788130f [accessed on 25 July 2019] 180 ‘unbelievable that within a week’: George Parker, Jim Brunsden, Ian Mount, ‘Gibraltar tensions bubble over into British war talk’ (Financial Times, 2 April 2017), https://www.ft.com/content/391f0114-17a1-11e7-a53d-df09f373be87 [accessed on 25 July 2019] 180 ‘a colossal military disaster’: ‘Great Speeches of the 19th Century: Winston Churchill, “We shall fight on the beaches” (Guardian, 20 April 2007), https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/apr/20/greatspeeches1 [accessed on 25 July 2019] 180 ‘miracle of deliverance’: ibid. 182 ‘you must take the decision which is fraught with risk’: Harry Yorke, ‘Boris Johnson likens Brexit dilemma to Churchill’s defiance of Hitler’ (Telegraph, 6 December 2018), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/12/06/boris-johnson-likens-brexit-dilemma-churchills-defiance-hitler/ [accessed on 25 July 2019] 183 ‘make me an offer’: Lucy Pasha-Robinson, ‘Angela Merkel “ridicules Theresa May’s Brexit demands during secret press briefing”’ (Independent, 29 January 2018), https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/angela-merkel-theresa-may-brexit-demands-press-briefing-davos-eu-talks-a8183436.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 183 ‘France and England will never be powers comparable to the United States’: ‘An affair to remember’ (Economist, 27 July 2006), https://www.economist.com/node/7218678 [accessed on 25 July 2019] 184 ‘betrayed our relationship’: Boris Johnson, ‘The Aussies are just like us, so let’s stop kicking them out’ (Telegraph, 25 August 2013), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10265619/The-Aussies-are-just-like-us-so-lets-stop-kicking-them-out.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 185 ‘While the empire’: David Olusoga, ‘Empire 2.0 is dangerous nostalgia for something that never existed’ (Guardian, 19 March 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/19/empire-20-is-dangerous-nostalgia-for-something-that-never-existed [accessed on 25 July 2019] 185 ‘The twentieth century saw the UK eclipsed’: Simon Akam, ‘Left Behind’ (The New Republic, 21 May 2011), https://newrepublic.com/article/88797/british-empire-queen-elizabeth-india-ireland-africa-imperial [accessed on 25 July 2019] 187 ‘an exercise in British wish-fulfilment’: Nikita Lalwani, ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: an exercise in British wish-fulfilment’ (Guardian, 27 February 2012), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/27/best-exotic-marigold-hotel-compliance [accessed on 25 July 2019] 188 ‘a wave of colonial nostalgia’: Stuart Jeffries, ‘The best exotic nostalgia boom: why colonial style is back’ (Guardian, 19 March 2015), https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/mar/19/the-best-exotic-nostalgia-boom-why-colonial-style-is-back [accessed on 25 July 2019] 189 ‘reduce the country to the status of “colony”’: Guy Faulconbridge, ‘Boris Johnson says Brexit deal will make Britain an EU colony’ (Reuters, 13 November 2018), https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-johnson/boris-johnson-says-brexit-deal-will-make-britain-an-eu-colony-idUSKCN1NI16D [accessed on 25 July 2019] 189 ‘not a vassal state but a slave state’: Nick Clegg, ‘On Brexit, Jacob Rees-Mogg is right: Britain risks vassal status’ (Financial Times, 27 January 2018), https://www.ft.com/content/be44ff5a-028e-11e8-9e12-af73e8db3c71 [accessed on 25 July 2019] 191 ‘the rags to riches dream of a millionaire’s blank check’: Thomas A.

…

zd=1&zi=6ioipdib [accessed on 25 July 2019] 171 ‘Americans’ sketchy understanding’: Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (Atlantic Books, 2017), 13 172 ‘in order to save the 40 million’: Pankaj Mishra, ‘How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war’ (Guardian, 10 November 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war [accessed on 25 July 2019] 174 ‘They were not there on holiday’: Simon Akam, ‘Left Behind’ (The New Republic, 21 May 2011), https://newrepublic.com/article/88797/british-empire-queen-elizabeth-india-ireland-africa-imperial [accessed on 25 July 2019] 176 ‘But the research also found’: Sally Weale, ‘Michael Gove’s claims about history teaching are false, says research’ (Guardian, 13 September 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/13/michael-goves-claims-about-history-teaching-are-false-says-research [accessed on 25 July 2019] 177 ‘an inherent bias in the curriculum that runs the other way’: The Secret Teacher, ‘Secret Teacher: the emphasis on British history is depriving students of balance’ (Guardian, 26 May 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2018/may/26/secret-teacher-history-bias-school-fear-student-future [accessed on 25 July 2019] 179 ‘Anyone who suggests that the United Kingdom cannot be trusted’: Department for Exiting the European Union and The Rt Hon David Davis MP, ‘David Davis’ speech on the future security partnership’ (GOV.UK, 6 June 2018), https://www.gov.uk/government/news/david-davis-speech-on-the-future-security-partnership [accessed on 25 July 2019] 179 ‘The first Eurosceptic’: Jonathan Isaby, ‘Jacob Rees-Mogg identifies the three historical heroes from his constituency who will be his political inspiration’ (Conservative Home, 8 June 2010), https://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2010/06/jacob-reesmogg-identifies-the-three-historical-heroes-from-his-constituency-who-will-be-his-politica.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 179 ‘we survived our break from Europe’: Giles Fraser, ‘The English Reformation was the first Brexit – we survived our break from Europe then, and we’ll do so again’ (Telegraph, 18 August 2018), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/14/english-reformation-first-brexit-survived-break-europe-do/ 179 ‘showed the world what a free people could achieve’: Michael Gove, ‘EU referendum: Michael Gove explains why Britain should leave the EU’ (Telegraph, 20 February 2016), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/12166345/European-referendum-Michael-Gove-explains-why-Britain-should-leave-the-EU.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 180 ‘it will be like Dunkirk again’: Andrew MacAskill, Anjuli Davies, ‘“Insecurity is fantastic,” says billionaire funder of Brexit campaign’ (Reuters, 11 May 2016), https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-donations-hargreaves/insecurity-is-fantastic-says-billionaire-funder-of-brexit-campaign-idUKKCN0Y22ID [accessed on 25 July 2019] 180 ‘Thirty-five years ago this week’: Owen Bennett, ‘“We Will Go To War With Spain Over Gibraltar”’ Warns Ex-Tory Leader Lord Howard (Huffington Post, 2 April 2017), https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/gibraltar-war-falklands-lord-howard_uk_58e0ed0ee4b0c777f788130f [accessed on 25 July 2019] 180 ‘unbelievable that within a week’: George Parker, Jim Brunsden, Ian Mount, ‘Gibraltar tensions bubble over into British war talk’ (Financial Times, 2 April 2017), https://www.ft.com/content/391f0114-17a1-11e7-a53d-df09f373be87 [accessed on 25 July 2019] 180 ‘a colossal military disaster’: ‘Great Speeches of the 19th Century: Winston Churchill, “We shall fight on the beaches” (Guardian, 20 April 2007), https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/apr/20/greatspeeches1 [accessed on 25 July 2019] 180 ‘miracle of deliverance’: ibid. 182 ‘you must take the decision which is fraught with risk’: Harry Yorke, ‘Boris Johnson likens Brexit dilemma to Churchill’s defiance of Hitler’ (Telegraph, 6 December 2018), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/12/06/boris-johnson-likens-brexit-dilemma-churchills-defiance-hitler/ [accessed on 25 July 2019] 183 ‘make me an offer’: Lucy Pasha-Robinson, ‘Angela Merkel “ridicules Theresa May’s Brexit demands during secret press briefing”’ (Independent, 29 January 2018), https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/angela-merkel-theresa-may-brexit-demands-press-briefing-davos-eu-talks-a8183436.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 183 ‘France and England will never be powers comparable to the United States’: ‘An affair to remember’ (Economist, 27 July 2006), https://www.economist.com/node/7218678 [accessed on 25 July 2019] 184 ‘betrayed our relationship’: Boris Johnson, ‘The Aussies are just like us, so let’s stop kicking them out’ (Telegraph, 25 August 2013), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10265619/The-Aussies-are-just-like-us-so-lets-stop-kicking-them-out.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 185 ‘While the empire’: David Olusoga, ‘Empire 2.0 is dangerous nostalgia for something that never existed’ (Guardian, 19 March 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/19/empire-20-is-dangerous-nostalgia-for-something-that-never-existed [accessed on 25 July 2019] 185 ‘The twentieth century saw the UK eclipsed’: Simon Akam, ‘Left Behind’ (The New Republic, 21 May 2011), https://newrepublic.com/article/88797/british-empire-queen-elizabeth-india-ireland-africa-imperial [accessed on 25 July 2019] 187 ‘an exercise in British wish-fulfilment’: Nikita Lalwani, ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: an exercise in British wish-fulfilment’ (Guardian, 27 February 2012), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/27/best-exotic-marigold-hotel-compliance [accessed on 25 July 2019] 188 ‘a wave of colonial nostalgia’: Stuart Jeffries, ‘The best exotic nostalgia boom: why colonial style is back’ (Guardian, 19 March 2015), https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/mar/19/the-best-exotic-nostalgia-boom-why-colonial-style-is-back [accessed on 25 July 2019] 189 ‘reduce the country to the status of “colony”’: Guy Faulconbridge, ‘Boris Johnson says Brexit deal will make Britain an EU colony’ (Reuters, 13 November 2018), https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-johnson/boris-johnson-says-brexit-deal-will-make-britain-an-eu-colony-idUSKCN1NI16D [accessed on 25 July 2019] 189 ‘not a vassal state but a slave state’: Nick Clegg, ‘On Brexit, Jacob Rees-Mogg is right: Britain risks vassal status’ (Financial Times, 27 January 2018), https://www.ft.com/content/be44ff5a-028e-11e8-9e12-af73e8db3c71 [accessed on 25 July 2019] 191 ‘the rags to riches dream of a millionaire’s blank check’: Thomas A.

Duty of Care: One NHS Doctor's Story of the Covid-19 Crisis
by Dr Dominic Pimenta
Published 2 Sep 2020

The pieces of the herd immunity narrative are strewn through the last six months and paint an ugly picture. On 3 February, Boris Johnson gave a speech at Greenwich, claiming one country should “make the case for the right of freedom of exchange” and prevent unnecessary measures that were “beyond medically rational”. He described “some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion . . . I can tell you in all humility that the UK is ready for that role.”2 Later, in conversations with the Italian Prime Minister, Boris Johnson was on record as stating “herd immunity” as his goal.3 The position of his chief special advisor, Dominic Cummings, was reportedly summarized at a private function in identical terms: “herd immunity, protect the economy, and if some old-age pensioners die, so be it” – although the fact that he said this was subsequently denied.

…

I could understand the confusion and division, but what was the government doing? The guidelines hadn’t changed, community transmission was established, and yet there were no measures to stop the spread, even ones that required no energy or input from the public. The next morning, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was on “This Morning”, discussing coronavirus. The clip was edited, but one of the strategies he mentioned was to “take it on the chin” and let the virus pass through the population all in one go. In more formal terms, Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, had discussed the rationale behind making early interventions in a similar way, introducing the concept of producing “herd immunity”.

…

Some reports indicate that doctors are forced to choose who to save, with those over 65 not even being assessed by intensive care departments. Every diagnosis is the same: bilateral pneumonia, COVID-19. Given these accounts, I can’t understand the inaction on our end. I watched Professor Chris Whitty’s testimony at the Health and Social Care Select Committee on 6th March again, to which Boris Johnson later responded that it was important not to “fire your shots too early” in escalating measures to tackle the illness. I get the logic of “going too early” when it comes to lockdown measures and interventions in terms of the potential business and economic impact, but it feels as though we’re going to have to decide what’s more important: livelihoods or lives.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency
by Vicky Spratt
Published 18 May 2022

Available at england.shelter.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/1039530/FINAL_SAFE_AND_DECENT_HOMES_REPORT-_USE_FOR_LAUNCH.pdf ‘burning injustices’ … ‘the government I lead …’: Theresa May, ‘Statement from the new Prime Minister Theresa May’, transcript of speech delivered on 13 July 2016. Available at www.gov.uk/government/speeches/statement-from-the-new-prime-minister-theresa-may Boris Johnson’s increase in 2011: Jenny Jones, ‘Who can afford Boris Johnson’s new affordable housing?’, Guardian, 26 July 2011, www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2011/jul/26/boris-johnson-jenny-jones-housing ‘result in unnecessary … rents for tenants’: ‘Housing and Planning Bill’, House of Commons Debate, vol. 604, col. 706 (12 January 2016). Available at hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2016-01-12/debates/16011271000002/HousingAndPlanningBill on the market for £3.5 million: Mike Laycock, ‘Historic home on market for £3.5 million’, York Press, 16 July 2008, www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/3209854.historic-home-on-market-for-35-million/ it was adopted as government policy: Oxfordshire Liberal Democrats, ‘Lib Dem campaigners win campaign to abolish rental fees’, 27 November 2016, www.oxonlibdems.uk/2016_renterreforms; see also commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8756/ Eighty-six per cent of Britons would buy their own home: Glen Bramley, ‘Housing: Homes, Planning and Changing Policies’, in British Social Attitudes 28, NatCen Social Research (2012), p. 123, www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/38952/bsa28_8housing.pdf 63 per cent of households in Britain: Race Disparity Unit, ‘Home ownership’, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (2020).

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Now, house prices are bloated, the private rented sector is engorged and under-regulated, and too many people – including children living out their formative years – are stuck in limbo or stranded in temporary accommodation because we don’t have enough social housing. In September 2021, Boris Johnson moved Michael Gove over to the housing brief. Just as Theresa May had renamed the government department responsible for housing – changing its name from the Department for Communities and Local Government to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Johnson renamed it again. The Ministry of Housing became the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC). ‘Levelling up’ was a nebulous concept which Boris Johnson had put front and centre of his administration, and one of the starkest examples of inequality in Britain is the urgent crisis in housing.

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While some British people saw their dream – independence from Eurocracy – realised, others felt that just over half of the country had voted for something they did not want but would have to live with. The Labour Party, beleaguered and led by Jeremy Corbyn (and subsequently Keir Starmer), struggled. The Conservatives, led by David Cameron, then Theresa May, then Boris Johnson, fought among themselves and yet continued not only to win elections, but win big. In the early hours of 13 December 2019, Johnson declared victory in an election which delivered the Conservatives their biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 win and the largest overall majority since Tony Blair’s landslide in 2001.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/08/the-guardian-view-on-climate-change-a-global-emergency> The editors. ‘From the Editors; The Times and Iraq’. The New York Times, 26 May 2004. <https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html> Elgot, Jessica. ‘Secret Boris Johnson column favoured UK remaining in EU’. The Guardian, 16 October 2016. <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/16/secret-boris-johnson-column-favoured-uk-remaining-in-eu> Ellis, Justin. ‘Q&A: The Guardian’s Gabriel Dance on new tools for story and cultivating interactive journalism’. NiemanLab, 25 November 2013. <https://www.niemanlab.org/2013/11/qa-the-guardians-gabriel-dance-on-new-tools-for-story-and-cultivating-interactive-journalism/> Embury-Dennis, Tom.

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There was lamentable confusion about how to cover the nightly parade of presidential lies, sulks, boasts and vainglorious irrelevance that flagged itself as public information. There was uncertainty about how to communicate risk. Some news outlets – initially, at least – seemed unable to imagine the scale of what was happening: it was easier to report on what videos Boris Johnson was watching in his hospital bed than on the hundreds dying every day all around. The newsrooms that had jettisoned their health or science correspondents struggled. The idiots who suggested that 5G phone masts could be spreading the disease encouraged arson and trashed their own brand. So, it was a mixed picture.

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That front page might bewilder anyone under the age of, say, thirty-five, whose only experience of the Daily Mail is of a paper that grew ever more fervent in its clamour to convince its readers that Europe represented everything that threatened the country’s best and brightest future. But likewise, we could skip forward nearly twenty years and meet a young and ambitious Daily Telegraph reporter in Brussels. The young Boris Johnson found the business of routine reporting on the European Union a bit, well, routine. He made a name for himself with a style of writing that was provocative, highly subjective and . . . perhaps we could settle for the word ‘inventive’. Take prawn cocktail crisps. Johnson announced in January 1993 that Europe was about to ban them.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

Mayors are not cities, however, and if our title is to be something more than a provocation, who and what mayors are has a good deal to do with the role of the city as a foundation for global governance. Can mayors really rule the world? Who on earth are they? Profile 3. The Efficient Jester BORIS JOHNSON OF LONDON A serious journalist and a slightly less serious mayor (defeating incumbent socialist Ken Livingstone for the first time in 2008 and then again in 2011), BORIS JOHNSON makes a joke of everything. When athletes arriving for the 2012 Summer Olympics were lost on wayward buses in London—still a city of almost eight million—for too many hours, he quipped, “They saw more of our fantastic city than they would otherwise have done.”1 And he told Carl Swanson, a New York Magazine reporter, that in order to build the new airport London would need to become Europe’s gateway, he himself would have to “assume supreme power in England.”

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For more on the “Southern Mystique,” see Howard Zinn, The Southern Mystique, Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002. 24. C. V. Wedgwood, ed., The Trial of Charles I, London: Folio Press: J. M. Dent, 1974, pp. 88–91. Profile 3. Boris Johnson of London 1. John F. Burns, “Athletes Arrive in London, and Run into a Dead End,” New York Times, July 14, 2012. 2. “105 Minutes with Boris Johnson,” interview with Carl Swanson, New York Magazine, June 17, 2012. 3. Ibid. Chapter 4. Mayors Rule! Epigraph: Lyndon Johnson quote from “Troubled Cities—and Their Mayors,” Newsweek, March 13, 1967. 1. Paul Maslin, “Cities: The Last Remaining Redoubt of Public Confidence,” Remarks by Paul Maslin, 2011, U.S.

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Mayor of the World MICHAEL BLOOMBERG OF NEW YORK CHAPTER 2. THE LAND OF LOST CONTENT Virtue and Vice in the Life of the City Profile 2. The Incorruptible as Artist LEOLUCA ORLANDO OF PALERMO CHAPTER 3. THE CITY AND DEMOCRACY From Independent Polis to Interdependent Cosmopolis Profile 3. The Efficient Jester BORIS JOHNSON OF LONDON CHAPTER 4. MAYORS RULE! Is This What Democracy Looks Like? Profile 4. Governing in Partnership WOLFGANG SCHUSTER OF STUTTGART CHAPTER 5. INTERDEPENDENT CITIES Local Nodes and Global Synapses Profile 5. The Founder as President and the President as Mayor LEE KUAN YEW AND TONY TAN OF THE CITY-STATE OF SINGAPORE CHAPTER 6.

The Passenger
by The Passenger
Published 27 Dec 2021

Most (but by no means all) unionists sided with Boris Johnson in advocating withdrawal from the EU. Irish nationalists, centre-ground politicians and some unionists wanted to remain (with two former British prime ministers who had played key roles in the peace process, John Major and Tony Blair, both warning of the potential for disruption to trade and wider relations in Ireland if the UK did not stay in the EU). In the end, 56 per cent of voters in Northern Ireland backed Remain, but the UK as a whole voted narrowly to leave. Since then prime ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson have wrestled with the consequences of the referendum.

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At one EU summit the Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) at the time, Leo Varadkar, brandished a newspaper cutting about a 1970s bomb attack on a border customs post as a warning to his fellow European leaders about what might happen if the Brexit negotiations failed. Everyone took Northern Ireland’s sea border with Great Britain to the north and east of Belfast pretty much for granted. But then Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, cut a deal which involved keeping Northern Ireland in the EU Single Market. The arrangement meant there would be no customs checks on the land frontier. It avoided the construction of new border posts, which might in time become targets for violent extremists. It promised advantages for local manufacturers by granting Northern Ireland access to both the EU and UK markets.

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The Protestant settlers have long enjoyed a love-hate relationship with governments in London, pledging loyalty to them while at the same time suspicious that English politicians might betray them. ‘The Protestant settlers have long enjoyed a love-hate relationship with governments in London, pledging loyalty to them while at the same time suspicious that English politicians might betray them.’ Before he became prime minister, Boris Johnson made a speech to a gathering of Northern Ireland’s biggest unionist party, the Democratic Unionist Party, in which he guaranteed he would never countenance putting a border down the Irish Sea. Then the checks on the cargo arriving at the ferry ports went operational. The unionists concluded Johnson had gone back on his word.

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City
by Jack Brown
Published 14 Jul 2021

But while some of the causes of this antagonism are particular to our times, and some are indeed entirely novel, others are longstanding grievances that have now become acute. This chapter puts the issues of today in context by providing a short history of London’s relationship with the nation. In September 2014, as mayor of London, Boris Johnson said, ‘A pound invested in London can drive jobs and growth around the country … When London grows the rest of the country grows.’1 Chapter One has shown that there is truth in this claim. In June 2020, as prime minister, Boris Johnson observed that ‘too many parts of this country have felt left behind, neglected, unloved, as though someone had taken a strategic decision that their fate did not matter as much as the metropolis.’2 The historical reality of this claim is examined in this chapter.

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In June 2020, as prime minister, Boris Johnson observed that ‘too many parts of this country have felt left behind, neglected, unloved, as though someone had taken a strategic decision that their fate did not matter as much as the metropolis.’2 The historical reality of this claim is examined in this chapter. Chapter Three goes on to examine the wider public ‘feeling’ towards London. ‘Levelling up’ Boris Johnson is the first former mayor of London to become prime minister of the United Kingdom. His government was elected in 2019 on a commitment to ‘level up’ the UK, a carefully chosen phrase that suggests tackling regional inequalities by boosting the economy and improving opportunities outside of London and the south-east rather than attacking or ‘levelling down’ the capital. The 2019 general election was notable for its results across the newly named ‘red wall’, a former Labour stronghold of constituencies stretching from north Wales to the north-east of England.

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Crossrail was part-funded by an additional tax on London-based businesses, and over half of the planned ‘Crossrail 2’ would be funded by London-only sources.55 Nevertheless, the idea that London received ‘more than its fair share’ persisted. Away from transport, other new pots of funding were established to counter the idea that London ‘gets everything’. A ‘Stronger Towns’ fund, initiated under May but ultimately delivered by her successor, Boris Johnson, was established to provide funding to ‘left behind’ towns across the country. The allocation of such funding, however, has proved highly controversial: the criteria have been unclear and subject to accusations of politicisation.56 And the politics were increasingly volatile. In November 2017, mayor of London Sadiq Khan attacked ‘the most anti-London Budget in a generation’ for its affordable housing funding pledges; earlier that year, he had branded May ‘the most anti-London leader of a mainstream party since Margaret Thatcher.’57 Some of this was about more than just funding.

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order
by Colin Kahl and Thomas Wright
Published 23 Aug 2021

Mitnick, “Israel’s Cautionary Coronavirus Tale”; Steve Hendrix, “Why Israel Is Seeing a Coronavirus Spike After Initially Crushing the Outbreak,” Washington Post, July 7, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middlle_east/why-israel-is-seeing-a-coronavirus-spike-after-initially-crushing-the-outbreak/2020/07/07/dd141158-bfbc-11ea-8908–68a2b9eae9e0_story.html; “Netanyahu Admits Israel’s Economy Reopened ‘Too Soon,’” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 10, 2020, https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/netanyahu-admits-israels-economy-reopened-too-soon; Ariel Oseran, “Israel Considers a Second Lockdown as Coronavirus Cases Surge,” The World, July 17, 2020, https://www.pri.org/stories/2020–070–17/israel-considers-second-lockdown-coronavirus-cases-surge; Anshel Pfeffer, “Why Netanyahu Failed the Coronavirus Stress Test,” Haaretz, July 10, 2020, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-why-netanyahu-failed-the-coronavirus-stress-test-1.8984398.   67.  Graeme Wilson and George Jones, “Boris Johnson Inspired by Jaws Mayor,” Telegraph, July 18, 2007, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1557765/Boris-Johnson-inspired-by-Jaws-mayor.html.   68.  Hayley Mortimer, “Coronavirus: Cheltenham Festival ‘May Have Accelerated’ Spread,” BBC, April 30, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-52485584; Dan Roan, “Liverpool v Atletico Madrid: Mayor Calls for Inquiry amid Coronavirus Concerns,” BBC, April 23, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/52399569; Anthony Costello, “The United Kingdom Is Flying Blind on Covid-19,” New Statesman, March 20, 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2020/03/uk-response-coronavirus-pandemic-distancing-medical-advice; Neel Patel, “The UK Is Scrambling to Correct Its Coronavirus Strategy,” MIT Technology Review, March 16, 2020, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/16/905285/uk-dropping-coronavirus-herd-immunity-strategy-250000-dead/; Andrew Sparrow, “Boris Johnson Warns Britons to Avoid Non-Essential Contact as Covid-19 Death Toll Rises—As It Happened,” The Guardian, March 16, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2020/mar/16/boris-johnson-press-conference-coronavirus-live-firms-could-soon-be-allowed-to-run-reduced-services-because-of-coronavirus-shapps-suggests-politics-live; Amanda Sloat, “Reopening the World: Britain Bungled Its Lockdown and Garbled Its Reopening,” Brookings Institution, June 16, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-frsom-chaos/2020/06/16/reopening-the-world-britain-bungled-its-lockdown-and-garbled-its-reopening/.   69.  

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Hayley Mortimer, “Coronavirus: Cheltenham Festival ‘May Have Accelerated’ Spread,” BBC, April 30, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-52485584; Dan Roan, “Liverpool v Atletico Madrid: Mayor Calls for Inquiry amid Coronavirus Concerns,” BBC, April 23, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/52399569; Anthony Costello, “The United Kingdom Is Flying Blind on Covid-19,” New Statesman, March 20, 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2020/03/uk-response-coronavirus-pandemic-distancing-medical-advice; Neel Patel, “The UK Is Scrambling to Correct Its Coronavirus Strategy,” MIT Technology Review, March 16, 2020, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/16/905285/uk-dropping-coronavirus-herd-immunity-strategy-250000-dead/; Andrew Sparrow, “Boris Johnson Warns Britons to Avoid Non-Essential Contact as Covid-19 Death Toll Rises—As It Happened,” The Guardian, March 16, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2020/mar/16/boris-johnson-press-conference-coronavirus-live-firms-could-soon-be-allowed-to-run-reduced-services-because-of-coronavirus-shapps-suggests-politics-live; Amanda Sloat, “Reopening the World: Britain Bungled Its Lockdown and Garbled Its Reopening,” Brookings Institution, June 16, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-frsom-chaos/2020/06/16/reopening-the-world-britain-bungled-its-lockdown-and-garbled-its-reopening/.   69.  

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“Coronavirus: Prime Minister Boris Johnson Tests Positive,” BBC, March 27, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52060791; “What’s Gone Wrong with Covid-19 Testing in Britain,” The Economist, April 4, 2020, https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/04/04/whats-gone-wrong-with-covid-19-testing-in-britain; Andrew MacAskill, “UK Defends Coronavirus Response After Reuters Investigation,” Reuters, April 9, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-modelling/uk-defends-coronavirus-response-after-reuters-investigation-idUSKCN21R33D.   70.  Colin Dwyer, “Boris Johnson: U.K. Is ‘Past the Peak’ of Its Coronavirus Outbreak,” NPR, April 30, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/30/848496099/boris-johnson-u-k-is-past-the-peak-of-its-coronavirus-outbreak.   71.  

How Cycling Can Save the World
by Peter Walker
Published 3 Apr 2017

We are realizing that if you have people walk and bicycle more, you have a more lively, more livable, more attractive, more safe, more sustainable, and more healthy city. And what are you waiting for?”3 We Do Not Want to Lose Any More So what was London waiting for? In part, it was waiting for the then-mayor, Boris Johnson, to stop building bike lanes marked only by paint, and embark on a network of better-designed cycle routes. This he did, and fairly soon: work began on the city’s first major separated lanes in early 2014. The complex and fascinating political battle behind this process is told in chapter 6, but one element in particular illustrates the changing attitude of big business to mass cycling.

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But their interest in cycling as an economic force, or even just something they should be seen to support, is nonetheless fascinating. There are still those in big business who argue that a vibrant and competitive city is based around roads choked with cars, taxis, and vans. But they are increasingly starting to look like dinosaurs, clinging to a bygone era. Rewriting the Code of the Streets Boris Johnson was not the only mayor of a major global city to recently push through new cycling infrastructure amid noisy opposition, despite holding avowedly free-market opinions. Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City, predated Johnson in becoming serious about cycling, and was something of an inspiration to his London counterpart.

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Parking, especially free, on-street parking, is one of those areas that many people seem somehow to take both entirely for granted and very, very personally. People in New York seem to “treat every parking space like it was their firstborn child,” says Janette Sadik-Khan, recalling the battles she endured over it. Her near-equivalent, Andrew Gilligan, Boris Johnson’s mayoral commissioner for cycling in London from 2013 to 2015, once confessed he never even tried to properly tackle the subject. “Parking is the third rail of politics,” he said, referring to the live power line that runs between the tracks of many subway systems. “If you touch it, you die.”14 If any thought is given to the economics of easy on-street parking, the assumption is often that its impact is generally neutral.

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval
by Jason Cowley
Published 15 Nov 2018

But because it happened for me on my thirtieth birthday, and the cabinet in my early forties, maybe you have a sense that your time may have been at an earlier stage. I definitely felt that in 2010.’ Eddie Morgan has worked for the BBC and ITV as an editor and producer. He was close to Cooper and Purnell in the late 1980s when he read philosophy, politics and economics at Balliol College, Oxford (where they overlapped with Boris Johnson) and he worked alongside the Golden Generation in the early 2000s when he was Labour assistant general secretary. ‘How foolish that now all looks,’ he said, reflecting on the Blair-Brown conflict – the so-called TBGBs. ‘Talk about the narcissism of small differences! They really were a golden generation, weren’t they?

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Cameron was one of those students at Oxford people knew of and spoke about, even if they didn’t actually know him. Journalists such as Toby Young and James Delingpole, who knew Cameron a little back then, write enviously even today of the effect of his youthful hauteur and insouciance. Unlike Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, Cameron stayed clear of student politics and of the Oxford Union. He liked to dress up in white tie and tails, played tennis and always said thank you at the end of a tutorial. He had such good manners and such charm, and together these have carried him a very long way, to the top of British politics as prime minister of the first coalition government since the Second World War.

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James Wood, now a literary critic and Harvard professor, remembers Cameron as being ‘confident, entitled, gracious, secure . . . exactly the kind of “natural Etonian” I was not’. He remarks on Cameron’s ‘charm and decency [at Eton] – almost a kind of sweetness, actually’, though he says Cameron showed little interest in politics. (Rory Stewart, the writer-traveller, Conservative MP and another Etonian, once told me that he thought Cameron and Boris Johnson were the ‘wrong kind of Etonians’, which leads one to assume that there must be a right kind, of whom Stewart is presumably one.) Eton: a word of just four letters but with a multiplicity of associations. Eton: a word synonymous with upper class and aristocratic ease and entitlement. Eton: a word that inspires as much anger as it does respect.

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response
by Tony Connelly
Published 4 Oct 2017

Numerous EU delegations had gathered in the Novotel bar to watch the results trickling in on Sky News. There were grounds for optimism, not just from Lidington’s phone call. A YouGov poll released as polls closed at 10 p.m. predicted a Remain victory by 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, told Sky News by phone that he thought the Remain side was going to ‘edge it’. Boris Johnson, MP, the former Mayor of London and a prominent Leave campaigner, appeared to have conceded. But that was before the thunderbolts from the north-east of England. At 1 a.m. Luxembourg time, the Newcastle result flashed up on Sky News. Newcastle had been expected to vote heavily in favour of Remain; but Remain prevailed only by a whisker.

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That also meant waiting for the official response from Downing Street. Some senior officials in Room 308 had wondered if David Cameron would tough it out. There had been an assumption that the Tory leadership question would not be resolved until the autumn, a belief supported by statements from Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, the most prominent Brexiteers. At around 8.15 a.m. Cameron emerged with his wife, Samantha, from Number 10. Room 308 suddenly went quiet. The emergency Cabinet meeting was just over, and Charlie Flanagan, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, was slumped on one of the sofas, looking up at the screen.

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‘The freedom of movement line was agreed by Kenny, and repeated in his press conference afterwards. This was very significant. It wasn’t [Slovak Prime Minister Robert] Fico or [former Polish President Jarosław] Kaczyński saying it. It was Kenny. Kenny gave it more weight.’ The Brexit result triggered a spate of bloodletting within the Conservative Party. Boris Johnson had been expected to stand for the leadership, but pulled out at the last minute when he learned that his ally, Michael Gove, was about to launch his own bid. Stephen Crabb, the Work and Pensions Secretary, dropped out of the race due to lack of support and within days was embroiled in a ‘sexting’ scandal.

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
by Mehdi Hasan
Published 27 Feb 2023

I’ll admit there are plenty of books already out there on how to argue or debate or give speeches that have been authored by academics and writers and debate coaches. Indeed, you’ll see that I cite from many of them in the pages and chapters ahead. But this book builds on my own unique set of experiences: from my student days debating with the likes of future British prime minister Boris Johnson and former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, to the highlights from a career spent interviewing some of the biggest names from the worlds of politics, finance, and, yes, Hollywood. So that’s reason number one: I’ve had to learn every debating technique in this book to be able to step in front of the camera and challenge leaders from around the globe.

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In the name of God, go.” Amery said those last six words, Cromwell’s words, in a hushed tone and sat down. He didn’t need to say more. Within three days, writes historian Martyn Bennett, Chamberlain resigned as prime minister and was replaced by Winston Churchill. More recently, in January 2022, then prime minister Boris Johnson was facing calls from the media and the opposition to resign over a series of parties allegedly held in Downing Street in violation of COVID lockdown rules. In a debate in Parliament, David Davis, a backbench Conservative MP and former government minister, gave a withering speech. And how did he end it?

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A defensive and mumbling Johnson, who happens to be a biographer of Churchill, pretended to be unaware of the origins of Davis’s zinger. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t know what quotation he is alluding to. The clip of Davis in Parliament quoting Amery (who was quoting Cromwell!) grabbed news headlines in the UK and around the world. It added to the crescendo of voices calling on Boris Johnson to resign from office. Six months later, Johnson announced he was quitting. 2. Keep ’em short If you google “best debate zingers,” these are some of the quotations from U.S. presidential debates that tend to pop up again and again in various online listicles: “There you go again.”—Ronald Reagan to Jimmy Carter in 1980, suggesting that his Democratic opponent had a history of not being truthful with Americans.

Legacy: Gangsters, Corruption and the London Olympics
by Michael Gillard
Published 24 Jul 2019

The MP was keen to know what dirt he had but Law was reticent about showing his hand. ‘[Lyn] asked for everything I’d got on the Parks police scandal,’ said the rebel councillor, but he refused to hand over the file. Instead, the dossier was shown to his new party and Law tried, without success, to get former London Tory mayoral candidate Steve Norris, and Boris Johnson, the future one, interested in what was going on in Labour Newham. It was quickly apparent that ‘there wasn’t a cigarette paper between the parties’ and no interest in raising the spectre of corruption after London had won the Olympics bid. In effect, Law had run up against a new united front across party lines to put on the best show possible.

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In November 2008, George raised the matter with the Labour government as a supporter of Tessa Jowell, his local MP, who was now the Olympics minister. His letter was also addressed to Sir Ian Blair, the police commissioner, and copied to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, home secretary Jacqui Smith and the newly-elected Tory mayor of London, Boris Johnson. ‘The story I listened to would make any taxpayer very angry to know that police officers doing their jobs are put at such risk and then treated so poorly … The investigation must have cost millions … Please can you help to bring some pressure to bear to complete this investigation … David is very unwell and has become worse.’

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Despite the global financial crisis, which started to bite in 2008, the London Olympic development was the biggest demolition programme in Europe with more than two hundred buildings knocked down and others erected. Some, such as the media centre, were big enough to house five jumbo jets standing wing tip to wing tip. On the campaign trail to becoming the first Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson had talked up the Games as a never-again, not-to-be-missed business opportunity for UK plc. The Long Fella, whose own politics remain a mystery, was, as ever, ahead of the curve. In April 2008, he had formed a joint venture between his waste management plant and a leading demolition group of companies whose owner donated heavily to the Tories.

Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System
by Colin Yeo;
Published 15 Feb 2020

The change of tone was not accompanied by any official change in policy, although some of the measures most likely to affect unintended victims, such as automatic closure of bank accounts, were suspended (see Chapter 3). Although Theresa May was able to survive the Windrush scandal, she could not weather Brexit and formally resigned as Prime Minister on 24 July 2019 to make way for Boris Johnson. JOHNSON AND BEYOND In 2018 the government belatedly published a White Paper proposing a new immigration system for post-Brexit Britain. It proposed that the status quo established by Theresa May as Home Secretary would be maintained, except that free movement for EU citizens would be ended and they, along with all other migrants, would be subject to a slightly streamlined version of the existing immigration system.

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This was perhaps no surprise, as the White Paper was published with Theresa May still at the helm as Prime Minister, although admittedly very much in her latter days. There was no suggestion that the system of citizen-on-citizen immigration checks would be dismantled, the family immigration rules reformed or citizenship policy widened. May’s replacement by Johnson threw these plans into doubt. One of Boris Johnson’s defining characteristics, and perhaps his greatest strength, is what some might call his moral flexibility – though others might call this lack of principle. At the time of writing it is impossible to discern what immigration policy, if any, Johnson might pursue in office. So far, he seems to offer all things to all factions.

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The names were changed for the purposes of the report, which is available at: https://www.lag.org.uk/about-us/policy/campaigns/chasing-status 43 ‘Tighter immigration laws catching out long-term legal migrants – report’, The Guardian, 15 October 2014. 44 See Amelia Gentleman, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (London: Guardian Faber, 2019) for the full account. 45 ‘“Shameful”: widespread outrage over man denied NHS cancer care’, The Guardian, 12 March 2018. 46 See Gentleman, The Windrush Betrayal. 47 Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and Gisela Stuart, ‘Restoring public trust in immigration policy – a points-based non-discriminatory immigration system’, Vote Leave, 1 June 2016. 48 ‘Unsettled Status? Which EU Citizens are at Risk of Failing to Secure their Rights after Brexit?’, Migration Observatory, 12 April 2018. 49 ‘Asylum seeker denied cancer treatment by Home Office dies’, The Guardian, 19 September 2019. 50 See for example ‘Thousands of asylum seekers and migrants wrongly denied NHS healthcare’, The Independent, 16 April 2017, and ‘Pregnant women without legal status “too afraid to seek NHS care”’, The Guardian, 20 March 2017. 51 ‘Briefing: what is the hostile environment, where does it comes from, who does it affect?’

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History
by Alex von Tunzelmann
Published 7 Jul 2021

‘People’s reputations are being trashed for holding opinions that a large majority of people held at the time – essentially for being insufficiently woke.’30 Boris Johnson expressed similar views: ‘The statues in our cities and towns were put up by previous generations. They had different perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong.’31 The Man of His Time argument contends that the subject of a statue is complicated, because he did good things as well as bad things. These must be balanced against each other, and forgiven accordingly. Boris Johnson again, talking about the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square: ‘It is absurd and shameful that this national monument should today be at risk of attack by violent protesters.

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The following tweet was illustrated with the named statues of Mary Seacole and Floella Benjamin. 26Tim Stanley, ‘Tearing down Confederate statues won’t wipe out past evils’, Daily Mail, 18 August 2017. 27@Boris Johnson (verified account), Twitter, 12 June 2020, 11:25 a.m. 28Chris Wallace speaking on Fox news, 11 June 2020, https://www.mediamatters.org/chris-wallace/chris-wallace-compares-removal-confederate-statues-mao-zedongs-cultural-revolution. 29Tammy Bruce speaking on Fox News, 23 June 2020, https://video.foxnews.com/v/6166637768001sp=show-clips. 30Andrew Roberts, ‘Stop this trashing of monuments – and of our past’, Mail on Sunday, 13 June 2020. 31@Boris Johnson (verified account), Twitter, 12 June 2020, 11:25 a.m.. 32Ibid. 33Sarah Vine, ‘I fear for Britain’s future if we erase the past (good and bad)’, Daily Mail, 9 June 2020. 34Robert Jenrick, ‘We will save our history from woke militants who want to censor our past’, Daily Telegraph, 16 January 2021. 35Donald Trump, speaking on Fox News, 23 June 2020, video at https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-blasts-weak-states-for-allowing-targeting-of-statues-to-happen. 1: A Revolutionary Beginning: King George III 1Remarks by President Trump at the 2020 Salute to America, 5 July 2020, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-2020-salute-america/. 2Ruth Kenny, ‘Joseph Wilton’s equestrian statue of George III, Bowling Green, New York’, in Tabitha Barber and Stacy Boldrick, eds, Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm (London: Tate Publishing, 2013), p. 106; Arthur S.

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‘He wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious.’3 Trump responded on Twitter by denying that he had suggested it, then, in the same sentence, suggesting it again: ‘This is Fake News by the failing @nytimes & bad ratings @CNN. Never suggested it although, based on all of the many things accomplished during the first 3 1/2 years, perhaps more than any other Presidency, sounds like a good idea to me!’4 Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, also took to Twitter: ‘those statues teach us about our past, with all its faults. To tear them down would be to lie about our history, and impoverish the education of generations to come.’ The Conservative government announced that it would amend the Criminal Damage Act so anyone damaging a war memorial in Britain could also be looking at ten years in prison.5 Museums and civic authorities were quick to react too, though often in a different way.

The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021
by Greg Clark
Published 31 Dec 2014

Available at www.budget.gov.hk/2012/eng/budget31.html. Accessed 2013 Mar 4. Hong Kong Government (2013). The 2013-14 Budget. Available at www.budget .gov.hk/2013/eng/highlights.html. Accessed 2014 Feb 16. Howlett S (2013). Boris Johnson’s stamp duty plan offers solution to affordable housing supply. The Guardian. Feb 15. Available at www.guardian.co.uk/housingnetwork/2013/feb/15/boris-johnson-stamp-duty. Accessed 2013 Feb 21. Hudson N (2014). Housing tenure in England and Wales. Savills. Jan 30. Available at www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/141564/172300-0. Accessed 2014 Feb 16. Hutton W (1991). Foreword.

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Indeed, the Mayoral figurehead has quickly become an indispensable feature of London life. Both Mayors (Livingstone and Johnson) up until now have keenly sought the unique media platform the position offers to communicate their vision for London. Ken Livingstone made much of his authenticity as a committed Londoner, while Boris Johnson’s charisma has drawn media attention to his activities to manage a more competitive London (Travers, 2013a). Shortly before his passing, Professor Sir Peter Hall reflected on the role of the Mayor: “The London Mayor has proved to be brilliantly effective in three ways; promoting London internationally, co-ordinating activities within London, and making the case for London to central government.

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Strategic plans for London continue to hinge on the capacity to persuade central government to guarantee essential items of investment. As such, London must rely more on central government “avoiding catastrophically bad decisions” than on the city’s own capacity to effect change (The Economist, 2013b). Under Mayor Boris Johnson, the London Plan has been successively modified. London’s global city credentials have been spatialised into commitments to excellent liveability, local autonomy and housing development (Figure 5.3). Questions still persist as to whether the Plan makes sufficient allowance for the city’s varied housing needs, and what practical measures can rebalance growth away from the poles of the CBD, West End and The City, and Canary Wharf (the Central Activities Zone).

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016
by Stewart Lee
Published 1 Aug 2016

The scenario above is sheer satirical fantasy, of course, and it is lazy of the Left to make political capital out of the fact that the chancellor made welfare savings while eating a burger, even if it was a more expensive burger than any the average welfare claimant could ever afford. But it is hardly a state secret that Byron burgers are extremely popular with the right-wing politicos who dwell in the leafy paradise of west London. Byron is run by Tom Byng, a member of the same Old Etonian cabal as David Cameron himself and Boris Johnson. And the mass of juicy meat that top Tories ate in Byng’s previous restaurant, Zucca, saw it described as the de facto works canteen of the Cameron set. Even Nicholas Clegg extols Byron’s succulent flattened beef pads. The coalition has bonded over Byron burgers, and all its key players are proud to stand before their fellows and declare, “Ich bin ein Byronburger.”

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I am filing this column, in English, on the morning of Thursday 2 January, but by the time you read it, on Sunday the 5th, it may already be appearing only in Romanian, in an attempt to court some of the 29 million potential new Observer readers the soft right predict will arrive this week. From a business point of view, should I be pro-Romanian or anti-Romanian? While I won’t be down at Luton airport handing out Costa coffees any time soon, I do nonetheless wonder which market should I work. At the end of November Boris Johnson, Britain’s first self-satirising politician, became an early advocate of the anti-Romanian business model, observing sadly: “We can do nothing to stop the entire population of Transylvania – charming though most of them may be – from trying to pitch camp at Marble Arch.” Johnson’s trademark tuck-shop wit makes him a formidable political orator.

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Corden appears in the paper in knitted tie, his face painted with a cross of St George, looking like the Man at C&A version of the Christian soldier who goes crazy and dynamites the Cajun’s shack in Southern Comfort. The image illustrates his column. There is no need to read his column. A Sgt Pepper-style Sun collage of 117 definitive English people included James Corden, Simon Cowell, Boris Johnson, Michael McIntyre, David Cameron, Jeremy Clarkson and Nigel Farage, but no Mark E. Smith, William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Ted Chippington or Pauline Black from The Selecter, which my superior version would have boasted. At which point during the preparation of the artwork was Gary Barlow crossed out?

Urban Transport Without the Hot Air, Volume 1
by Steve Melia

A study of the Barclays Bike Hire scheme showed that women tend to avoid main roads and to use the bikes more for recreational riding in areas like Hyde Park.350 In The mayor’s vision for cycling (mentioned in Chapter 7, page 77) Boris Johnson declares an aim to get more women cycling, through the construction of safer cycle routes. London transport policy under Boris Johnson Livingstone is scathing about his Conservative successor Boris Johnson, on cycling policy among other issues: “We were working on the next stage of this and our cycle routes were going to get as much physical separation as possible. Boris just dumped all that and painted blue lines on the road, because Boris never wants to offend the car lobby… That would have been the biggest transport part of my third term if I’d had a third term… We were going to close the north side of the Embankment between Westminster and Waterloo Bridge every summer, replicating what the mayor of Paris did.

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Following a serious injury to a reporter cycling to work, in February 2012 The Times launched its influential ‘Cities Fit for Cycling’ manifesto and has given prominence to cycling issues ever since. In the same month, the London Cycling Campaign launched its ‘Love London, Go Dutch’ campaign in the run-up to the London mayoral elections in May 2012. Many people were sceptical when Mayor Boris Johnson endorsed the campaign, until shortly after his re-election he produced a rather surprising policy document (The Mayor’s Vision for Cycling) committing £913m to cycling over 10 years, comparable to levels of spending in the European cycling cities. Although future spending may be difficult to guarantee (and there will be two mayoral elections in those 10 years), the most significant departure from the past can be found in the language of this document.

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“No one’s interested in transport itself, apart from engineers and enthusiasts. Transport is the means by which a major city works. People look at this as a transport question without recognizing the political conditions you need...” Peter Hendy Peter Hendy, commissioner for Transport for London under mayors Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, explains why London succeeded where most British cities have failed. Figure 5.4 (page 44) showed how bus use in London has bucked the UK national trend, doubling since the mid-1990s. With walking as a principal mode of travel remaining stable, the main story told by Figure 14.1 is a progressive switch from driving to public transport.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite
by Michael Lind
Published 20 Feb 2020

The technocratic neoliberal revolution from above, carried out in one Western nation after another by members of the ever more aggressive and powerful managerial elite, has provoked a populist backlash from below by the defensive and disempowered native working class, many of whom are nonwhite (a substantial minority of black and ethnic British voters supported Brexit, and in the US an estimated 29 percent of Latinos voted in 2016 for Trump).4 Large numbers of alienated working-class voters, realizing that the political systems of their nations are rigged and that mainstream parties will continue to ignore their interests and values, have found sometimes unlikely champions in demagogic populists like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, and Matteo Salvini. For all their differences, these populist demagogues have launched similar counterattacks on dominant neoliberal establishments in all three realms of social power. In the realm of the economy, populists favor national restrictions on trade and immigration to shield workers from competing with imports and immigrants.

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It is more plausible to assume that they did so out of concerns about national and popular sovereignty than to believe that before 2019 one in seven Labour voters was a cryptofascist white supremacist.13 The actual antecedents of contemporary populist politicians like Trump are to be found not in interwar Central European totalitarian states but in state and local politics, particularly urban politics. In Europe, pro-Brexit Boris Johnson was the mayor of London before becoming prime minister, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini was on the city council of Milan from 1993 to 2012. In the United States, the shift from post-1945 democratic pluralism to technocratic neoliberalism was fostered from the 1960s onward by an alliance of the white overclass with African Americans and other racial minority groups.

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In addition to making the usual comparison of Trump to Hitler, Browning displayed his supercilious erudition by comparing Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to Hitler’s predecessor and enabler German president Paul von Hindenburg.18 But even Browning’s clever comparison of McConnell to von Hindenburg draws from the stock of trite Nazi equivalence arguments. Surely other enterprising academics could draw parallels between contemporary politicians they despise and fascists less well-known than Hitler and Mussolini. Why not ransack interwar European history to declare that Boris Johnson is the new Miklós Horthy (Hungary) or that Matteo Salvini is the new Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (Portugal)? Granted, asserting that Donald Trump is the new Engelbert Dollfuss (Austria) does not make him seem very frightening. The most frequently cited evidence that Trump is a crypto-Nazi would-be dictator relied on his statements following violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017.

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline
by Russell Jones
Published 15 Jan 2023

Despite no one really being able to say quite was Brexit was, is or should be, ‘getting Brexit done’ became the only game in town. And the only folks who could deliver that unicorn were not the serious – but flawed – politicians and technocrats, who the public had apparently had enough of. Brexit could only be delivered by the pure showmen: Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and their billionaire backers. Once Brexit had been delivered in its ‘oven-ready’ but indigestible form, and after the country was subsequently battered by a pandemic that eventually brought down the showman-in-chief, the last woman standing was up next to bat. That is how, and why, the UK ended up with Liz Truss.

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Cameron returned from Brussels with this set of accords and subsequently formally committed to persuading the electorate to vote to remain in the EU at a referendum scheduled for 23 June. Within days, six cabinet members announced that they would be supporting the campaign to leave. To Cameron’s chagrin, the six included his close friend Michael Gove, who was Minister of Justice at the time. Another prominent Conservative rapidly to side with the Leave campaign was Boris Johnson, then still the mayor of London. With these defections the vote had rapidly taken on the appearance of a Tory civil war, but conscious that he would have to try to lead a united government and party if he won the referendum, Cameron often seemed to fight it with one hand tied behind his back.

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Her default option was to operate largely as before: keeping her cards close to her chest; eschewing contact with the press, or for that matter many other MPs; and relying heavily on her two widely disliked and distrusted political advisors, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, for strategic guidance. Reflecting the reality of Brexit, May rapidly sacked nine of the previous cabinet, including George Osborne, another whose political career died a sudden death. She had little choice but to shift the government to the right, and a number of prominent Brexiteers, including Boris Johnson and David Davis, were elevated to senior ministerial posts. Few of those promoted proved to be a success. Phillip Hammond moved across from the Foreign Office to become chancellor. Like May, he was a less-than-enthusiastic, even rather idiosyncratic, Remainer, and in many ways he was the antithesis of the Machiavellian Osborne.

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series)
by James Bloodworth
Published 18 May 2016

Young’s oracular warning of half a century ago has been recast as a blueprint. 2 ‘Down with Meritocracy’, Michael Young, The Guardian, 29 June 2001. 3 Equality, R. H. Tawney, Unwin Books, 3rd edition (1975). 4 The Rise and Rise of Meritocracy, edited by Geoff Dench, Wiley-Blackwell, 1st edition (2006). 5 ‘David Cameron brushes Boris Johnson aside over IQ comments’, Tomas Jivanda, The Independent, 2 December 2013. 6 Nick Clegg, speech to the Sutton Trust, 22 May 2012. 7 ‘Ed Miliband attacks social inequality’, Martha Linden and James Tapsfield, The Independent, 21 May 2012. 8 ‘Wanted by Labour, working-class MPs’, Michael Savage, The Times, 16 July 2012. 9 Hansard, HC Deb, 13 July 1807, vol. 30, cc. 1007–48. 10 Hansard, HC Deb, 17 July 1873, vol. 217, cc. 502–90. 11 Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought 1914–1939, Michael Freeden, Oxford University Press, 1st edition (1986).

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The elite are where they are, so it is argued, because they possess both the ability and the drive to succeed. If a disproportionate number of the rich are the products of an elite upbringing, well, that is because talent is distributed throughout society unevenly and is often hereditary. The former Mayor of London Boris Johnson articulated something along these lines when in 2013 he told the Centre for Policy Studies that inequality was the product of human beings who are ‘far from equal in raw ability’96 (though he also said that more should be done to help talented people from working-class backgrounds ‘rise to the top’).

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The rich man is still in his castle and the poor man remains, as ever, loitering forlornly at his gate. But now the meritocracy has made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate. 95 ‘Some 95% of 2009–2012 Income Gains Went to Wealthiest 1%’, Brenda Cronin, Wall Street Journal, 10 September 2013. 96 ‘Boris Johnson: some people are too stupid to get on in life’, Peter Dominiczak and James Kirkup, Daily Telegraph, 27 November 2013. 97 Intelligence: All That Matters, Stuart Richie, Hodder & Stoughton, 1st edition (2015). 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 ‘After the Bell Curve’, David L. Kirp, New York Times Magazine, 23 July 2006. 101 Ibid.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, considered the British tradition of effective, clean bureaucracy to be one of the key reasons for his city-state’s success, despite other onerous aspects of colonial rule. And yet, Britain has adopted the same anti-government ideology as the United States since the 1980s. It, too, has starved its domestic agencies in the name of efficiency and, in Boris Johnson, is run by a populist leader who scorns experts and views beureaucrats with great skepticism. His government, presiding over a state hollowed out by austerity, fared unusually poorly in its initial battle against Covid-19, far worse than Northern Europe did. By contrast, Greece, a young and still-developing democracy, with a legendarily dysfunctional bureaucracy, handled the pandemic exceptionally well.

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Steve Bannon argues that the seeds of Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party were sowed by that crash. In the years since, the Right has veered away from its devotion to markets, instead espousing protectionism, subsidies, immigration controls, and cultural nationalism—ideas championed by Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, and other populists around the world. On the left, meanwhile, two trendsetters have been Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, both self-described “socialists.” They have been joined by energetic newcomers on the political scene such as New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who seems just as comfortable with the label.

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He fired one health minister and caused his replacement to resign. Despite government regulations, he refused to wear a mask, leading a Brazilian judge to order him to wear one. Bolsonaro ended up a victim of his own careless attitude: he announced in July 2020 that he had tested positive for the coronavirus. Boris Johnson conspicuously did not socially distance in the early stages of the outbreak, and ended up in the ICU with Covid-19. In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador encouraged people to go out, attend rallies, shake hands, and hug—all in direct contradiction of his own public health officials.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

Overvaluing yourself implies undervaluing others. Note: The data points for Australia and Italy are very close and overlap on the graph. Source: Loughan, Kuppens et al., 2011 Figure 2.4 Individual average self-enhancement verses economic inequality in fifteen nations In a major speech in November 2013, London mayor Boris Johnson told his audience: ‘Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2 per cent have an IQ above 130.’57 A numerate audience would have known that exactly 50 per cent of the population have an IQ above or below 100, and the ratios at all other IQ values can be found in a table.

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In 2007, at the age of 71, having finally managed to conquer her alcoholism, she was living on a pension of £87 a week, had an overdraft, and was searching for work.8 Even more extreme stories are now routinely told in the US, where it sometimes seems as if people will do anything for the chance of a fortune and routinely have their lives ruined through the ill effects of gaining riches.9 For millennia, we have known that greed harms and having too much can be damaging; but we seem able to forget faster than we can remember. In November 2013 Boris Johnson, Conservative mayor of London, made a speech in which he explained why he believed that greed was good: Like it or not, the free market economy is the only show in town … No one can ignore the harshness of that competition, or the inequalities that it inevitably accentuates [but] the top 1 per cent contributes almost 30 per cent of income tax; and indeed the top 0.1 per cent – just 29,000 people – contributes fully 14 per cent of all taxation.10 The implication is that those who grab the most for themselves also somehow give the most back, even if unwillingly, through taxation.

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Income tax is only 26 per cent of total government revenue – national insurance contributions raise 18 per cent, and VAT raises 17 per cent.11 The rich pay such a large proportion of income tax because their incomes are now so extraordinarily large, because they have worked so hard to raise their take and swallow up so much of what is available. Owing to VAT and other regressive levies, the 20 per cent least well-off of all households pay 36.6 per cent of their income in tax, while the wealthiest 20 per cent pay 35.5 per cent.12 Boris Johnson’s figure of 30 per cent of all income tax revenue equates to under 8 per cent of all government revenues, so there is no way that the top 0.1 per cent can be contributing 14 per cent of all taxation. Boris was wrong. When it comes to numerical rather than verbal dexterity, he is not a ‘top cornflake’.

COVID-19: Everything You Need to Know About the Corona Virus and the Race for the Vaccine
by Michael Mosley
Published 1 Jun 2020

Day 60 On February 28th Sub-Saharan Africa had its first confirmed case when an Italian citizen, who had returned to Nigeria from Milan, tested positive for the virus. Day 64 By March 3rd hundreds of Italians had died from Covid-19 and Italian hospitals were beginning to buckle under the pressure of so many sick and elderly patients. In the UK the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, had clearly not yet fully bought into the idea of social distancing. He said, at a press conference, “I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody.” Day 72 On March 11th the WHO acknowledged that the virus was spreading uncontrollably and that the world was in the grip of a serious pandemic.

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Although the governor said in a press conferences while announcing the changes, “This is not a permanent state, this is a moment in time,” he did not specify when the state would reopen. By April 20th the instructions to people to stay at home, which began in California in March, had been taken up by almost all US states. Which meant that at least 316 million people were self-isolating at home. Day 84 A week later, on March 23rd, Boris Johnson put the UK into lockdown. All nonessential businesses were to close and people were told that they would only be allowed to leave their homes for limited reasons, such as shopping for food, going out for exercise once a day, and traveling for work “if absolutely necessary.” By then most other European countries had gone into lockdown.

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Day 87 On March 26th experts from Imperial College published an updated study that suggested that, with social distancing and measures to protect the vulnerable, global deaths from the virus could be cut from 40 million to less than 10 million.18 Day 94 On April 2nd the number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 passed the million mark. At least 50,000 people had died. Within two weeks both those numbers would double. Day 100 After coming down with Covid-19, Boris Johnson was moved to intensive care. There was real concern as to whether he would survive. Although reasonably fit, he is in his 50s, male, and overweight, all of which are risk factors. America was now the epicenter of the pandemic and more than 2000 people were dying every day. Millions were forced to apply for unemployment benefits.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

Bill Clinton declared that ‘all Americans have not just a right but a solemn responsibility to rise as far as their God-given talents and determination can take them’, a formula reiterated by Barack Obama.1 Tony Blair repeatedly identified New Labour with meritocracy.2 David Cameron declared that Britain is an Aspiration Nation and that his government was on the side of ‘all those who work hard and want to get on.’3 Boris Johnson praised meritocracy for ‘allowing the right cornflakes to get to the top of the packet’.4 Such praise for meritocracy is hardly surprising: opinion polls repeatedly show that large majorities of people are deeply opposed to interfering with the meritocratic principle. A Pew poll in 2019, for example, found that 73 per cent of Americans, including 62 per cent of African-Americans, say that colleges should refrain from taking race or ethnicity into account when making decisions about student admissions.5 Meritocracy straddles the East–West divide.

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As well as declaring himself a ‘very stable genius’, Donald Trump has repeatedly boasted that he has ‘a very good brain’ and a ‘high IQ’. During his first run for the presidency back in 1987, Joe Biden ticked off a voter who asked him about his educational qualifications by retorting, ‘I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do … I’d be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours.’8 Boris Johnson has been known to rag David Cameron because he was a King’s Scholar at Eton, a sure sign of mental ability, while Cameron was an Oppidan, or regular fee payer. This is not just froth. The meritocratic idea is shaping society from top to bottom. A growing proportion of great fortunes are in the hands of people with outstanding brain power: computer geeks such as Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) or financial wizards such as George Soros (who pioneered hedge funds) and Jim Simons (who helped to found computer-driven ‘quant investing’).9 The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and makes a point of surrounding himself with academic super-achievers.

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The director of the Princeton Election Consortium promised, a week before the election, to ‘eat a bug’ if Trump won more than 240 electoral votes.5 Whether he did or not is, alas, not recorded. Populist leaders have struck back against the media’s cosmopolitan bias not just because they think doing so is a good source of votes but also because they are affronted by the way that journalists’ ideological sympathies distort their coverage. Boris Johnson denounced the Financial Times and the Economist for their negative coverage of Brexit at the 2017 Tory Party Conference. German populists have repeatedly vilified the Lügenpresse – the lying press. American bloggers routinely denounce the ‘lamestream media’. No one has been so skilled at taking the war to the enemy as Donald Trump.

The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World
by William Drozdiak
Published 27 Apr 2020

Austria’s Freedom Party entered government as part of a center-right coalition and took control, for a while, of the Interior Ministry. Poland’s Law and Justice Party solidified its grip on power by cracking down on dissent. Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán won reelection on an anti-immigrant platform. Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party emerged as the strongest opposition force in the Bundestag. And Boris Johnson, a leading Euroskeptic and EU antagonist, succeeded Theresa May as Britain’s prime minister. Far-right parties secured a foothold in twenty-three out of twenty-eight legislatures across Europe. But perhaps no other manifestation of growing nationalism in Europe matched the remarkable ascendancy of Salvini, who became almost overnight the dominant figure in Italian politics and the most galvanizing personality among pan-European populists.

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“I believe in it very deeply, and I don’t want Brexit to come and block us on this.”19 When Prime Minister Theresa May failed on three occasions to persuade the House of Commons to approve the detailed agreement that her government had painstakingly worked out with the EU, she was forced to resign by intransigent opponents within her own Tory Party. Boris Johnson, her former foreign secretary and a prominent advocate for the Leave campaign, won the succession battle and immediately moved into 10 Downing Street. On his first day in office, Johnson vowed to take Britain out of Europe by the end of October 2019, “no ifs or buts.”20 But Johnson was soon forced to abandon the Halloween deadline and seek another extension from the European Union to hold rare December elections.

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While Britain dithered, Macron warned that Europe was becoming distracted and missing opportunities to expand its economic growth and influence in the world. Meanwhile, China, Russia, and the United States were using divide-and-rule tactics to exploit Europe’s stasis for their own purposes. Macron became infuriated by the cavalier way in which Boris Johnson and his merry band of “Little Englanders” misled the British people about the impact of Brexit and held the rest of Europe hostage to their whims. “The trap is in the lie and irresponsibility that can destroy the European Union. Who told the British people the truth about their post-Brexit future?

Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life
by David Mitchell
Published 4 Nov 2014

From Margaret Thatcher’s Yes Minister sketch to Tony Blair’s “Am I Bovvered?” appearance, their attempts to associate themselves with humour have generally been awful. And the reason for this is that they don’t really care what’s funny. Being funny involves taking risks, and no politician (except possibly Boris Johnson) can understand why anyone would take the slightest risk of public disapproval in order to get a laugh. They’re about power – they don’t understand the instinct to amuse, and that’s why Vince Cable’s pretty unfunny remark about Gordon Brown being transformed “from Stalin to Mr Bean” has led to his being acclaimed a great parliamentary wit.

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The whole event would barely be worthy of note if it weren’t for the fact that they shot him in the back. But then the gentleman is quite old and has suffered two strokes in the last few years – so the comparatively slow rate at which he was fleeing was probably taken as provocation. Incidentally, if you do get Tasered by the police, it’s advisable to watch your language. As Boris Johnson has pointed out, it’s now an offence to swear at a police officer. So should you incur a public-spirited 50,000-volt warning shot – perhaps for brandishing your pension book in an aggressive manner or because a young PC has mistaken your tartan shopping trolley for a piece of field artillery – don’t accidentally shout “Oh fuck!”

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This was extremely funny news and I am convinced it will have brought immeasurably more pleasure to many more people than all of the grotty ready meals that were recalled could ever have done had they solely contained ground-up cartilage and ligament of the advertised species rather than the macerated fragments of other, more glamorous, quadrupeds. You may disagree with my definition of funny news. What’s funny about incompetence, malpractice and dishonesty in the preparation of our food, you might ask. You might think this is simply a grim example of something going seriously wrong. Funny news, you might say, is when Boris Johnson gets his balls caught in a harness or Kanye West sues the online currency “Coinye West” for exploiting his image. In my experience, news like that is too obviously amusing to be lastingly funny. You can’t make a joke about it because the story is already a joke. You can laugh once, because it’s daft, then it’s over.

Big Capital: Who Is London For?
by Anna Minton
Published 31 May 2017

Terrorism was another factor which ranked as marginally more of a problem in New York than in London.16 THE MONACO GROUP In Kensington and Chelsea, home to around 4,900 Ultra High Net Worth Individals,17 I had arranged to meet Daniel Moylan. Moylan was formerly deputy leader of the council and a past adviser to Boris Johnson and remains a councillor of twenty-seven years’ standing. Walking down Kensington High Street on my way to meet him, I passed what used to be Ken Market, once a bohemian magnet for punks with their pink mohicans, who lolled about outside the indoor market when I was a child. The market catered to every subculture of music and fashion and was where Freddie Mercury had a stall before Queen became famous.

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Under this system, housebuilders are legally bound to work with local authorities to build a percentage of affordable housing in all new developments. Over the last generation some housing has been built in this way, but nowhere near the numbers needed, and the increasingly Orwellian definition of ‘affordable’ means that much of the small amount provided is far from affordable for most. This is particularly acute in London. In 2013 Mayor Boris Johnson’s ‘London Plan’ redefined ‘affordable rent’ to mean up to 80 per cent of market rate, while the Housing and Planning Act 2016 deemed that affordable housing includes Starter Homes for up to £450,000. These are not remotely affordable even to many people on relatively high incomes. Now even this has come under threat with the introduction of the ‘viability assessment’.

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Fewer homes will in turn add more pressure on a housing market already unable to cope and will drive further increases in rents. Opting to pursue the incremental change route is close to aspects of the policies pursued by London’s Labour mayors, Ken Livingstone and since 2016 Sadiq Khan. As for Boris Johnson, while Gordon Brown was in power, he too followed this route before altering course dramatically when the Conservative-led coalition was elected and his old rival Livingstone was out of the picture. When Boris was fighting against Ken to win his second term, he got headlines for condemning the ‘Kosovo-style social cleansing’ which saw people on housing benefit being pushed out of London.2 But as chapter 4 described, under his watch this trend – which he stopped referring to in his second term – became far more entrenched, and not long after he was elected he was making lavish declarations of approval for the oligarchs’ cranes which he described as ‘marvellous’.3 The main thrust of Livingstone’s approach, which Sadiq Khan is indicating he would like to emulate, was to raise the numbers of affordable housing that developers have to provide.

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong
by James O'Brien
Published 2 Nov 2018

Their bespoke, unchallenged diet of ‘news’, augmented we now know by Facebook algorithms and deliberately fake stories, is so unvaried that the possibility that it might be largely bogus is never entertained. It’s also worth pointing out here how easy it is to confine criticism of face veils to the garment rather than the human being wearing one. When the former Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, elected to compare these human beings to ‘bank robbers’ and ‘letterboxes’ in August 2018fn2, he was feeding the anger and confusion of people like Martin. It’s hard to imagine what good he thought might come of it. One of the most memorable calls I have ever taken came during the brief heyday of the so-called English Defence League.

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It’s not always easy to remember that anger should be directed at the dupers as opposed to the duped, but on this occasion it was simple enough. James: It’s not funny is it? The pound’s the lowest it’s been since 1985 and I just asked you to name any law, just one, and you say bananas. We both know that the bananas line was a lie made up by Boris Johnson. Remind me which side he was on?’ Andy: Well, he was out for himself. See? Andy is not stupid. He’s a bright, entrepreneurial professional with his own young company and an eye on the future. He hasn’t mentioned immigration (yet) and doesn’t subscribe to some bogus nineteenth-century notion of English exceptionalism.

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On rare childhood visits to the capital from Kidderminster, my little sister and I considered a ride on one of their pull-down seats to be as much of a ritual as popping into Harrods’ toy department. So when drivers first started telling me how unhappy they were with Uber in 2014 I was keen not to let dewy-eyed sympathies cloud my judgment. The then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, termed them Luddites, in an attempt to portray them as dinosaur-like opponents of progress. Horse and carriage drivers, went the argument, had objected similarly to the introduction of the petrol engine but common sense soon prevailed. But the more I talked to cab drivers, the more I realised that Uber, and other euphemistically termed ‘disruptive technology companies’ like Deliveroo, were actually at the vanguard of a rather serious assault on established commercial norms.

How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (And Knowing When to Trust Them)
by Tom Chivers and David Chivers
Published 18 Mar 2021

Antonakis, J., Bendahan, S., Jacquart, P. and Lalive, R., ‘On making causal claims: A review and recommendations’, The Leadership Quarterly, 21 (2010), pp. 1086–1120 10.1016/j.leaqua.2010.10.010. Chapter 9: Is That a Big Number? 1. ‘£350 million EU claim “a clear misuse of official statistics”’, Full Fact, 2017 https://fullfact.org/europe/350-million-week-boris-johnson-statistics-authority-misuse/ 2. Sir David Norgrove, letter to Boris Johnson, 17 September 2017 https://uksa.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Letter-from-Sir-David-Norgrove-to-Foreign-Secretary.pdf 3. TFL Travel in London Report 11, 2018 http://content.tfl.gov.uk/travel-in-london-report-11.pdf 4. Rojas-Rueda, D., de Nazelle, A., Tainio, M. and Nieuwenhuijsen, M.

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At least with small but random samples, the more data you get, the closer you’ll get to the true answer. But with biased samples, getting more data doesn’t help and instead can make you more confident in your wrong answer. For instance, in the run-up to the 2019 UK general election, Jeremy Corbyn – then leader of the Labour Party – and Boris Johnson, the prime minister and Tory leader, held a televised debate. The political polling company YouGov polled viewers afterward and found that they were evenly split on who had ‘won’ the debate, with 48 per cent saying Johnson, 46 per cent Corbyn and 7 per cent saying they didn’t know. (Yes, it adds up to 101 per cent.

…

But ten days before the election, YouGov released a ‘shock poll’ (not, in fact, a poll, but a model of polls) that found that the Tories would lose about twenty seats, meaning that Theresa May, the prime minister, would lose her majority.1 Come election night, the results were revealed: the Tories lost thirteen seats, and YouGov’s ‘multilevel regression with post-stratification’ (MRP) model had outperformed the rest of the field comfortably (with the final result well within their margin for error).2 Two and a half years later, with May gone and Boris Johnson in place, another election was called. This time, everyone had their eyes on the YouGov MRP, which called the election – in its final model, released days before the country voted – as a narrow Conservative win, with a majority of twenty-eight.3 ‘The new YouGov poll means this election is going to the wire,’ reported one well-respected political journalist.4 The idea that we should have predicted things – the Covid-19 pandemic, the financial crisis, the outcome of the last election – is seductive.

The Story of Crossrail
by Christian Wolmar
Published 5 Sep 2018

But bring in the ‘wider economic benefits’ such as job creation, the taxes paid during construction and economic growth stimulated by the line, which total between £39bn and £65bn, and the benefit–cost ratio zooms up to between 4 and 5. A no-brainer to fund, surely. Livingstone and Brown had agreed on the core funding, but Livingstone departed the scene when he lost the 2008 London mayoral election to Boris Johnson, who became the first Conservative to hold the post. Although famously lazy and averse to detail, Johnson was enthusiastic about Crossrail. As one insider put it, ‘he did not play games about Crossrail, he backed it and helped keep up the pressure’.6 But even with the money in the bag (sort of), not everyone was convinced.

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The site was needed for the expanding Tottenham Court Road station, one of the most cramped in central London and constrained by the proximity of the huge, thirty-three-storey Centre Point, which itself was in the throes of being changed from office to residential use. The first construction work took place at Canary Wharf station on 15 May 2009, at a ceremony attended by a pair of mismatched politicians, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and London mayor Boris Johnson. Transport minister Lord Adonis, London’s Transport commissioner Peter Hendy, Crossrail chairman Douglas Oakervee and Canary Wharf Ltd chief executive George Iacobescu were also there to watch the first of the nearly 20 metre-long (65.5 ft) steel piles, which underpin the massive station, being driven in.

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Work was hardly underway and no major contracts had yet been let. When the bill went through Parliament, the design work was only around 30 per cent complete, and while there had been considerable honing of the project’s finances in the intervening eighteen months, the cost estimates were still necessarily vague. Boris Johnson, the London mayor, who was now looking to the mayoral election in 2012, piled on the pressure to save the project. He held a series of meetings with Prime Minister David Cameron and George Osborne, arguing that, if the project were scrapped, it would scupper his chances of being re-elected. ‘Savings’ of £1.6bn were therefore found to satisfy the Treasury, half of which came from ‘reducing risks by simplifying integration works, re-sequencing work and reducing scope, saving £800 million’.2 This amount included the £400m, mentioned in Chapter 7, that Transport for London had set aside because of potential risks for the Underground’s interface with Crossrail; it also included savings from a decision not to create a direct connection from Crossrail to the District and Circle Line platforms of the London Underground at Paddington station, which would have involved a particularly fiddly and expensive passageway.

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet
by Arthur Turrell
Published 2 Aug 2021

Sykes et al., “First Physics Results from the MAST Mega-Amp Spherical Tokamak,” Physics of Plasmas 8 (2001): 2101–106. 23. “Boris Johnson Jokes About UK Being on the Verge of Nuclear Fusion,” New Scientist (2019), https://www.newscientist.com/article/2218570-boris-johnson-jokes-about-uk-being-on-the-verge-of-nuclear-fusion/#ixzz66tYUwh6k; P. Ball, “A Lightbulb Moment for Nuclear Fusion?,” Guardian (2019), https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/27/nuclear-fusion-research-power-generation-iter-jet-step-carbon-neutral-2050-boris-johnson; E. Gibney, “UK Hatches Plan to Build World’s First Fusion Power Plant,” Nature (2019), https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03039-9. 24.

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“A Tool for Tracking Millions of Parts,” Iter Newsline (2014), https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/1887; Space Shuttle Era Facts, NASA (2011), https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/566250main_2011.07.05%20SHUTTLE%20ERA%20FACTS.pdf. 6. “Stephen Hawking: Why We Should Embrace Fusion Power,” BBC News (2016), https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161117-stephen-hawking-why-we-should-embrace-fusion-power. 7. “Boris Johnson Jokes About UK Being on the Verge of Nuclear Fusion,” New Scientist (2019), https://www.newscientist.com/article/2218570-boris-johnson-jokes-about-uk-being-on-the-verge-of-nuclear-fusion/#ixzz66tYUwh6k. 8. R. F. Post, “Controlled Fusion Research—An Application of the Physics of High Temperature Plasmas,” Reviews of Modern Physics 28 (1956): 338. 9. R. Herman, Fusion: The Search for Endless Energy (Cambridge University Press, 1990). 10.

The Skripal Files
by Mark Urban

In its modern form it is a windowless place, electronically swept to prevent bugging, and plugged into a wide range of communications equipment including secure phones and video-teleconferencing facilities. Around thirty people arrived that morning to find Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, and a couple of officials waiting. Tall, precise in manner, and already well briefed, she would be chairing the session. Among the others filing in were Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, and two dozen other ministers and officials. None of them harboured any doubt that Russia was responsible for what had happened in Salisbury. But in appointing Rudd to chair the meeting, the Prime Minister was concerned firstly to deal with urgent practical questions arising from the poisoning and secondly not to rush into publicly blaming Russia.

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But in appointing Rudd to chair the meeting, the Prime Minister was concerned firstly to deal with urgent practical questions arising from the poisoning and secondly not to rush into publicly blaming Russia. But one figure at the Cobra table on the 7th had already come very close to doing that. The meeting followed remarks in the House of Commons the previous day by Boris Johnson. He and the Home Secretary, entrenched on opposite sides of the Brexit debate, were also quite different political animals: Rudd the more deliberate and measured, Johnson given to rhetorical flourishes and shooting from the hip. ‘It is too early to speculate as to the precise nature of the crime or attempted crime that has taken place in Salisbury,’ Johnson told MPs, ‘but I know members will have their suspicions.

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The investigation focused on who was about in the Maltings and Zizzi’s restaurant in the hope it might quickly yield suspects. As we will see, things would go very differently. There were a number of reasons why her initial readout was more cautious in attributing blame than the Foreign Secretary. She wanted to put clear blue water between herself and Boris Johnson, evidently. But she and those briefing her were also conditioned by the investigators’ desire to bring people to trial for Salisbury, and to avoid saying anything that, by pointing a finger before the evidence was clear, might prejudice the process. In this way the early reactions of the Home and Foreign Secretaries reflected the classic division between evidence and intelligence.

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals
by Oliver Bullough
Published 10 Mar 2022

This is not to say, however, that British politicians are not interested in some Eastern Europeans. They very much are. And in the next chapter I’m going to look at the interest they showed in one man in particular, the kind of man who could afford a lot of butler’s fees. 7 DOWN THE TUBES When Boris Johnson – the journalist-turned-politician who is, at the time of writing, still prime minister – was Mayor of London, he used to hold regular public events where ordinary Londoners could ask him questions. They were billed as exercises in transparency, which no doubt they were, but they also gave a man who liked performing an opportunity to perform.

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When the government was asked to choose between helping an entrepreneur to realise an eccentric dream that would enrich its capital city in a truly unique way or selling an asset to the highest bidder, there was only going to be one winner, and it wasn’t going to be Ajit Chambers. It’s a well hidden story that requires some excavating. So, as Boris Johnson put it in that first encounter with Chambers, we’re going underground. First of all, we need to dig into where the money that bought the ghost station came from. To understand that, we need to go back in time to the days of the Cold War, when the Communist Party still wielded unchecked power over Russia and the other Soviet republics.

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But that was a rare exception to the general governmental willingness to accept money from anywhere, which has so distinguished Britain since it got started in the butlering business. In 2020 Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee published a report on Russian influence in the UK. The report failed to gain as much attention as it deserved thanks in part to Prime Minister Boris Johnson dismissing it as an attempt to delegitimise the Brexit referendum. This was a shame because it was a thoughtful analysis of the kind of blind spot that has led Britain to accept money directly from Russian oligarchs, as well as from Russia-allied businessmen like Firtash, without looking into where it comes from.

Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain
by Ed Husain
Published 9 Jun 2021

As we head for the airport, I ask Oliver if he has been to London recently. ‘Years ago, probably not since 1980.’ ‘How do you feel about this government in London now?’ I ask. ‘Theresa May and Boris Johnson are only there because of our support from the DUP. Northern Ireland is the power behind the throne.’ ‘Right,’ I say. ‘And what about the new chancellor, Sajid Javid? Or the home secretary, who’s responsible for security around here, Priti Patel? Neither of them is white. Even Boris Johnson has Turkish ancestry. How do people around here feel about that?’ He doesn’t answer. There’s something deeply stubborn about Oliver, almost verging on denial of reality.

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First, back in 2006, there was the former MP Jack Straw’s uneasy questioning of a woman in his constituency wearing the full veil in a private meeting. Later, in 2017, there was the uproar over former Prime Minister Theresa May’s support for women to wear the hijab ‘without fear’. Then, finally, there was the backlash faced by Boris Johnson in 2018 over his comments about women in burkas ‘looking like letterboxes’. Throughout all this time, Faiza and I discussed this controversy that was so close to her heart and appearance. After debating the correctness of wearing a face veil for more than a decade, she finally decided to remove hers after leaving her job at an Islamic girls’ school several years ago.

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Ibn Khaldun was no abstract theorist: he was famed for his practical thinking. When the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane was on the outskirts of Damascus in 1401, he summoned Ibn Khaldun to converse for hours about what causes the rise and fall of civilisations. President Ronald Reagan, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have all cited Ibn Khaldun, but none has tried to unpack his insight on the rise and fall of countries and civilisations based on the energy and synergy of group-feeling. In the modern world, the idea that comes closest to the force that Ibn Khaldun identified is patriotism.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

On February 10 the administration released a budget proposal that called for deep cuts to WHO and global health funding. Meanwhile, for commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, China’s crisis was an opportunity to encourage manufacturers to return to America’s safer shores.19 In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s administration was similarly distracted. On January 31, an evacuation flight brought eighty-three Britons home from Wuhan, and the first case in Britain, a Chinese visitor, was identified in York in the North of England.20 But the headlines of the day were dominated by Brexit. On January 31, Britain left the EU.

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The International Labour Organization estimated that as of early April 2020, 81 percent of the world’s workforce were under one or other type of restriction.48 It was staggering and, for many, impossible to accept. Around the world, opposition expressed itself in national idiolects. In France and Italy, the radical left railed against the normalization of the “state of exception” and the spectacular accretion of power it conferred on the government.49 Perversely, Prime Minister Boris Johnson agreed: “We’re taking away the ancient, inalienable right of free-born people of the United Kingdom to go to the pub. And I can understand how people feel about that . . . I know how difficult this is, how it seems to go against the freedom-loving instincts of the British people.”50 In Brazil, President Bolsonaro, a skeptic from the start, continued to rant against lockdown measures.

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On Monday the sixteenth, it became clear that this was dangerously complacent.39 The foreign exchange market, where currencies are traded, is the biggest market in the world. Despite Britain’s faded status as a financial power, the place where most transactions are booked is the City of London. In 2019, on an average day, turnover ran to $6.6 trillion. In the week starting Monday, March 16, London was in turmoil. Boris Johnson’s laissez-faire coronavirus strategy was in tatters. The report from the Imperial College team made it clear beyond doubt that there needed to be an immediate shutdown. Would Downing Street bite the bullet? No major Western metropolis had yet gone into full shutdown—not London, not New York. On Wednesday, March 18, on the terminals in the banking towers of Canary Wharf there was only one trade: Sell every currency in the world.

The City on the Thames
by Simon Jenkins
Published 31 Aug 2020

Recession Years: 1970–1980 Immigration – The Common Market – Rise of the drugs trade – The Motorway Box – Battle for Covent Garden 24. Metropolis Renascent: 1980–1997 Thatcher vs Livingstone – IRA bombs – Docklands development – Big Bang – The decline of the council house 25. Going for Broke: 1997–2008 Blair and the mayoralty – Post-9/11 threats – Livingstone’s skyline 26. Constructs of Vanity: 2008 to the present Boris Johnson – 2011 riots – 2012 Olympics – High-rise London – Whose city? – Brexit Epilogue Photographs A Timeline of London’s History Author’s Note Further Reading About the Author Index List of Illustrations Section 1 1. Reconstructed view of Roman London, c.120, by Peter Froste. © Peter Froste/Museum of London 2.

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. © David Granick/Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives 68. The Barbican, c.1970, illustration by the LCC, from Peter Hall, London 2000, 1971. Private collection 69. Rubbish in Leicester Square, 1979. AP/Shutterstock 70. Ken Livingstone at County Hall, 1982. Daily Mail/Shutterstock 71. Boris Johnson launching London’s first cycle-hire scheme, 2010. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images 72. Canary Wharf from Mudchute, Isle of Dogs, 2012. Alamy 73. Coal Drops Yard redevelopment, King’s Cross, 2019. Urban Land Institute 74. View of the City from Waterloo Bridge, 2019. Guy Bell/Alamy 75. Notting Hill carnival, 2016.

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Over the next decade, London’s local councils lost between 40 and 50 per cent of their central government grants. This was to cost them 37 per cent of revenue per head, against 29 per cent in the rest of the country. In the recession year of 2008, the London mayoralty passed from Livingstone to the Conservative Boris Johnson. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Johnson was a marked contrast to Livingstone’s ‘cheeky chappie’ image, but he shared his predecessor’s unconventional humour and lack of cant, virtues in civic leadership. Nothing about his past, his classical metaphors, incessant gaffes or colourful private life seemed to dent his popularity.

Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence
by Yaroslav Trofimov
Published 9 Jan 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Most of the Ukrainian Army”: “Политолог заявил о готовности украинских солдат перейти на сторону России,” Lenta, February 22, 2022, www.lenta.ru/news/2022/02/22/osvobozhdenie. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 4: “We Will Fight. We Will Not Surrender.” “Some of the defense intelligence people”: “In Full: Exclusive Interview with Boris Johnson,” Sky News, November 2, 2022, news.sky.com/video/in-full-exclusive-interview-with-boris-johnson-12736232. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “For God’s sake”: Putin vs. the West, Series 1:3, “A Dangerous Path,” BBC, www.bbc.co.uk, January 30, 2023, www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dlzdwr/putin-vs-the-west-series-1-3-a-dangerous-path.

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“Nobody Loves Losers” Epilogue Photographs Acknowledgments Note to Readers Notes List of Maps Index _145852931_ Cast of Principal Characters Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, president Valeriy Zaluzhny, commander in chief of Ukrainian Armed Forces Oleksandr Syrsky, commander of Ukrainian Ground Forces Dmytro Kuleba, foreign minister Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of National Security and Defense Council Kyrylo Budanov, commander of GUR military intelligence service Mykhailo Podolyak, presidential adviser Petro Poroshenko, former president Vsevolod Kozhemiako, commander of Khartiya battalion Maria “Vozhata,” medic in Carpathian Sich battalion Mykola Volokhov, commander of Terra unit Kyrylo Berkal, Azov Regiment officer Valentyn Koval, Himars battery commander Anna Zaitseva, wife of Azovstal defender Yulia Paevska, medic and former prisoner Ihor Skybiuk, commander of 80th Brigade Ihor Terekhov, mayor of Kharkiv Kirill Stremousov, collaborator in Kherson Russia Vladimir Putin, president Sergei Shoigu, minister of defense Valeriy Gerasimov, chief of General Staff Sergei Lavrov, foreign minister Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of Wagner paramilitary organization Ramzan Kadyrov, leader of Chechen Republic Sergei Surovikin, commander of Russian forces in Ukraine Igor Girkin, former FSB colonel and former minister of defense of Donetsk “people’s republic” Other Countries Joe Biden, president, United States Boris Johnson, prime minister, United Kingdom Emmanuel Macron, president, France Olaf Scholz, federal chancellor, Germany Stevo Stephen, Wall Street Journal head of risk Manu Brabo, photographer Prologue On the sunny afternoon of February 23, 2022, Kyiv was still a city at peace.

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“You must explain everything to the children, because it is war,” he told her before rushing back to the presidential headquarters on Bankova Street atop the Pechersk hill. It was the last time he would see his daughter and son for months. There was hardly anyone on Bankova when Zelensky returned to his desk. Once fully briefed by the military, he got British prime minister Boris Johnson on the line. It was still the middle of the night in London. Like other Western leaders, Johnson had been told by advisers that Ukraine’s fight was futile. “Some of the defense intelligence people were saying: look, this is going to be very one-sided. The Russians are just going to roll through,” Johnson recalled.

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way
by Steve Richards
Published 14 Jun 2017

In the immediate aftermath of the referendum that they thought they would lose, the Conservative politicians Boris Johnson and Michael Gove seemed pale with fearful apprehension. Suddenly they had to make sense of the words uttered with vague defiance during the campaign. They were not euphoric. They had had an easy time of it on the outside; now there were deep and complex consequences as they became the insiders they always were. The leader of UKIP, Nigel Farage, was euphoric, but he did not stay on to face the consequences. He took the easy route by announcing his resignation. Of the leading campaigners in the ‘Out’ campaign, only Boris Johnson plays a role, as Foreign Secretary, in what form Brexit will take.

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Marine Le Pen comes from a highly political family and is a successful lawyer. She has not yet had the misfortune to be elected, but she is still part of the political elite. UKIP’s Nigel Farage was a wealthy stockbroker from Surrey and a member of the European Parliament. The leading figure for the ‘Out’ campaign Boris Johnson was educated at Eton and Oxford, was a former editor of the weekly Spectator magazine and a former Mayor of London. The leader of the Dutch far-right party, Geert Wilders, has been a member of the Dutch parliament for years. Trump has been a famous multimillionaire entrepreneur and celebrity for decades.

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Even those Conservative Cabinet ministers who joined the Brexit campaign and were theoretically advocates of a small-state liberal conservatism began to face the logic of their other arguments and put the case for bigger government. Nigel Farage and the two most prominent Cabinet ministers campaigning for ‘Out’, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, argued that the state must intervene to curtail the free movement of labour. That was their most overt campaign for government intervention. Forget about their support for the purity and efficacy of markets. Forget about their wariness of government as a highly active regulator of markets. They wanted the state to decide how the labour market should work.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

Other key bankrollers include property millionaires such as David Rowland, hedge-fund boss Stanley Fink, May Makhzoumi (wife of the businessman Fouad Makhzoumi) and venture capitalist Adrian Beecroft, a major investor in the legal loan-shark firm Wonga. Australian strategist Lynton Crosby has played a key role in British Conservative politics, a role he has juggled with his lobbying for private interests. After helping to mastermind the successful London mayoral campaign of Tory Boris Johnson in 2012, Crosby was taken by the re-elected mayor on a five-day business jaunt to the United Arab Emirates, allowing the Australian spin-doctor to promote his own lobbying firm, even though many far larger businesses were not invited by the mayor. Crosby’s business dealings came under fresh scrutiny when, in November 2012, he got a new job with the Conservative Party leadership.

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The language used was deliberately inflammatory, attempting to paint the Labour leader as a dangerous extremist. Miliband’s speech ‘raised the hairs on the back of my neck’, declared John Cridland, the director of the CBI, the big-business federation. According to the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, Miliband’s commitment to a crackdown on land-banking amounted to ‘Mugabe-style expropriations’, while Graeme Leach, chief economist at the Institute of Directors, saw it as ‘a Stalinist attack on property rights’. Miliband, frothed David Cameron, wanted to live in ‘a Marxist universe’; according to Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, resolutely on script, Miliband had voiced ‘essentially the argument Karl Marx made in Das Kapital’.

…

The Daily Telegraph’s Benedict Brogan knows of several examples of journalists who socialize with politicians, go on holiday with them, and are even godparents to their children and vice versa (though he refuses to break anyone’s confidence by revealing details). But what helps cement a coherent elite above all else is a revolving door between the media and politics. Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson straddles both worlds. He is the former editor of The Spectator and is currently a weekly columnist for the Daily Telegraph, once describing his £250,000 salary at the newspaper as ‘chickenfeed’. It is a worthy investment by the Barclay Brothers should he ever become Prime Minister. One of The Times’ star columnists, Matthew Parris, is a former Conservative MP with experience of working directly for Margaret Thatcher; another, Phillip Collins, is Tony Blair’s former speechwriter.

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians
by Isabel Hardman
Published 14 Jun 2018

Only a handful of reporters attend Commons sessions outside Prime Minister’s Questions, key statements on European summits and the like, so it’s often easy to become the ‘one to watch’ when no one actually watches to see if you’re much cop. Meanwhile, hacks will want to have lunch with you to build a good relationship before you enter a ministry. If you’re good company over lunch, they will warm to you and write you up as ‘effective’, even if this only means ‘effective at gossiping and eating pudding’. Other MPs, such as Boris Johnson, use their considerable wit to build a popular profile by going on shows such as Have I Got News for You. This only works if you are firstly actually funny and secondly able to laugh at yourself, as politicians are often invited onto these shows to be roundly mocked. But Johnson and Labour’s Jess Phillips are MPs who have made themselves far better known than their colleagues simply by being able to work outside the Bubble.

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Gove has entered every government department with three strategic objectives for his time there, and has focused on delivering those above everything else. As a result, he has gained a reputation for being a radical reformer, even among those who despise his reforms. Other cabinet ministers have less of a serious focus on their brief. While Boris Johnson undoubtedly enjoys the international exposure that being Foreign Secretary gives him, he has struggled to grasp that this exposure means that every comment he makes could have serious implications. He failed to get on top of the detail of a case involving a British national, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who had been imprisoned in Iran, and ended up inflaming tensions still further by telling a select committee in 2017 that Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been in the country to teach journalism, something the regime instantly seized upon.

…

But many others can’t quite rid themselves of their social media addiction. One former member of Ed Miliband’s team when he was Labour leader says that they kept trying to delete the Twitter app from his phone, only for him to reinstall it late at night to read what people were saying about him. Even Boris Johnson, who gives the impression in public of being comfortable in his own skin, went through a phase of reading the comments below the line on online pieces about him. I often observe a spike in MPs replying to trolls late at night, which suggests that politicians are logging on to Twitter as they lie in bed.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader
by Colin Lancaster
Published 3 May 2021

Unemployment rate drops to 3.5%, lowest since 1969. 10/11/19—President Trump announces US/China have reached an outline of a deal for phase 1 of trade negotiations. 10/11/19—Fed announces plans to buy $60B in T-bills each month. New actions are “purely technical.” 10/28/19—EC President Donald Tusk and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson agree to “flextension”: Brexit deadline pushed from month-end to Jan. 31, 2020. 10/30/19—Fed cuts rates by 25 bps (1.5–1.75%), third cut in four months. Powell wants to pause unless the growth outlook deteriorates. Month-end: UST 10s at 1.69%; S&P +2.2%; Nasdaq +3.7%. I couldn’t take it anymore.

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I meet my driver and hop in the car. The radio is on and I hear “Orrrrrderrrrrrr. Orrrrrdeerrrrrr. I have listened carefully to the application from the right honorable gentleman, and I’m satisfied that the matter raised by him is proper to be discussed under Standing Order Number …” It’s Brexit vote day. Boris Johnson is trying to ram his deal through. The currency has already popped 7% in the last week in the hope that this gets done, and we’ve been adding to our position the entire way up. It’s eight o’clock in the morning and BBC News is already in full gear. This will definitely be more entertaining than the Arsenal match later today.

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The Bank of Canada (BoC), BoE, BOJ, and ECB coordinate to increase dollar liquidity via swap lines. 3/16/20—Italian government approves a 25B euro emergency stimulus package. 3/17/20—EU bans most travelers from outside the bloc. 3/17/20—Fed announces creation of Commercial Paper Funding Facility (unsecured short-term loans for small businesses). 3/18/20—ECB announces 750B euro Pandemic Emergency Purchase Program (PEPP) that includes nonfinancial corporate debt; eases collateral standards. 3/19/20—Dollar swap lines extended to more countries, including some emerging markets. 3/19/20—California issues statewide stay-at-home order. 3/23/20—Fed further expands QE to include MBS; three new lending facilities: PMCCF and SMCCF to support large employers; revival of TALF to provide credit for existing corporate debt. 3/24/20—Tokyo Olympics postponed for a year. 3/26/20—Jobless claims spike to 3.28M for week ending March 21. 3/27/20—Boris Johnson infected. 3/27/20—Trump signs $2T CARES Act; $1,200 checks to individuals. 3/30/20—More states announce shelter-at-home directives: VA, MD, DC. 3/31/20—Fed announces another liquidity measure to temporarily swap foreign-held treasuries into dollars. Month-end: UST 10s at 0.67%; ∆193; S&P -12.4%; Nasdaq -10.1%; dollar index +0.9%.

Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-Racist Comedian
by Frankie Boyle
Published 23 Oct 2013

At every Tory Conference the party outlines its priorities: building a Deathstar; killing Harry Potter; and creating a doorway into our dimension so the Many-Angled Ones can harvest our souls to the accompaniment of several previously unreleased Fleetwood Mac albums. Boris Johnson usually gives a keynote speech that sounds like a Labrador having a ketamine-induced psychotic episode. And all the Tories speak of the Lib Dems like a celebrity speaks about the heavily sedated sibling they’ve sprung from hospital long enough to make up the numbers on Family Fortunes. It’s been said that Boris Johnson doesn’t have the skills to become prime minister. He doesn’t seem to have the skills to get dressed, but it happens. Sort of. Many Tories want Boris to lead them into the next election.

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Miliband has revealed he’s afraid his young sons can access violent porn on his smartphone. To prevent this from happening do what I do – before giving the phone to the kids make sure you’ve deleted the contents of the history page. I was surprised to learn Ed Miliband went to the same primary school as Boris Johnson. I’d naturally assumed both were failed prototypes for a Geppetto-like toymaker before he successfully made a real boy. Miliband’s parents fled Nazi Germany. But let’s not forget Cameron’s forebears were some of the first to describe Hitler as a monster – after he drank claret with the fish course when over for dinner.

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Perhaps it’s even time for an award that’s the opposite of a knighthood. Just so we can fully show our gratitude to bankers and the like, the Queen could tap their shoulders with a dirty mop and blow a raspberry, before they wriggle out the room on their stomachs while Prince Philip flicks them with a wet towel. Boris Johnson’s warned the government that new bank regulations could risk ‘killing the goose’. I’m guessing that’s from the expression ‘Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs made from all that money we’ve all already fed the goose anyway.’ The deadline for the banks to make the changes is 2019, giving us the structure that’s needed to avoid a second banking crisis, just after a second banking crisis has already taken place.

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party
by David Kogan
Published 17 Apr 2019

He could have done it in different ways, he may have got credit for being himself about it much more vociferously, but he couldn’t. By 2013, the need to get a clear focus and a full policy slate also meant new people were joining the team. Simon Fletcher, having run two successful campaigns for Ken Livingstone in London and then two losing mayoral elections against Boris Johnson in 2008 and 2012, was brought into the Miliband office by Anna Yearley. It was a joke in the office that Ed Miliband was the most left-wing person in it until Simon Fletcher joined, but Fletcher was to play an important role with the unions over the next two years. Patrick Loughran and Spencer Livermore of the Blair and Brown leadership teams were also approached.

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The known leavers, Iain Duncan Smith (who resigned from the cabinet before the referendum), Chris Grayling, Theresa Villiers and John Whittingdale were not particularly prominent among the public. Michael Gove joined them in February, despite his close relationship with David Cameron. Three weeks later, Boris Johnson announced his last-minute conversion to the cause. Having taken the decision, Gove and Johnson had no choice but to lead the Leave campaign with vigour. Cameron and Osborne countered this with Project Fear, which depended on a combination of economic arguments and the fear of the unknown. Pushing the economic consequences of leaving the UK in Scotland in 2014 had helped achieve a ‘No’ result in the Scottish Independence referendum.

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I thought they were more organised. Amidst all this turmoil, the political world continued to revolve. On 30 June 2016, two days after Labour’s vote of no confidence, the Conservative party nominations for leader closed and Michael Gove completed his cycle of turning on his friends by announcing he would stand against Boris Johnson who immediately pulled out. Gove had been his campaign manager up to that point. The Conservative soap opera continued into the following week with two ballots culminating in Theresa May beating Andrea Leadsom on 7 July. Four days later, May was leader of the Conservative party and on 13 July, the new prime minister.

Lonely Planet London
by Lonely Planet
Published 22 Apr 2012

Standout design highlights include the stunning Aquatics Centre, the Olympic Stadium and the state-of-the-art Velodrome. The entire park will be rebranded the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park upon its reopening after the Games in 2013, in a bid to make the park a top destination for visitors and residents beyond the 2012 Games. Barclay’s Cycle Hire Scheme London’s enthusiastic, tousle-haired mayor Boris Johnson spearheaded this immensely popular bike-hire scheme, with the affectionately named ‘Boris bikes’ dotting the capital since 2010. All you need to hire a bike is your debit or credit card, a reasonably fit pair of legs and lungs, plus a basic sense of direction. There are over 400 well-marked docking stations (Click here) around London and short trips are free!

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Best by Budget £ Honest Burgers (Click here) E Pellici (Click here) Mangal Ocakbasi (Click here) Nevada Street Deli (Click here) Busaba Eathai (Click here) Taquería (Click here) ££ Moro (Click here) Ottolenghi (Click here) Magdalen (Click here) Al Boccon di’Vino (Click here) Kazan (Click here) £££ Les Trois Garçons (Click here) Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s (Click here) Chez Bruce (Click here) Zuma (Click here) Le Boudin Blanc (Click here) Best by Cuisine Modern European Whitechapel Gallery Dining Room (Click here) Vincent Rooms (Click here) Launceston Place (Click here) Andrew Edmunds (Click here) Wild Honey (Click here) Indian Tayyabs (Click here) Café Spice Namasté (Click here) Mooli’s (Click here) Rasoi Vineet Bhatia (Click here) Cinnamon Club (Click here) Chinese Yauatcha (Click here) Bar Shu (Click here) Hunan (Click here) Baozi Inn (Click here) Pearl Liang (Click here) Vegetarian Gate (Click here) Mildreds (Click here) Manna (Click here) Gallery Cafe (Click here) Diwana Bhel Poori House (Click here) Italian Bocca di Lupo (Click here) Fifteen (Click here) Locanda Locatelli (Click here) Polpetto (Click here) British St John (Click here) Penny Black (Click here) Laughing Gravy (Click here) Inn the Park (Click here) Best Gastropubs Gun (Click here) Anchor & Hope (Click here) Garrison Public House (Click here) Duke of Cambridge (Click here) Lots Road Pub & Dining Room (Click here) Best for Views Skylon (Click here) Formans (Click here) Oxo Tower Restaurant & Brasserie (Click here) River Café (Click here) Min Jiang (Click here) Best Afternoon Teas Dean Street Townhouse (Click here) Orangery (Click here) Volupté (Click here) Bea’s of Bloomsbury (Click here) Wolseley (Click here) Best Food Markets Borough Market (Click here) Broadway Market (Click here) Portobello Road Market (Click here) Marylebone Farmers Market (Click here) Best Gourmet Shops Jones Dairy (Click here) Fortnum & Mason (Click here) Algerian Coffee Stores (Click here) Vintage House (Click here) Best Celebrity Chef Restaurants Viajante (Click here) Dinner by Heston Blumenthal (Click here) Nobu (Click here) HIX (Click here) Drinking & Nightlife West London pub TERRY HARRIS / ALAMY © There’s little Londoners like to do more than party. From Hogarth’s 18th-century Gin Lane prints to Mayor Boris Johnson’s decision to ban all alcohol on public transport in 2008, the capital’s history has been shot through with the population’s desire to imbibe as much alcohol as possible and revel like there is no tomorrow. The Pub The pub (public house) is at the heart of London’s existence and is one of the capital’s great social levellers.

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The project ran 24 hours a day, every day for 100 days, and the rules specified that the participants spent their hour on the plinth alone, could do what they wanted as long as it wasn’t illegal and were allowed to take with them anything they could carry. Following Yinka Shonibare’s MBE Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2011), a wink to the square’s dominant figure, Mayor Boris Johnson announced in early 2011 that artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset would present Powerless Structures, Fig. 101, a boy astride a rocking horse, in 2012 and that Katharina Fritsch would exhibit Hahn/Cock, a huge, bright blue sculpture of a cockerel, in 2013. Each artwork will be exhibited for 18 months.

The Flat White Economy
by Douglas McWilliams
Published 15 Feb 2015

Four years later, David Cameron opened the Technology Exhibition CeBIT in Hanover with a follow-up of sorts: “Come over to Shoreditch in East London and you can see it – Tech City is teeming with startups and new ideas. It started less than three-and-a-half years ago with 200 digital companies in that area of East London – now there are 1300”.2 London Mayor Boris Johnson has been even more directly involved. He has announced as his aim the desire to make London the technology capital of the world. Speaking at the launch of London Technology Week in June 2014, he pointed out Tech City’s successes but bemoaned the lack of blockbuster take-offs: “Although we’ve got the biggest tech sector in Europe we haven’t yet produced knock-out multi-billion pound companies.

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Speaking at the launch of London Technology Week in June 2014, he pointed out Tech City’s successes but bemoaned the lack of blockbuster take-offs: “Although we’ve got the biggest tech sector in Europe we haven’t yet produced knock-out multi-billion pound companies. They have in Silicon Valley. We need to explore why that is. Is it a certain British diffidence about making billions? Is it that we haven’t got kick-ass business people here? Or that the banks aren’t as proactive as they should be?” Boris Johnson has a point – the Flat White Economy has produced a lot of startups but they have not yet grown to the scale of global leaders yet. There is no London-based Facebook, Google or Alibaba. This may be partly a matter of time, but it remains a valid criticism. Besides the digital businesses in the area that directly comprise the Flat White Economy, there are related businesses which, in the decentralised world that many technology businesses inhabit, often involve more jobs and activity than the core businesses themselves.

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The pace of housebuilding in London is currently rising at a substantial pace as Figure 9.1 shows – London’s housing orders are running at about six times the historic average. If this continues, London will have had its highest ever pace of housebuilding – with the possible exception of postwar reconstruction. London Mayor Boris Johnson clearly understands the need to encourage housebuilding7 and has been very proactive in trying to ensure that planning permissions for housebuilding developers have been granted. He has been criticised for this (including by me), but in the context of the Flat White Economy one could make the case that if he is erring, at least he is erring on the side of permitting increased economic growth.

The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics
by Diarmaid Ferriter
Published 7 Feb 2019

One senior EU delegate maintained that vague talk of waivers for goods and services travelling over the border, or the UK collecting customs duties for the EU, or various untried technological solutions was ‘a lot of magical thinking about how an invisible border would work in the future’.24 May had asserted after the referendum that there would be ‘no return to the borders of the past’. But there was, it seemed, a return to the politics and ignorance of the past over the course of the next two years as a succession of clownish Tories revealed the depth of their ignorance and contempt when it came to Ireland, none more so than Boris Johnson, foreign secretary from July 2016 to July 2018, who embarrassingly suggested the invisible boundary between the London boroughs of Camden and Westminster as a possible model for a post-Brexit border. Johnson continued to dismiss the idea that the Irish border was a complicated issue and communicated his resentment at a private dinner in June 2018: ‘it’s so small and there are so few firms that actually use that border regularly it’s just beyond belief that we’re allowing the tail to wag the dog in this way.

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Why not let’s all put one hand on the red pencil and draw a line that falls naturally and peacefully into place?”’ And so the fate of Puckoon was sealed; now to be divided by the border, with a customs shed on hallowed church ground.29 In the aftermath of the Brexit vote the British government seemed to be taking the Irish border question as seriously as Milligan’s boundary commissioners. Boris Johnson even toasted the British government’s Chequers Agreement in July 2018 – a proposed ‘common rulebook’ with the EU post-Brexit for all goods, including agricultural produce, with Parliament having the option to ‘diverge’ from some rules and with ‘different arrangements for services’ – and then resigned over it.30 After the EU rejected the Chequers proposals in September 2018 Theresa May complained defiantly that she would not contemplate a deal that would ‘divide our country’ by treating Northern Ireland differently and threaten the ‘integrity’ of the UK.

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Arlene Foster later warned ominously of ‘blood red’ lines in relation to a special deal for Northern Ireland, persisting with the bombast that there could not be ‘a differential between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK’ and suggesting the Belfast Agreement could also be altered.32 David Davis and Boris Johnson may have been vocal about the idea that the border issue was being exaggerated, but credible sources suggested otherwise. In 2018, the first officially agreed account since partition in 1920 – between the Republic’s Department of Transport and the Northern Ireland Department for Infrastructure – revealed that Ireland had 208 border crossings and government technicians endured what was described as a ‘nightmare’ trying to map definitively all the roads, paths and dirt tracks that traverse the 500km of frontier, and there was still confusion about where the border juts in and out of routes, ‘or where roads are privately owned on one side and publicly maintained on the other’.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

Our enforced confinement in the home caused much family tension, couple separation, and even violence. But it was also a reminder to many people of the primary value of family and the hard work of nurture and education that takes place within its walls. If Britain’s health service is, as the Conservative Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, declared, “powered by love” then how much more so the private realm of the family. This is how I see the crisis as strengthening the Hand and Heart and readjusting the status balance somewhat with Head. To put it in political language, I see the crisis, particularly in Europe, as reinforcing an unusual coalition—a conservative preference for the local, the national, the family, along with a liberal preference for higher social spending and modest collectivism, combined too with a renewed concern for the environment.

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An exasperation with the existing political elites was a significant factor behind Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the national elections in France in 2017 and Italy in 2018. In almost all of these cases politicians were rewarded for their lack of political experience and, at least in some of those cases, for their “blokeish” lack of deference toward so-called politically correct speech: Consider the reluctance of Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and Matteo Salvini to be constrained by the normal rules of official discourse. But, of course, that list also underlines the fact that the idea of politicians being like ordinary people will always be a fantasy. “The uncomfortable truth is that all political systems are aristocracies… Democracies are only different in that the aristocracies are installed and removeable by popular vote,” as the former British judge Jonathan Sumption put it in a 2019 lecture.2 Leading politicians will always be different from the great mass of voters.

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Perhaps this is most true of education policy where we are all too much influenced by our own, dimly remembered, schooldays. Many less educated voters do say they want people more like themselves in politics, although they seem to make an exception for people at the very top like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson who are allowed to be sui generis. According to British political scientist Oliver Heath: “All else being equal, people with a given social characteristic prefer candidates or leaders who share that characteristic: women are more likely than men to vote for female candidates, and black people are more likely than white people to vote for black candidates.”

Lonely Planet London City Guide
by Tom Masters , Steve Fallon and Vesna Maric
Published 31 Jan 2010

Madame Tussauds is very keen on public surveys telling it who the punters would like to see most, resulting in such highlights as a photo op with the Kate Moss figure (a poor likeness), an eco Prince Charles statue, the Blush Room where A-listers stand listlessly and where the J-Lo figure blushes if you whisper in her ear. Bollywood fans are treated with a smiling Shahrukh Khan and ‘Big Bruvva’ lovers can get into the Diary Room and take the video home. The latest addition to the collection is of London Mayor Boris Johnson, smiling cheekily at the visitors, and the website features a YouTube video of the live Boris Johnson next to his waxen doppelganger, telling a bunch of journalists that Madame Tussauds is ‘one of those London attractions that will pull this city out of the recession’. All for a good cause, then. Permanent photo opportunities include the political leaders in World Stage and the array of celebrities in Premiere Room.

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Just two weeks later the attempted detonation of several more home-made bombs on London’s public transport system sent the city into a state of severe unease, which culminated in the tragic and shocking shooting by the Metropolitan Police of an innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, mistaken for Hussain Osman, one of the failed bombers from the previous day. Summer 2005 definitely marked London’s lowest ebb for some time. Return to beginning of chapter THE ERA OF BORIS Ken Livingstone’s campaign to get a third term as London mayor in 2008 was fatally undermined when the Conservative Party fielded maverick MP and popular TV personality Boris Johnson as its candidate. Even more of a populist than Livingstone, Johnson, portrayed by the media as a gaffe-prone toff, actually proved himself to be a deft political operator. Employing his ‘zone 5 strategy’ (campaigning in suburban London and largely ignoring the inner city where Livingstone’s traditional support lay), amassing a £1.5 million campaign fund and exploiting fears about Livingstone’s rumoured cronyism, Johnson shocked everyone by sailing past the incumbent to become the first Conservative mayor of London.

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While disagreeing with Livingstone on many things, Johnson has actually continued to support several of his predecessor’s policies, including the congestion charge and the expansion of bicycle lanes, albeit with a cut budget for the latter. Johnson, a keen cyclist himself, has pledged to replace Livingstone’s beloved ‘bendy buses’, though this is proving a more problematic campaign promise to keep for financial reasons. * * * THE BORIS PHENOMENON When Boris Johnson, the Conservative MP then best known for a high-profile extramarital affair and regular appearances on the popular news quiz Have I Got News For You, was elected mayor of London in 2008 the country at large was stunned. Johnson became the most senior Tory office holder in the country, and it was at once suggested that he and his old Eton pal David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, would soon find themselves rivals.

The New Snobbery
by David Skelton
Published 28 Jun 2021

“David Skelton was talking about levelling up and the potential for a Conservative breakthrough with the abandoned working class long before either was a glint in Boris Johnson’s eye. In this timely, insightful and impassioned book, he explains how a new snobbery is alienating the progressive left from the working people of Britain. If you want to know why the Red Wall is turning Tory, and how the post-Brexit political realignment might become permanent, read this book. I suspect Boris Johnson will have half a dozen copies on his bedside table before too long.” Tim Shipman, political editor, Sunday Times “David Skelton is, once again, excellent.

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Post-2005 ‘Tory modernisation’ was squarely aimed at the metropolitan middle class, with a short-lived cocktail of Thatcherite economics and social liberalism that didn’t seem especially conservative. This all began to change rapidly with the Brexit vote. The shift of the Labour Party to being the party of middle-class political hobbyists made the swing possible, but the Tory Party also had to change to make it happen. The move that started under Theresa May and then crystallised under Boris Johnson saw a shift away from myopic economic liberalism and accepted that the state had a role to play in the economy. This was reflected in a policy agenda that focused on using the state to ‘level up’ and the use of levers such as state aid. This didn’t go unnoticed and led to many towns that have been Labour for the best part of a century voting Tory – something that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.

SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies
Published 15 Nov 2021

The competitive environment in which regulatory agencies now operate has been shown to incentivise light-touch regulation – if your regulatory process is too strict, you are likely to lose out on licensing fees to a more lenient competitor. Research has shown that this regulatory ‘race to the bottom’ favours industry interests over those of patients.20 What happens now that the UK has left the EU remains unclear, but with Boris Johnson’s government allegedly pushing for further deregulation,21 it is unlikely that standards will improve. Five months after the Health Select Committee’s report was published, exposing many of the problems with the MHRA outlined above, a headline appeared in the British Medical Journal: ‘UK government fails to tackle weaknesses in drug industry’.22 This referred to the government’s response to the Health Select Committee’s report, which was simply, as Hinchliffe put it, ‘miserable on all our key recommendations’.

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The views articulated above were further corroborated in June 2014, when, as part of David Cameron’s Red Tape Challenge, the MHRA pledged to further ‘reduce bureaucratic burdens on firms’ – ushering in an era even more industry-friendly than that criticised in Hinchliffe’s Health Select Committee report, a lax regulatory environment likely to be further compounded now that Britain has left the EU. It does not bode well that Boris Johnson’s government has already been accused of potentially making NHS patient data available to US companies while further deregulating pharmaceutical markets.27 ‘What do you make of all this?’ I asked Hinchliffe, some time after our initial interview. ‘Well, I just find it all astonishing,’ he responded, aggrieved, ‘especially in the light of the evidence uncovered by our inquiry: that deregulation and commercial power continue to dominate successive governments’ thinking, to the clear and obvious detriment of the public interest.’

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It was a product of living in a rigged economy where inequality, racism, ailing services and poor wealth redistribution saw BAME people filling the COVID front lines of essential work. Neo-liberal ideas of individualism and non-stateintervention also took a hit. After all, it was no accident that it was leaders located on the economic right who mostly embraced the failed anti-interventionist policy of ‘herd immunity’. Donald Trump (US), Boris Johnson (UK) and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil) all adopted this policy to varying degrees, even though the most vulnerable in the herd (the elderly and chronically ill) would be the worst affected. This anti-interventionist, survival-of-the-fittest policy only collapsed after the UK public, out of incredulous self-protection, began spontaneously locking themselves down in early March 2020.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 17 Jun 2019

Siwek, “Video Games in the 21st Century,” Entertainment Software Association, 2017. 9Ukie, “The Games Industry in Numbers,” Ukie, http://ukie.org.uk/research. 10Ukie, “The Games Industry in Numbers.” 11Ukie, “The Games Industry in Numbers.” 12Boris Johnson, “The Writing Is on the Wall – Computer Games Rot the Brain,” Telegraph, December 28, 2006, www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3635699/The-writing-is-on-the-wall-computer-games-rot-the-brain.html. 13Tom Phillips, “Disgraced Senator Who Campaigned against Violent Video Games Jailed,” Eurogamer, February 25, 2016, www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-02-25-disgraced-senator-who-campaigned-against-violent-video-games-jailed. 14Quoted in Julian Benson, “10 Years Ago, Boris Johnson Held Games Responsible for ‘Ignorance, Underachievement and Poverty,’” Kotaku, January 19, 2016, www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/01/19/10-years-ago-boris-johnson-said-that-games-were-responsible-for-ignorance-underachievement-and-poverty. 15Olsberg-SPI and Nordicity, “Economic Contribution of the UK’s Film, High-End TV, Video Game, and Animation Programming Sectors,” February 2015, www.bfi.org.uk/education-research/film-industry-statistics-reports/reports/uk-film-economy/economic-contribution-uks-film-sectors. 16The Video Games Tax Relief program “allows video games studios to claim a cash repayment or tax relief from the Government after they have spent money on developing a video game.”

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Contrast this figure with the video market, £2.3 billion (of which the videogames market is 1.65 times larger); and music, £1.3 billion (videogames: 2.9 times larger).11 Videogames therefore make up the majority (51.3 percent) of entertainment spending in the UK. This potential—and it is worth stressing that often these statistics are exaggerated—has captured the imagination of many actors, from investors to governments. For example, the British politician Boris Johnson used to write scathingly critical takes on videogames. A prominent member of the right-wing Conservative Party in the UK, he is famous for his carefully curated image as a bumbling aristocrat. In an article for the right-wing British newspaper the Telegraph, Johnson once wrote the following about children who play videogames: They become like blinking lizards, motionless, absorbed, only the twitching of their hands showing they are still conscious.

Re-Educated: Why It’s Never Too Late to Change Your Life
by Lucy Kellaway
Published 30 Jun 2021

The red scrapbook is full of technical news stories from the early days, including an impressively niche one on agricultural equipment manufacturers, in which I painstakingly explain the superiority of the square baler over the round one. There are many more from my stint in Brussels where I was posted in 1990 to cover the impending single market. I wrote faithful stories about new European legislation in semiconductors and sausage meat, leaving my counterpart on the Telegraph, Boris Johnson, to whip up his own faithless scoops: Brussels bans the British banger. I am proud of my reporting as I worked so hard trying to understand the legal detail – so much so that I felt personal outrage over Brexit (on top of all the other outrage) as it meant all that effort had been a total waste of time.

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But once lockdown hit, over 150 people were regularly tuning into our Zoom events to listen to me holding forth from my study at home about how much I loved my new career. Only I didn’t love it then. I absolutely loathed teaching during lockdown. From the terrible day when we gathered around a computer screen in the maths office at school and watched Boris Johnson announce that schools were closing and that exams were cancelled, my job became hateful to me. I disliked recording lessons and posting them on Google Classroom, knowing that half the students – those very same ones who were already doing badly – would not be listening to them. I hated not being able to see my students.

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I don’t ask which one but fear the worst – that an article I wrote about dating is doing the rounds. Me: Quite possible. I used to be a journalist. Are you interested in journalism? Student: Nah. He wanders off to giggle with his friends. A Year 8 boy who took part in a debate I arranged comes up to discuss the election. He wants to be a politician. Me: Do you like Boris Johnson? Student: No. He’s a liar. But I still think this country needs someone like him. Over his shoulder I see a large group of students congregating. The school only allows up to eight students to talk together, but this is a cluster of ten smallish boys. I tell them two of them must leave the group, and stand there looking fierce until, reluctantly, a pair peels away. 1.05pm For the second half of duty I’m stationed in the canteen queue.

Corbyn
by Richard Seymour

If their campaign wasn’t to be a leftier version of the largely defensive, apolitical Remain campaign, it needed to outline a strategy for an offensive. Another Europe was possible – but how? John McDonnell was intellectually the sharpest defender of this case. He used a rally to condemn both the paranoid bombast of Boris Johnson, comparing the EU to the Third Reich, and Cameron’s ‘Project Fear’ approach to Remain. The debate, he said, was a perpetuation of the ‘gang warfare of the Eton playing fields’, dragging the country ‘into the intellectual gutter’. He stressed that many of the issues facing the future were transnational and required transnational solutions: climate change, financial malfeasance and tax avoidance, refugees.

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The critique of the EU as an undemocratic bloc committed to neoliberal practices was well founded, but there was, in truth, little strategic calculation about what Brexit would mean in practice, or how it was to be harnessed by the Left. The bigger problem, however, was that the Left was barely a factor. The media weren’t interested in what it was saying. Corbyn arguably only got the coverage he did, which was limited, because he was Labour leader. The top six figures reported in the news were David Cameron, Boris Johnson, George Osborne, Nigel Farage, Michael Gove and Ian Duncan Smith. Of these, four were Brexit campaigners. Taking the entire media into account, and factoring for viewership and readership, the Brexit campaign received 80 per cent of the coverage. Corbyn’s campaign focused on trying to outflank the media by building grassroots support, while Labour In for Britain muddled along in obscurity – in a BBC article on the campaign, it was mentioned as an afterthought.

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By insinuation, if you haven’t shown a consistent bias toward the British state, the Union, and the Loyalist paramilitaries defending it, you’re as good as one of them. That, naturally, segued neatly into the Conservative campaign claiming that Corbyn had, in the words of Security Minister Ben Wallace, ‘spent a lifetime siding with Britain’s enemies’. Or, as Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson put it, that Corbyn had ‘taken the side of just about every adversary this country has had in my lifetime’. The Tories went further in their attack ads, editing pieces of Corbyn’s speeches to make it appear as if he refused to condemn IRA violence at all.48 The chorus was in synch, the choreography perfectly timed.

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of
by Mick Hume
Published 23 Feb 2017

The last time any major UK political party pledged to leave the EU at a general election was back in 1983, when it formed part of the Labour Party’s left-wing manifesto – described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’ – which resulted in a devastating defeat. In the June 2016 referendum campaign, the leaders of every mainstream party – including Labour’s Corbyn, supposedly a long-standing left-wing Eurosceptic – backed the conformist Remain campaign. Even leading Tory Leave campaigner Boris Johnson had no history of being anti-EU, and had gone so far as to write an (unpublished) pro-Remain column months before the referendum. The popular Brexit vote looked far more like a spirited revolt against discredited and two-faced politicians than any tame acquiescence to their instructions. In response, those politicians reacted as if they had been shot at.

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37 What’s the truth about those ‘Brexit lies’? There were of course exaggerated claims and flights of fancy on both sides of the EU referendum: from the official Leave campaign’s fantasy of a quick extra £350 million a week for the NHS, to the Remain campaign’s horror stories of imminent economic depression; from Boris Johnson’s comparison of the EU with Hitler, to David Cameron’s warning that a vote for Brexit would delight ISIS and could start the Third World War. Much of this is the overblown-but-normal cut-and-thrust of heated political debate in an electoral firefight. Voters do not need to be protected from such stuff by the wise men and women of the European Commission, the ERS or any other fact-checkers or ‘official body’ set up to decide The Truth on our behalf.

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It is certainly preferable to leaving our liberties to the tender mercies of the state authorities backed by illiberal liberals who appear to believe that most voters are a racist lynch-mob, and that jurors are the rapist’s friends. 2 ‘People are too ignorant to know what’s right – leave it to the experts’ What proved to be the most controversial statement during the EU referendum campaign in the UK? Not Boris Johnson’s typically overblown comparison of the EU’s expansionist aims with Hitler’s Germany. Nor prime minister David Cameron’s desperate claim that leaving the European Union could mean signing up for the Third World War. No, the statement that appeared to cause most outrage in political and media circles was Leave campaigner and then-Tory cabinet minister Michael Gove’s suggestion to a television interviewer that ‘I think the people of this country have had enough of experts’.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

He is one of the few heroes Ken Loach and Alastair Campbell probably have in common. I confess that I can be a sucker for a spot of Nyemania myself. I’m not wild about fannish cults surrounding politicians. I’d rather have the hard-working, principled, slightly dull Clem Attlee over sordid ‘characters’ like Boris Johnson any day. But if we’re going to have cults, let’s reserve them for people like Nye. When I have winced behind splayed fingers as Jeremy Corbyn has scuttled in disdain and fear from journalists’ perfectly reasonable questions, flanked by minders who bleat about him being ‘hassled’, I wonder what Nye would have done.

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But another seminal landmark of the NHS is still very much standing, booming in fact, even in the face of adversity and austerity. Worth seeing, I thought. Well worth the tram to Trafford Bar and the 256 bus to Collyhurst, a working-class suburb of Manchester with a claim to be the historic heart of the National Health Service. We shouldn’t let the memory of an inflated self-publicist like Boris Johnson dangling marooned on a zip wire high in the air, waving a little flag like Captain Mainwaring’s halfwit brother, suggest that all instances of political theatre are foolish and wrong. Nye Bevan could surely have made even that daft stunt work, just as he made the opening day of the NHS a stirring national spectacle with himself, of course, at the heart.

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Many economists, most of those in universities and academia as opposed to the more partial and vested City economists, have pointed out that the cuts could easily have been postponed until the countries wider economic fortunes had changed and the threat of recession receded. But more to the point, when Christopher Grayling can squander billions on botched privatisations and Boris Johnson waste the same on harebrained garden bridge schemes, we have to ask what kind of society we want before we decide where to cut. For me, libraries, like schools and hospitals should be the last things we should cut not the first, alongside parks and leisure centres, swimming baths and sports pitches, the great panoply of healthy – and sometimes not so healthy – organised fun that was another reason some of us grew up grateful for the nanny state.

Half In, Half Out: Prime Ministers on Europe
by Andrew Adonis
Published 20 Jun 2018

Get rid of the EU and watch British productivity soar. De facto and de jure sovereignty – reality and delusion. Remember Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I: Glendower: ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep.’ Hotspur: ‘Why so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? Well, the spirits are summoned. Boris Johnson and the tabloid editors are on the case. And, forget not, if they don’t arrive on time by March 2019 we will be to blame. Which brings me to my final point. An important chorus in the drama of John’s negotiations with Brussels and with the Conservative Party was the media, more specifically the British media, parts of which have been the catalysts in moulding opinion on Europe over the years, and whose role will be even more significant and divisive I fear over the coming months and years.

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Noting that Samantha Cameron was with her husband, May turned to the only other person in the room at the time, her then media adviser at the Home Office, Joey Jones, and declared: ‘He’s going to go.’ She did not know until then that there would be a leadership contest in the immediate aftermath of a Brexit referendum. Even then she worked on the assumption, as many did in her party and beyond, that Boris Johnson would probably be the next Prime Minister. Only when Johnson withdrew from the contest did May realise she stood a very good chance. Suddenly she was Prime Minister when the only other candidate left standing, Andrea Leadsom, pulled out. With dizzying speed, the UK had a new leader who had never been given cause to think deeply about Brexit.

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This needless defensiveness was combined with an overconfident ideological zeal slightly at odds with her personality. Her ministerial team was equally ill prepared. Her Brexit Secretary, David Davis, had never been a Cabinet minister. He had been a highly effective Europe minister in the 1990s but the EU had changed beyond recognition since then. Boris Johnson had also never been a Cabinet minister before moving to one of the top jobs in government at the Foreign Office. Liam Fox had been forced to resign as Defence Secretary under David Cameron and now became the key figure seeking future trade deals. To some extent, all of them mistakenly regarded the early stages of the negotiation as a game of poker.

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World
by Peter Frankopan
Published 14 Jun 2018

Most people in Britain were ‘suffering because of our membership of the EU’, Michael Gove, then secretary of state for justice, stated baldly in a televised interview shortly before the referendum, offering no evidence to support his claim.19 The European Union, he had said previously, had ‘proved a failure on so many fronts’ – and was not only holding Britain back, but doing so to all its members. By leaving, he claimed, ‘we can show the rest of Europe the way to flourish’.20 In the build-up to the referendum, the European Union was presented as being part of the problem, not part of the solution for Britain’s future. The EU, said Boris Johnson, was ‘a job-destroyer engine’, that did deep damage to the British economy.21 The customs union between all the members of the EU was a ‘complete sell-out of Britain’s national interests’, said another prominent proponent of Brexit; ‘luckily’, however, noted yet another senior politician, Britain has ‘old friendships’ with other countries that could be rekindled and with whom better trade agreements could be reached – countries, as it so happened, that had almost all once been British colonies.22 To advance into the future meant looking to the past

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, Financial Times, 23 March 2018. 16http://www.europarl.europa.eu/resources/library/media/20180411RES01553/20180411RES01553.pdf 17Reuters, ‘EU is not at war with Poland, says EU’s Juncker’, 17 January 2018. 18Agence France-Presse, ‘Italy threatens EU funding in migrant row’, 25 August 2018. 19Anushka Asthana and Rowena Mason, ‘Michael Gove attacks David Cameron over EU “scaremongering” ’, Guardian, 4 June 2016. 20BBC News, ‘UK “better off” out of EU – Michael Gove’, 20 February 2016. 21The Herald, ‘Boris Johnson: EU tariffs would be “insane” if UK backs Brexit’, 21 June 2016. 22BBC News, ‘Liam Fox warning of customs union “sellout”, 27 February 2018; Chloe Farand, ‘UK government post-Brexit plans to create Africa free-trade zone are being internally branded “Empire 2.0” ’, Independent, 6 March 2017. 23UK Prime Minister’s Office, press release, ‘PM; UK should become the global leader in free trade’, 4 September 2016. 24Association of Southeast Asian Nations, http://asean.org/?

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, The Diplomat, 12 July 2017. 116Laura He, ‘HNA sells property and logistics assets to Chinese tycoon Sun Hongbin for US$305 million’, 12 March 2018; Don Weiland, ‘Default reignites questions over China groups’ state backing’, 7 June 2018; Elvira Pollina, ‘Elliott launches action to take control of AC Milan – source’, Reuters, 9 July 2018. 117Zhou Xiaochuan, ‘守住不发生系统性金融风险的底线’, http://www.pbc.gov.cn/goutongjiaoliu/113456/113469/3410388/index.html 118Stefania Palma, ‘Malaysia suspends $22bn China-backed projects’, Financial Times, 5 July 2018; Kuunghee Park, ‘Malaysia finally scraps $ 3billion China-backed pipeline plans’, Bloomberg, 10 September 2018. 119Jeremy Page and Saeed Shah, ‘China’s Global Building Spree Runs Into Trouble in Pakistan’, 22 July 2018. 120Jamil Anderlini, Henny Sender and Farhan Bokhari, ‘Pakistan rethinks its role in Xi’s Belt and Road plan’, Financial Times, 9 September 2018. 121Stephen Dziedzic, ‘Tonga urges Pacific nations to press China to forgive debts as Beijing defends its approach’, ABC, 16 August 2018. 122Jon Emont and Myo Myo, ‘Chinese-funded port gives Myanmar a sinking feeling’, Wall Street Journal, 15 August 2018. 123James Kynge, ‘China’s Belt and Road difficulties are proliferating across the world’, Financial Times, 9 July 2018. 124Sarah Zheng, ‘China embarks on belt and road publicity blitz after Malaysia says no to debt-heavy infrastructure projects’, South China Morning Post, 26 August 2018. 125Xinhua, ‘Xi pledges to bring benefits to people through Belt and Road Initiative’, 27 August 2018. 126Xinhua, ‘Full text of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s speech at opening ceremony of 2018 FOCAC Beijing summit’, 4 September 2018. 127Yonas Abiye, ‘Chinese government to restructure Ethiopia’s debt’, The Reporter, 8 September 2018. 128Christian Shepherd, Ben Blanchard, ‘China’s Xi offers another $60bn to Africa, but says no to “vanity” projects’, Reuters, 3 September 2018. 129Bank of England, ‘From the Middle Kingdom to the United Kingdom: spillovers from China’, Quarterly Bulletin Q2 (2018), op. cit. 130David Lawder and Elias Glenn, ‘Trump says US tariffs could be applied to Chinese goods worth $500 billion’, Reuters, 5 July 2018. 131Bank of England, ‘From the Middle Kingdom to the United Kingdom.’ op. cit. 132BBC News, ‘Boris Johnson’s resignation letter and May’s reply in full’, 9 July 2018. 133Tasnim News Agency, ‘Iran, Kazakhstan plan trade in own currencies’, 12 August 2018. 134Heiko Maas, ‘Wir lassen nicht zu, dass die USA über unsere Köpfe hinweg handeln’, Handelsblatt, 21 August 2018. 135Christina Larsen, ‘China’s massive investment in artificial intelligence has an insidious downside’, Science, 8 February 2018. 136Xinhua, ‘Beijing to build technology park for developing artificial intelligence’, 3 January 2018; The Economist, ‘China talks of building a “digital silk road”’, 31 May 2018. 137CB Insights, Top AI Trends To Watch in 2018 (2018). 138Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, ‘Xi Jinping Urges Breaking New Ground in Major Country Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics’, 23 June 2018. 139Stephen Chen, ‘Artificial Intelligene, immune to fear or favour, is helping to make China’s foreign policy’, South China Morning Post, 30 July 2018. 140Jamie Fullerton, ‘China’s new CH-5 Rainbow drone leaves US Reaper “in the dust”’, The Times 18 July 2017. 141Jeremy Page and Paul Sonne, ‘Unable to Buy US Military Drones, Allies Place Orders With China’, Wall Street Journal, 17 July 2017. 142Bill Gertz, ‘China in race to overtake the US in AI warfare’, Asia Times, 30 May 2018. 143George Allison, ‘The speech delivered by the Chief of the Defence Staff at the Air Power Conference’, UK Defence Journal, 13 July 2018. 144Stephen Chen, ‘New Chinese military drone for overseas buyers “to rival” US’s MQ-9 Reaper’, South China Morning Post, 17 July 2017. 145Boris Egorov, ‘Rise of the Machines: A look at Russia’s latest combat robots’, 8 June 2017. 146Robert Mendick, Ben Farmer and Roland Oliphant, ‘UK military intelligence issues warning over Russian supertank threat’, Daily Telegraph, 6 November 2016. 147Anastasia Sviridova, ‘Специалисты обсудили успехи и недостатки в сегменте отечественной робототехники’, Krasnaya Zvezda, 4 June 2018. 148Dave Majumdar, ‘The Air Force’s Worst Nightmare: Russia and China Could Kill Stealth Fighters’, The National Interest, 28 June 2018. 149Zachary Keck, ‘China’s DF-26 “Carrier-Killer” Missile Could Stop the Navy in Its Track (without Firing a Shot)’, The National Interest, 20 April 2018. 150Aanchal Bansal, ‘India’s first manned space mission to send three persons’, Economic Times, 29 August 2018. 151Stephen Clark, ‘China sets new national record for most launches in a year’, Spaceflight Now, 27 August 2018; Ernesto Londoño, ‘China on the march in Latin America with new space station in Argentina’, Financial Review, 2 August 2018. 152White House, ‘Remarks by President Trump at a Meeting with the National Space Council and Signing of Space Policy Directive-3’, 18 June 2018. 153Shawn Donnan, ‘US strikes deal with ZTE to lift ban’, 7 June 2018. 154Charles Clover, ‘China-Russia rocket talks sparks US disquiet over growing links’, Financial Times, 17 January 2018. 155Patti Domm, ‘US could target 10 Chinese industries, including new energy vehicles, biopharma’, CNBC, 22 March 2018. 156John Grady, ‘Pentagon Research Chief Nominee: China, Russia Racing to Develop Next Generation Weapon Technology’, United States Naval Institute, 11 May 2018. 157Shane Harris, ‘The CIA is returning its central focus to nation-state rivals, director says’, Washington Post, 24 September 2018. 158China–Russia Relations, p.5. 159Bandurski, ‘Yan Xuetong on the Bipolar state of our world, op.cit.’ 160Edward Luce, ‘Henry Kissinger: “We are in a very, very grave period” ’, 20 July 2018. 161Xinhua, ‘Reform, opening up break new ground for China: article’, 13 August 2018. 162Clare Foges, ‘Our timid leaders can learn from strongmen’, The Times, 23 July 2018. 163State Council Information Office, ‘Full text: Xi Jinping’s keynote speech at the World Economic Forum’, 6 April 2017. 164Reuters, ‘Trump says tariffs could be applied to Chinese goods’, 5 July 2018. 165Frankopan, Silk Roads, xv. 166Minnie Chan, ‘China’s army infiltrated by “peace disease” after years without a war, says its official newspaper’, South China Morning Post, 3 July 2018. 167US Department of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2018, op. cit. 168Jessica Donati.

My Shit Life So Far
by Frankie Boyle
Published 30 Sep 2009

I hated the intensity of life in London—walking around a Scottish city is like walking around London after an apocalyptic viral event. I knew that I really needed to get out when Boris Johnson got elected. Voting for Boris Johnson can’t have been that different from voting for a Labrador wearing a Wonder Woman costume. He’s sort of like a wee boy who’s woken up in his dad’s body. The Labour Party must really be in trouble if they can lose control of London to a fat albino with Down’s syndrome. Earlier this year Madame Tussauds unveiled a waxwork of Boris Johnson. It’s so lifelike the only way to tell them apart is that the waxwork is slightly better at running London.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by Brad Stone
Published 30 Jan 2017

James Titcomb, “What Is Uber and Why Does TFL Want to Crack Down on It?,” Telegraph, September 30, 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/uber/11902093/What-is-Uber-and-why-does-TfL-want-to-crack-down-on-it.html. 3. Oscar Williams-Grut, “Taxi Drivers Caused Chaos at London’s City Hall after Boris Johnson Called Them ‘Luddites,’” Business Insider, September 16, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/london-mayor-boris-johnsons-question-time-disrupted-by-uber-protest-2015-9. 4. James Titcomb, “Uber Wins Victory in London as TFL Drops Proposals to Crack Down on App,” Telegraph, January 20, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/uber/12109810/Uber-wins-victory-in-London-as-TfL-drops-proposals-to-crack-down-on-app.html. 5.

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It proposed rules that, among other restrictions, would prohibit Uber from showing available cars in its app and require drivers to wait a minimum of five minutes before picking up passengers who had solicited a ride.2 These were irrational measures, mostly meant to curtail Uber’s appeal. Emotions were running high. “That Travis, he’s so smarmy, I could just punch him,” Steve McNamara, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Driver Association, a black-cab trade group, told me on my visit. At the eye of the storm was London’s mop-topped Conservative mayor, Boris Johnson, who would later rise to international attention as a main backer of Brexit, Great Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. Johnson was in a tough spot. He had solicited the support of black-cab drivers during his mayoral run in 2008, even printing his campaign slogan on taxi receipts. At first Johnson noted that Uber was systematically breaking minicab regulations by allowing its drivers to cruise the streets and wait for passengers.

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The company mobilized not only an army of practiced lobbyists but two hundred thousand customers who put their signatures on a petition calling for the TfL to drop its proposed restrictions. In January 2016, it did. Johnson conceded that the regulations “did not find widespread support” and said that lawmakers could not “disinvent the internet.”4 Boris Johnson’s counterparts in continental Europe did not necessarily agree with him. In France, the institutional reflex against Uber was strong. In early 2014, with Uber growing in Paris—the city had become the startup’s sixth market more than two years before—the French legislature ruled that drivers had to wait fifteen minutes before picking up a passenger that hailed a car on the Uber app.

The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged
by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison
Published 28 Jan 2019

Jensen, T. (2014) ‘Welfare commonsense, Poverty porn and doxosophy’, Sociological Research Online, 19(3), 3. Jerolmack, C. and Khan, S. (2014) ‘Talk is cheap: Ethnography and the attitudinal fallacy’, Sociological Methods & Research, 43(2), 178-209 (https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124114523396). Johnson, B. (2013) ‘Boris Johnson’s speech at the Margaret Thatcher lecture in full’, The Telegraph, 28 November (www. telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/london-mayor-election/ mayor-of-london/10480321/Boris-Johnsons-speech-at-theMargaret-Thatcher-lecture-in-full.html). 341 The Class Ceiling Jones, D. (1924) An English pronouncing dictionary: (Showing the pronunciation of over 50,000 words in international phonetic transcription) (Rev. edn, with Supplement), New York: E.

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Young is not necessarily alone in this view.2 The US political scientist Charles Murray has long made similar arguments about the association between IQ and race,3 and more recently authored Coming apart, which blames the travails of the white working class in the US on their purported lower cognitive abilities. Back in the UK, former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has also drawn on these arguments, arguing that economic inequality is the ‘inevitable’ by-product of ‘human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth’.4 These views may seem a little extreme. Certainly, empirical research connecting social mobility, intelligence and genetics is highly disputed.5 But we start this chapter with such provocations to make a broader point.

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Figure 3.1: The class pay gap is even larger after accounting for demographics £-£1,000 -£2,000 -£3,000 -£4,000 -£5,000 -£6,000 -£7,000 -£8,000 -£9,000 No controls Demographic controls Intermediate origins Working-class origins Note: Predicted class pay gaps between upwardly mobile and professional-managerial-origin people, with no controls, and in a regression model with controls for demographics – racial-ethnic group, country of birth, age, gender and disability status. Both class-origin pay gaps are statistically significant at p<0.05. Source: LFS 60 Untangling the class pay gap Is education really the ‘great equaliser’? Demographic differences, then, definitively do not explain the class pay gap. But what about differences in ‘merit’ or what Boris Johnson might call ‘raw ability’? For many, particularly on the right and centre of British politics, this is the go-to mechanism when confronted with this type of inequality. Those campaigning to end the gender pay gap, for example, have spent decades working to dispel myths that women perform less well, are less ambitious, or less well-qualified.12 Tellingly, most people in positions of power who we interviewed for this book also instinctively reached for meritocratic explanations when asked about the class pay gap.

SuperFreakonomics
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 19 Oct 2009

Could it be that nuclear energy, risks and all, is now seen as preferable to the uncertainties of global warming?” / 170 Al Gore’s “We” campaign: see www. climateprotect.org and Andrew C. Revkin, “Gore Group Plans Ad Blitz on Global Warming,” The New York Times, April 1, 2008. / 170 The heretic Boris Johnson: see Boris Johnson, “We’ve Lost Our Fear of Hellfire, but Put Climate Change in Its Place,” The Telegraph, February 2, 2006. / 170 “Rendered nearly lifeless”: see Peter Ward, The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? (Princeton University Press, 2009); and Drake Bennett, “Dark Green: A Scientist Argues That the Natural World Isn’t Benevolent and Sustaining: It’s Bent on Self-Destruction,” The Boston Globe, January 11, 2009. / 170–171 Human activity and carbon emissions: see Kenneth Chang, “Satellite Will Track Carbon Dioxide,” The New York Times, February 22, 2009; read more about NASA’s view of carbon dioxide at http:/oco.jpl.nasa.gov/science/.

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He has since founded the Alliance for Climate Protection, which describes itself as “an unprecedented mass persuasion exercise.” Its centerpiece is a $300 million public-service campaign called “We,” which urges Americans to change their profligate ways. Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception. Boris Johnson, a classically educated journalist who managed to become mayor of London, has read Lovelock—he calls him a “sacerdotal figure”—and concluded the following: “Like all the best religions, fear of climate change satisfies our need for guilt, and self-disgust, and that eternal human sense that technological progress must be punished by the gods.

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 27 Oct 2020

Rainey et al., “California Lessons from the 1918 Pandemic: San Francisco Dithered; Los Angeles Acted and Saved Lives,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 2020. 23 P. Gahr et al., “An Outbreak of Measles in an Under-Vaccinated Community,” Pediatrics 2014; 134: e220–228. 24 H. Stewart et al., “Boris Johnson Orders UK Lockdown to Be Enforced by Police,” The Guardian, March 23, 2020. 25 Y. Talmazan, “U.K.’s Boris Johnson Says Doctors Prepared to Announce His Death as He Fought COVID-19,” NBC News, May 3, 2020. 26 T. Mulvihill, “Sweden’s Divisive Lockdown Policy Could See It Excluded from Nordic ‘Travel Bubble,’” The Telegraph, May 27, 2020. 27 J. Henley, “We Should Have Done More, Admits Architect of Sweden’s Covid-19 Strategy,” The Guardian, June 3, 2020. 28 D.

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This line of reasoning feels sound in some ways; we cannot really stop the germ from infecting many people unless we have a vaccine, and efforts to stop it require us to devastate our economy and might possibly create many more deaths because of our response. After all, poverty is deadly too. Some countries did consider this approach in 2020. The British toyed with, but ultimately rejected, the idea of “taking it on the chin.” Sobering estimates of a rapid increase in deaths prompted a belated national lockdown in the UK.24 Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself contracted the disease after affecting an air of nonchalance for months, and he ended up in intensive care for several days in April 2020.25 Sweden, alone among its Scandinavian neighbors, adopted a tactic like this, aiming to isolate the vulnerable and aged while allowing the young and healthy to go about their business as sensibly as possible in order to achieve sufficient levels of population immunity.

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We learned that in India, for unclear reasons, younger people died of SARS-2 in higher proportions than in other countries.4 That country was being hit so hard that it resorted to using railway cars to create eight thousand more beds for COVID-19 patients in the capital.5 At the same time, the virus reemerged in China and in other populous countries, such as South Korea, that had previously successfully controlled it. In Brazil, whose president, Jair Bolsonaro, was so dismissive of what he called a “little flu” that a federal judge had to order him to wear a mask, the virus ran loose. In fact, like Boris Johnson in England before him, Bolsonaro became infected himself.6 Very preliminary hints also emerged from genetics laboratories around the world that the virus might possibly have certain variants that were worse for humans—more deadly or more infectious or both.7 And, with the passage of time, information began to accumulate about the long-term morbidity associated with the virus; some patients would be debilitated for months after recovery.8 In other words, for all we have learned about the virus through the early stages of the pandemic, there is still colossal uncertainty about exactly how it will continue to change the shape of our society in the coming years.

Greater: Britain After the Storm
by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis
Published 19 May 2021

With an eighty-seven majority, it has more power to legislate than any other government in the past thirty years. The pandemic has obscured this truth. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this and the scale of the massive shift. This matters because without a majority, governments can barely deal with day-to-day events. They can’t do anything. This is where it had got to when Boris Johnson was elected leader of the Conservatives. In fact, it was worse than that. It was what is technically called a significant minority position. With a small majority (up to fifty seats), governments can pass budgets and set about running the country. In a house of 650 MPs, though, if one in thirteen, or 7 per cent, of your MPs rebel, then you’ve lost your small majority.

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utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic 7 https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/foi/foi-and-eir/commons-foi-disclosures/human-resources/staff---numbers-2017/ 8 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31049249 9 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31049249 10 https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/parliamentary-monitor-2018/time 11 https://webrootsdemocracy.org/2018/01/19/mps-clamour-for-electronic-voting/ 12 HoC library. 13 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/06/who-needs-house-of-lords-meet-peers-rattling-the-commons 14 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/sep/07/nadine-dorries-david-cameron-quip 15 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-parliaments-42908222 16 https://www.visitbritain.org/annual-survey-visits-visitor-attractions-latest-results 17 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/08/uk-more-willing-embrace-authoritarianism-warn-hansard-audit-political-engagement 18 https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/parliamentary-monitor-2020/cost-administration 19 https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/parliamentary-monitor-2020/cost-administration 20 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/house-of-lords-expenses-spiral-out-of-control-36w0cbq5s 21 https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1323184/house-of-lords-peers-expenses-cost-voting-debates-electoral-reform-society 22 https://www.parliament.uk/about/faqs/house-of-lords-faqs/lords-members/ 23 https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/latest-news-and-research/publications/house-of-lords-fact-vs-fiction/#sub-section-3 24 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2375700/MP-Mark-Pritchard-My-marriage-latest-list-20-Tories-split-spouses.html 25 https://labourlist.org/2014/07/labour-need-more-signposts-not-weathervanes/ 26 https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/house-of-commons-trends-the-age-of-mps/ 27 https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7483/CBP-7483.pdf 28 https://www.statista.com/statistics/275394/median-age-of-the-population-in-the-united-kingdom/ 29 https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/datasets/allemployeesashetable1 30 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaries_of_Members_of_the_United_Kingdom_Parliament 31 https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/foi/transparency-publications/hoc-transparency-publications/former-mp-passes/ 32 http://www.w4mp.org/library/researchguides/welcome/access-to-refreshment-facilities-in-the-palace-of-westminster/ 33 https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olympic-britain/parliament-and-elections/representatives-of-society/ 34 https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/jun/04/higher-education-participation-data-analysis 35 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Too-Fast-Think-Creativity-Hyper-connected/dp/0749478861 36 Iain McGilchrist, ‘The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World’, TED, October 2011. 37 https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/boris-johnson-faces-election-wipeout-unless-he-rejects-rampant-individualism-new-poll-warns 38 https://www.ukonward.com/thepoliticsofbelonging/ 7 MODERNISING THE MANAGEMENT THAT GOVERNS US ‘The only real way to reform the civil service system is to reform the political system, and no government’s going to reform the system that put it into power.’

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Theresa May said she wanted to make Britain a country that works for everyone, adding, ‘When it comes to opportunity, we won’t entrench the advantages of the fortunate few. We will do everything we can to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.’36 Progress is being made. Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently committed to 50 per cent of Conservative candidates at the next general election being female.37 It is recognition that the world is changing. But the progress over the past twenty years has been slow, as we saw in Chapter 2. That’s also the conclusion of the Social Mobility Commission’s two papers ‘Time for change: an assessment of government policies on social mobility 1997–2017’38 and ‘Social mobility in Great Britain – state of the nation 2018 to 2019’.39 A 2018 OECD report on the subject measured the number of generations it would take for the descendants of a child born into the lowest 10 per cent of socio-economic groups to earn the national average wage.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
by Fiona Hill
Published 4 Oct 2021

Across the Atlantic, British newspaper columnists homed in on the assertion in my opening statement that my working-class background and northern English accent limited my professional prospects in the United Kingdom. They pondered the persistence of class and accent discrimination in England and the barriers they posed to career advancement. Somewhat bizarrely, they compared my unlikely professional trajectory to that of British prime minister Boris Johnson, the privileged and plummy-accented product of Eton and Oxford. I was suddenly the “improbable” Fiona Hill (as the Financial Times put it six months later in a June 2020 feature). The newspaper articles, the comments that accompanied them online, subsequent letters to the editor, and personal letters sent directly to me posed a series of questions: Was it true that my background had held me back in the UK in the 1980s?

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Farage had never actually been elected to a seat in the British Parliament in Westminster. Nonetheless, he claimed to channel the desire of the entire British population to be liberated from Europe. Several other vocal and flamboyant political activists jumped into the Brexit fray, including future British prime minister Boris Johnson, who tried to out-Farage Farage—to leverage the Brexit campaign for himself and accelerate his political momentum up the echelons of the Conservative Party. The Remain campaign was run by Prime Minister Cameron’s government, but with a limited budget and little enthusiasm. The government, and UK pollsters initially presumed the British electorate would continue to see the benefits of EU membership and vote to remain by a small but comfortable margin.

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They had just stood by and done nothing as jobs in the North East were decimated. The last huge steelworks and massive blast furnace in the North East, in Redcar, where several of Mam’s cousins had worked, closed down in 2015. This definitely colored people’s views on the eve of the Brexit referendum. During the Brexit campaign, Nigel Farage and also future prime minister Boris Johnson blamed the EU for these closures as well as for the growing strain on the budgets of the NHS, one of the last big regional employers. So people in Bishop Auckland and the North East voted for the Tories to “get Brexit done” and bring money and attention back home. Similarly, in the United States, workers believed the Democratic Party had abandoned them.

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
by Brett Christophers
Published 6 Nov 2018

So while its main focus is on the twentieth century, it insists that a true grasp of the political economy of land in contemporary Britain requires us to peer back nearly a thousand years, to the Norman invasion, the formalization of a system of feudal tenure, and the production in 1086 of the first, famous survey of national (at least, English and Welsh) landownership: the Domesday Book. The Book’s echoes, after all, are still with us, and part of our subsequent story: when in 2014, for instance, business interests urged the then London mayor, Boris Johnson, to identify and sell the capital’s surplus public land, they advised him to first create ‘a 21st Century Domesday Book for London so we know where this land is’.1 And while this chapter looks mainly at the history of public land, it also considers those types of landownership to which public ownership represents – and always has represented – a political alternative, in the absence of which the story of public land per se clearly cannot be told.

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Neither, of course, is private-sector influence limited to ideas and hands-on ‘assistance’. The private sector also cajoles. It recommends. It lobbies. And its lobbying is often underwritten or accompanied by monetary payment. In March 2014, the following headline appeared in London’s Evening Standard: ‘Sell Public Land to Solve Housing Crisis, Boris Johnson Is Told.’1 And in this case it was not Whitehall doing the telling. Johnson, then London mayor, was being instructed to privatize public land in the capital by London First, a business lobby group. He would hear the same message from the Berkeley Group, one of Britain’s leading property developers.

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Often those injunctions, like London First’s, have been issued in public, and we will encounter more of them, some more subtle than others. But one imagines many have also been made in private, behind closed doors. In 2014, Aditya Chakrabortty reported on a particularly striking and pertinent example of lobbying. Boris Johnson was again involved. London was for the first time hosting the UK’s own version of the annual property sector shindig MIPIM, held in Cannes. Chakrabortty described how each year ‘big money developers invite town hall executives for secret discussions aboard private yachts’ – in 2013, Australia’s Lend Lease had flown to Cannes the head of the very London council, Southwark, from which it acquired London’s Heygate council estate at what Chakrabortty called ‘a knockdown price’ (see Chapter 5) – and he raged that ‘in a shamefully undemocratic development system, this is one of the most untransparent forums of the lot’.

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City
by Anna Minton
Published 24 Jun 2009

But Shapps has made it clear that he believes ‘the current system strikes the right balance’, promising that ‘the Government has no plans to create any burdensome red tape and bureaucracy’.32 For a great many people in Newham and the neighbouring Olympic boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Hackney the main impact of 2012 on their daily lives will be the further marketization of housing for the poor, which is being introduced as the Olympic preparations come to a close. The cuts in housing benefit, which come into force in April 2012, will affect the 40 per cent or so of private renters in Newham on benefit and have caused controversy, with Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson likening them to ‘Kosovo-style social cleansing’ of poorer people from inner London.33 Research by Cambridge University confirms his fears that only a handful of outer London boroughs will be affordable to those on housing benefit, as benefit will now only cover the bottom 30 per cent of market rents in an area, rather than the average.

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But although the advent of shared space in some parts of the UK has coincided with London 2012, the Olympic developments themselves are characterized by exactly the opposite, with exceptionally high levels of security. Indeed, the UK’s track record in security and surveillance was considered a key strength of London’s bid. Once London won the bid, Mayor Boris Johnson described the security operation to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. He said that ‘broadly speaking, there will be quite substantial security and protection around the main Olympic venues of the kind that you would expect, and you will be seeing more detail about that nearer the time, but it will be not unlike what they did in China.’37 ‘Island security’ is the popular term among 2012 security practitioners, who talk of ‘locking down’ the Olympic Park.

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Rugg, Julie, Rhodes, David, The Private Rented Sector: Its contribution and Potential’, Centre for Housing Policy, University of York, 2008 31. ‘Shapps promises "no more red tape" for private landlords’, Communities and Local Government, http://www.communities.gov.uk/newsstories/newsroom/1611643, 10/6/10 32. ‘Boris Johnson won’t accept “Kosovo-style social cleansing”, BBC News, 28/10/10 33. Fenton, Alex, ‘Housing Benefit reform and the spatial segregation of low-income households in London’, Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research, University of Cambridge, January 2011 34. There are more changes planned which Shelter warn will make the situation worse, in particular cuts to the Single Room Allowance which will mean that only people over 35, rather than 25 as at the time of writing, will be eligible.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
by Henry Sanderson
Published 12 Sep 2022

Chapter 15 Cornwall’s Mining Revival 1 ‘Cornish Lithium to receive significant investment from UK government’s Getting Building Fund’, Cornish Lithium, https://cornishlithium.com/company-announcements/cornish-lithium-to-receive-significant-investment-from-uk-governments-getting-building-fund/. 2 ‘Debate between Boris Johnson and Steve Double’, 16 September 2021, www.parallelparliament.co.uk/mp/boris-johnson/vs/steve-double. 3 Buckley, J.A., The Cornish Mining Industry, A Brief History (Redruth, Tor Mark Press, 1992), p. 3. 4 Tonkin, B., ‘Heroic and tragic truth behind Poldark: Cornishmen shaped mining in Britain and pushed boundaries the world over’, Independent, 13 April 2015. 5 Schwartz, S., ‘Creating the cult of “Cousin Jack”: Cornish miners in Latin America 1812–1848 and the development of an international mining labour market’ (1999), https://projects.exeter.ac.uk/cornishlatin/Creating%20the%20Cult%20of%20Cousin%20Jack.pdf. 6 Pell, R., Grant, A., Deak, D., ‘Geothermal lithium: the final frontier of decarbonization’, Jade Cove Partners, May 2020. 7 See UK Environment Agency report, ‘Wheal Jane, a clear improvement’, https://consult.environment-agency.gov.uk/psc/tr3-6ee-uk-remediation-ltd/supporting_documents/1992%20EA%20pollution%20incident%20report.pdf.

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Wrathall was keen to show me the comments by UK minister Nadhim Zahawi the previous evening at a dinner to mark the launch of a new Critical Minerals Association, in which Zahawi had supported the development of UK resources. ‘The potential to become self-sufficient in lithium which Cornish mining represents will I think be incredibly important to the British economy,’ he had said.1 Boris Johnson, the prime minister, had also been supportive when he was asked the previous week in Parliament about lithium in Cornwall, saying, ‘It is a wonderful thing that Cornwall indeed boasts extensive resources of lithium, and we mean to exploit them.’2 Other politicians, however, were less enthusiastic.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince
Published 22 Aug 2022

Cities work as economic hubs because they are concentrated nodes of connectivity – people exchange money and resources, trade labour and combine ideas to create something bigger than the sum of their parts. Restricting any part of this exchange limits the economy, as the UK discovered after its decision to end freedom of movement between Britain and the EU resulted in labour shortages that reduced the availability of everything from food to fuel. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, comparing immigrants to heroin, complained businesses had been able to ‘mainline low-wage, low-cost immigration for a very long time’ and needed to wean themselves off, but nevertheless was forced to issue emergency visas in a desperate attempt to attract delivery drivers, fruit-pickers and other essential labour.

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‘Immigrants bolster patriotism and national trust in American government institutions,’ the researchers concluded.14 This is borne out in countless examples, including the Irish-born French immigrant Samuel Beckett, who was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his heroism in the French Resistance, many of the UK’s leaders – Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Chancellor Rishi Sunak, Home Secretary Priti Patel and London Mayor Sadiq Khan are all first- or second-generation immigrants – and social reformers such as Thomas Paine, the British-born American immigrant whose pamphlets helped inspire the patriots to declare American independence in 1776. Today, just one in seven of us is a migrant, and of these only 20 per cent crossed an international border.

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Kung peoples Kutupalong refugee camp, Bangladesh Kyrgyzstan Lagos Lake Chad Lammy, David land ownership language/linguistics; language classes for new arrivals; and nation state Laos Las Vegas Latin America: Amazon region; first nation states in; fragile social systems in; impact of climate emergency; mega-El Niño (1997–8); migrants in Parla, Spain; rivers fed by glaciers; rural to urban migration League of Nations Leipzig liberalism Libya Lima livestock farming: by drone; feeding of animals; impact of drought; inhumane treatment of animals; insects as feed; land and water used for; meat and dairy subsidies; need for huge reduction in Ljubljana, Slovenia locust plagues London Macau Maillard chemical reaction maize production, global Malacca Straits Malaysia Maldives Mali Manchester Mangroves Marijuana marine life: fish populations; impact of global warming; starved of oxygen by algae marshes Mayan civilization Mayors Migration Council McCarthy, Kate McCay, Adam McConnell, Ed Medellín, Colombia media, prejudice against migrants Mediterranean Mekong River Melbourne, Pixel Building Merkel, Angela Mesopotamia Met Office, UK, methane Mexico Mexico City Miami Micronesians Middle East migrant cities: the Arctic as new region for; charter cities option; and circulation of community resources; ‘climate haven’ cities; creation of entirely new cities; as cultural factories; environmental sustainability; evidence of decline of tribalism in; expanding existing cities; in the new north; planning future cities; repurposing/adaptation of; successful urban development/planning in; as synergistic; training for rural migrants; water-management infrastructure migrants/immigrants: arrival in family groups; ‘Bangla’ communities in London; contribution to global GDP; creation of active markets by; distinction between refugees and; dominant hostile narratives of in West; ‘economic migrant’ term; evidence of decline in hostility towards; harnessing potential of; immigrant inclusion programmes; as indentured labour; internal migration; Boris Johnson’s language on; language classes for; levels of patriotism of; living in slums/shanty towns; mentoring and support for; as percentage of global population; racist and prejudicial tropes about; returning to origin countries; seasonal; situations of appalling abuse/danger; state-sponsored support needed for migration: and advantageous genetic modifications; barriers to today; as benefitting everyone; controlled by city authorities; as deeply interwoven with cooperation; and diversified genes/culture; evidence of decline of anti-immigrant feeling; free movement ends in twentieth century; and historic climate change; historical; human displacement at record levels; inherited routes and channels; and mental illness; as not reduced by aid; reluctance to move; and skin colour; of stuff/resources; as survival strategy used widely in nature; as valid and essential part of human nature; world’s major cities created by migration, arguments against/fears around: fears around crime and violence; and jobs; long evolutionary roots to prejudice; in the media; populist politicians; pressure on inadequate host services; prospect of radical change; resting on true/pure national identity idea; security/terrorism issues; and welfare systems migration, climate-driven: Covid cooperation as hopeful example; due to flooding; and geopolitical mindset; global agreement on pathways needed; hypothetical scenarios/models enabling; as inevitable; Kiribati’s ‘migration with dignity’ programme; mass movement already under way; move to higher elevations; national and regional relocation schemes; need for strong nation-states; need to plan practically now; numbers affected today; predicted future numbers; and Refugee Convention (1951); risk of domination by wealthy elites; as solution not problem; speed of movement of climate niches; water issues to be main driver migration, urban; access to health and education; community sponsorship models; family retention of farmland; and intensive infrastructure development; as most effective route out of poverty; population fall due to; role of business in migrant integration; from rural areas; successful management of; as unplanned and iterative; in the West (1850–1910); and workforce shortages in global north Miller, David mineral supples/extraction mining industry Mongla (Bangladesh) Mongolian steppes Morocco Mumbai, mussels Myanmar Nairobi Nansen, Fridtjof nation state: Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’; claims that country is ‘too full’; first created by revolutionaries; and genetic variation; and geopolitical mindset; and language; leases/purchases of territory by; model as often failing; nationality as arbitrary line drawn on map; need for reinvention of; as norm after First World War; and system of borders; translocation of existing nation states National Health Service (UK) national identity: and anti-immigrant feeling; and bureaucracy; creation of first nation states; ethnic and cultural pluralism as the norm; evidence of decline of tribalism; feelings of loss of/decline; and ideology of nationalism; lack of political meaning before end of eighteenth century; nation state as norm after First World War; need to change immigration narrative; patriotism of welcomed migrants; predicated on mythology of homogeneity; and supranational identity; transition to pan-species identity Nauru Neanderthals negative emissions technologies Netherlands; Delta Programme; Energiesprong house insulation Neukölln (Berlin) New Orleans New Story (nonprofit) New York City; ‘Big U’ seawall project; NYCID programme New Zealand; Managed Retreat and Climate Adaptation Act Newtok, Alaska Nicaragua Niger, West Africa Nigeria nitrogen Noem, Kristi nomadic pastoralism Nordic nations Normans North Korea Northern Ireland Northwest Passage Norway Notre Dame, University of, Global Adaptation Initiative nuclear power; fusion reactor technology Nusantara (Borneo) Nuuk (Greenland) Obayashi (Japanese firm) oceans/seas: acidification; as energy source in north; and enhanced weathering techniques; global warming absorbed by; impact of 4° C-hotter world; impact of carbon emissions; jellyfish explosions; long-distance migratory voyages; marine heatwaves; and migratory raiders; Miocene Era sea levels; North Atlantic currents; Northwest Passage; nutrient and oxygen circulation; ocean fertilization; release of carbon dioxide; rise in sea levels; sea grasses; sourcing food from; toxic algae blooms oil industry OmniTrax (US freight company) Ottoman Turks Overjeria, Bolivian village Paine, Thomas Pakistan Palaeo-Eskimos, Canadian palaeontology Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Paris climate meeting (2015) Parla (near Madrid) passports Patagonia Patel, Priti patriotism Pearl River Delta Peatlands people-traffickers Peri, Giovanni permafrost, infrastructure built on Persian Gulf Peru Pfizer vaccine Philippines; nurses from Philistines Photios of Constantinople Phuket, Thailand Phytoplankton plains/steppes plants/vegetation: destruction of by wildfires; genetic tools to help adaptation; grass verge areas; heat damage to crops; during last ice age; move to plant-based diet; planted to increase crop yields; replanting of; rooftop vegetation/gardens plastic waste Pleistocene epoch Poland political and socioeconomic systems: in Africa; benefits to democracy of migration; cooperation during Covid upheaval; corporate food system; democracy based on inclusiveness; development of governance systems; end of multinational empires; erosion in the powers of global bodies; failure over decarbonization; far-right political parties/groups; fossil fuels as embedded in; geopolitical constraints; geopolitical implications of farming’s shift north; global institutions with enforceable powers needed; and ideal temperature question; inequality as failure of policy; institutional bias over skin-colour; institutional trust levels; international diplomacy; move from feudalism to centralized monarchy; nation-state model spreads; need for global planning over migration; need for redistributive policies; need for strong nation-states; new regional unions option; pledge of ‘strong borders’ as vote-winner; possible new political institutions/structures; post-war institutions and inequality; strong/stable institutions in north; translocation of existing nation states; and transnational rivers/’water towers’; vested interests in the rich world; Westphalian state system pollinators pollution Polynesians populist politicians Portugal postcolonial diaspora poverty see inequality and poverty Próspera ZEDE (embryonic charter city) Prussia Puerto Rico Putin, Vladimir Pygmies Qatar race and ethnicity: and anti-immigrant feeling; deliberately prejudicial policies; and demographic change; European colonialism; fallacy of biological ‘race’; heat related inequalities; unconscious bias in society; white supremacists rain gardens rainfall: altering patterns of; captured by roof gardens/storage; seeding of clouds rare earth metals Raworth, Kate, Doughnut Economics, recycling Refugee Convention (1951) refugees: from Afghanistan; barred from working; Burmese Rohingya in Bangladesh; climate change not in legal definition of; distinction between migrants and; EU seeks quota system for; hostile rhetoric towards; judgemental terms used about; and Nansen passports; privately sponsored; from Syrian crisis (2015–16) see also asylum-seekers renewable power production: as adding to, not replacing, fossil fuels; artificial light delivered by LEDs; hybrid hydro-solar power concept; hydroelectric plants; as leading job creator; and net zero targets; phenomenal rise in; refrigerant units in global south; solar-powered closed-cycle farming; storage technology; zero-carbon new-builds Republic of the Congo restoring our planet’s habitability; biodiversity loss; ‘blue carbon’; climate change-biodiversity loss as linked; cooling of global temperatures; decarbonizing measures; enhanced weathering techniques; future repopulation of abandoned regions; genetic tools to help species adapt; as global, labour-intensive task; natural restoration after human abandonment; nature guardianship in tropical regions; need for speed; negative emissions technologies; ocean fertilization; paying communities to protect ecosystems; regenerative agriculture; replanting of vegetation; solar radiation reduction tools, see also geoengineering retail services rice; SRI cultivation process rivers: drying out of; fed by glaciers; heavier rainfall as increasing flows; lack of in Gulf region; pollution discharged into; transnational Roatan, Caribbean island of Rocky Mountains Rome, ancient Romer, Paul Rotterdam rural living: and depopulation crisis; flight from drought/heat hit areas; impact of flooding; massive abandonment of in coming decades; migration to urban areas; and population expansion in Africa; remittances from urban migrants; as single largest killer today; and water scarcity Russell, Bertrand Russia: and charter cities model; depopulation crisis; economic benefits from global heating; economic sanctions on; expansion of agriculture in; infrastructure built on permafrost; invasion of Ukraine (2022); mega-heatwave (2010); migrant workforce in east; as potential area for charter cities; small-scale modular nuclear reactors in; water resources in Rwanda: Hutus and Tutsis in; special protective zones in; and UK asylum-seeker plan Salla, Finnish town of sanitation Saudi Arabia Saunders, Doug Sawiris, Naguib Scandinavia scientific discovery Scotland sea grasses Seasteading movement Seven Dials, London sex industry Shanghai sharing/circular economy Shenzhen Shyaam a-Mbul Siberia silicates Silicon Valley Silk Road Singapore sinkholes Skellefteå, Sweden slavery Slovenia slum dwellers; conditions at Kutupalong refugee camp; in Lagos; in Lima; and urban heat island effect; vulnerability to flooding social class/hierarchies: and anti-migrant attitudes; barriers erected against migration of the poorest; despair and anger of ‘left behind’ natives; development of; and gentrification; middle class migrants; myth of meritocracy; prejudice as often defensive fear-based reaction social networks; benefits of trade; cities as focal points for trade; Dunbar number; entangled ancestries/identities; forged by migrants; and knowledge flow; loss due to gentrification; migrants in family groups; and mistrust of outsiders; need for inclusive governance; and reluctance to migrate; in slum areas; social clustering of migrants; synergy created by; and unjust hierarchies; welcoming of strangers to social services see welfare systems and social services socioeconomic system see political and socioeconomic systems soil: ‘biochar’ use in; biomatter decay in; as carbon store; impact of heat on; impact of wildfires on; integrated soil-system management in China; and overuse of fertilizers; and perennial cereals; use of silicates in solar power Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative South Dakota South Korea Southern Ocean Soviet Union soya production Spain Spitalfields, London stateless persons Sudan sulphate cooling concept Sumerian civilization Sunak, Rishi Sweden Switzerland Syrian crisis (2015–16) Tabasco, Mexican state of Tabassum, Marina Tahiti Tajikistan Tanzania Tasmania textiles industry Thailand Thepdet, Supranee thermal wallpaper Thiel, Peter Thirty Years War Thwaites Glacier Tokyo Toltecs Tong, Anote Tourism trade and commerce; cities as focal points for networks; free movement of goods; free trade; global trade deals; origins and development of transport infrastructure: aviation; decarbonizing of; electric-powered vehicles; equitable access to; in global south; and limitations of battery weight; problems due to extreme heat; sail power as due a revival; in successful migrant cities; use of foot or pedal trees: American chestnut trees; cycles of burn and recovery; as ‘emissions offset’; giant sequoias; ‘green wall’ tree-planting projects; vine-like lianas Trestor, Anne Marie tropical regions: benefit of solar cooling idea; impact of climate emergency; nature guardianship in; population rise in Trump, Donald Tsipras, Alexis tundra Turkey Turkmenistan Tuvalu UAE Uganda Ukraine: maize exports; Russian invasion of (2022) United Kingdom: ageing population in; anti-immigrant feeling in; Brexit; Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962); and Covid pandemic; destruction of peatlands in; flood defences in London; historical migration to; history of granting asylum; ‘hostile environment’ policy; impact of climate emergency; and inevitability of change; low statutory sick pay level; migratory shift to southeast; planned fusion reactors; planning laws; renewable power production; Rwanda proposal for asylum-seekers; slow processing of asylum claims; small boats in English channel; wet-farming in United Nations: Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (2018); HCR; Human Rights Council; International Labour Organization; International Organization for Migration; and Nansen Passport concept; suggested new global migration body United States: Chinese Exclusion Act (1882); ‘climate-proof’ cities in; as created from global migrants; dam removal in; demographic change in; and depopulation crisis; and extreme La Niña events; and future climate problems; Green New Deal; heat related inequalities; Homestead Act; immigrant-founded companies; impact of climate emergency; indigenous communities; and inevitability of change; lack of universal healthcare in; leases/purchases of territory by; low spending on social services; mass incarceration of Mexicans in; meat industry in; migration to since 1980s; and mineral extraction; municipal codes; net zero commitment; nineteenth century migration to; patriotism of migrants; refugee children in detention camps; resettlement project in Louisiana; rural to urban migration; seeding of clouds in; Trump’s work visa restrictions; ‘urban visas’ in; yield gap in university towns urban development/planning: Bijlmermeer (outside Amsterdam); and elderly populations; and inclusive government policies; machizukuri process in Tokyo; need for integrated high-rise/low-rise; new canals/water features to combat heat; parks/squares/public spaces; planning and zoning laws; slum clearance programmes; social capital investment in cities USAID Uttarakhand, Indian state Uzbekistan Venezuela Venice Vermont Vietnam Vikings war/violent conflict: over water scarcity; triggered by climate upheaval water, fresh: circulated, cleaned, stored and reused; closed-circuit water recycling; conflict triggered by scarcity; crop irrigation; desalination techniques; drip-irrigation systems; evaporative losses; geopolitics of water control; held in glaciers; impact of heat on supplies; importance of new water policies; inland lake systems; need for urban underground reservoirs; new waterways and river diversions; pumping of groundwater; purified sewage recycled; as resource anxiety of this century; running dry of aquifers; salination of groundwater; used for livestock; water pricing/tax policies Waterloo, Ontario weather systems: cyclonic storms in Bay of Bengal; El Niño events; extreme La Niña events; extreme weather events; Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ); monsoon regions; trade winds welfare systems and social services: access to in migrant cities; and arguments against migration; and bureaucracy; despair and anger of ‘left behind’ natives; intensive infrastructure development needed; low spending on in USA; migrant access to; migration as benefitting social care systems; punitive restrictions on new migrants Westphalia, Peace of (1648) Whales wheat production, global Wilson, E.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
by Owen Jones
Published 14 Jul 2011

She is a success story in her own right as editor of the Lady,a rather frumpy magazine that seems tobe largely read by posh women out in the shires. Indeed, the classifieds for nannies and domestic staff are among its big selling points. 'NANNY REQUIRED for delightful girls in West Byfleet,' reads one typical advert. And yet, despite being the sister of a senior Eton-educated Tory politician (although she argues that Boris Johnson's background is 'very different' from that of David Cameron), she expressed her disgust to me before the 2010 general election that 'the prospect is Old Etonians bankrolled by stockbrokers ... It's back to the days of Macmillan and Eden.' She has a point. All in all, twenty-three out of twenty-nine ministers in Cameron's first Cabinet were millionaires; 59 per cent went to private school, and just three attended a comprehensive.

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As part of her argument that they were personally responsible for their situation, she argued: 'The working class of the past had enormous self-respect. Men, however poor, wore suits and ties. Women scrubbed front steps. Mothers wouldn't have been seen dead wearing pyjamas in their own kitchen, let alone in public As Rachel Johnson (editor of the Lady and sister of Boris Johnson) puts it: 'What we're having is a media which is run by the middle classes, for the middle classes, of the middle classes, aren't we?' She is spot on. The journalists who have stirred up chav-hate are from a narrow, privileged background. Even papers with overwhelmingly working-class readerships join in the sport.

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Indeed, Shaun Bailey, a former Conservative candidate who was defeated in Hammersmith at the 2010 general election, had argued that the Tories would struggle to win inner-city seats 'because Labour has filled them with poor people'. Such was the outrage over the government's all-too-clear agenda that even London's mayor, the Conservative Boris Johnson, came out publicly to say that he would not accept 'Kosovo-style social cleansing' of the capital." Taken together, this is a toxic brew. Large numbers of people without secure work; low-paid work that fails to give people a comfortable existence; some of the highest levels of poverty in Western Europe; and millions left without affordable housing.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

National sovereignty has always been a core part of British identity, and the Leave campaign argued that EU membership was undermining that sovereignty. Remain supporters countered by pointing to economic, trade, and national security benefits in the status quo. Vote Leave was led in public by the campaign’s lead spokesperson, Boris Johnson, a pompous man who was once mayor of London and was always a Conservative favorite, with some of the highest approval ratings among Conservative voters, and Michael Gove, who could be characterized as Johnson’s opposite. Lacking Johnson’s pomposity, Gove was more measured and was a favorite among the free-market-type libertarians in the U.K.

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Though they won by only 3.78 percent, the Brexiteers claimed the entire “will of the people” for themselves––and even when Trump lost the popular vote by 2.1 percent, he too claimed victory. Despite proven cheating, Vote Leave did not have its Brexit medal taken away. No one was disqualified from running in future campaigns, and Vote Leave’s two leaders, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, were both allowed to run for prime minister. Crimes waged against our democracy were not considered by the political class to be “real crime.” Many framed these transgressions as being on par with a parking fine, despite the very real harm we face when our civic institutions can be so easily undermined by criminals and hostile foreign states seeking to wage electoral terrorism on our society.

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In the United Kingdom, if a prime minister resigns mid-term, the convention is that Her Majesty the Queen appoints the new leader of the governing party as the new prime minister without a general election. This means that the internal party back-roomers, donors, and paid members of the party can bypass an election and choose among themselves who shall lead Britain. On July 23, the members of the Conservative Party decided that the new prime minister would be Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary and lead advocate for leaving the European Union without any negotiated exit deal (often referred to as a “hard Brexit”). When forming his new government, Johnson appointed Dom Cummings, his former colleague from Vote Leave, to become one of his new senior advisers in 10 Downing Street.

The Miracle Pill
by Peter Walker
Published 21 Jan 2021

Many politicians have told me that car drivers tend to be much more vocal than people who more commonly travel by bike or on foot. So if you want a more human-friendly local area, it can be worth making that known. 10 So What Now? A New Era of Health I can remember exactly where I was at the moment the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, announced that the country was going into enforced lockdown to try to slow the spread of coronavirus. As with so many key political moments over the past few years – and perhaps not the best image for the message of this book – I was sitting hunched over a laptop, typing up facts and quotes to turn them into a news story as fast as possible.

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The other side of the equation is whether people, having been through the coronavirus restrictions, will become more accepting of subsequent interventionist government policies, particularly if they might improve outcomes in future outbreaks. Burnham, for one, thinks this is possible: ‘There is such an opportunity here, and I did sort of hear in Boris Johnson’s voice that he might get that. Time will tell. But it’s an opportunity I don’t think we’ll ever get again in quite this form. There is a public appetite to not go back to business as usual – people want this to be a moment of positive change, in many ways.’ Burnham says he has been thinking about the political transformation after voters removed Winston Churchill from office in 1945, despite him leading the nation through the war, with the Labour government bequeathing the UK its National Health Service and social security system.

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‘It’s never too early to start thinking about the future, to think about what kind of world we want to build as we emerge from this crisis. I do think that there’s a public mood about this. I think we owe it to have a sort of reassessment of what really matters in our society, and how do we build something better for the future.’8 On the same day I speak to Miliband, in fact at more or less the same time, a spokesman for Boris Johnson tells journalists, including one of my colleagues, that the prime minister is devising plans for a new approach to the nation’s health in the wake of his own near-fatal encounter with coronavirus. He is, we are told, extremely serious about this.9 No more than an hour after that, some other news emerges: my own city, London, is to close off large sections of the centre to all vehicles apart from buses, bicycles and pedestrians, at a stroke creating one of the biggest traffic-free areas in the world.10 It’s the kind of plan that even a few months earlier would have seemed an impossible dream, something that would need years of consultation.

British Rail
by Christian Wolmar
Published 9 Jun 2022

The franchising arrangement, created a quarter of a century ago in order to stimulate competition, is now dead, and finding a replacement structure has proved difficult for a government motivated more by ideology than by a desire to do the best for the industry and its passengers. The publication of this book is indeed timely. In May 2021, the government led by Boris Johnson finally set out its vision for the railway in a White Paper entitled Great British Railways. This was the result of a process set in motion by the previous administration, led by Theresa May, when a wide-ranging timetable change in May 2018 resulted in chaos and thousands of cancellations because the various parts of the railway had not been coordinated in the absence of any overall ‘guiding mind’.

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This would merely be following the lesson of history which shows a continued and continuing expansion of road transport and a corresponding contraction in the volume of business handled by the railways … a streamlined railway system could surely be had for half the money that is now available.1 The editorial went on to argue that the railway had a ‘long history of failure’, rather neglecting its success as the first land-based mass-transit system. Marples was a colourful character, rather in the Boris Johnson mould, though his background was very different. A self-made man from humble origins with few strongly held political views, he was an innovator with an abundance of energy and drive. As Postmaster General, he introduced subscriber trunk dialling – which allowed long-distance calls to be made without going through an operator – and, at Transport, he oversaw the introduction of parking meters, seat belts and yellow lines.

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According to Charles Loft’s book on the Beeching years, Marples ‘demonstrated a consistent carelessness towards rules that impinged on his personal convenience, which appears to have stemmed from a reckless enjoyment of flirting with political danger almost for the hell of it’.2 He was spared by the mores of the time as Lord Denning, the eminent judge who had uncovered Marples’s predilection in the course of writing a report into the Profumo affair in the early 1960s, felt it was not appropriate to name the ‘minister’ concerned. Nevertheless, Marples’s identity was eventually revealed, and his career ended in disgrace as he had to flee to Monaco to avoid a ruinous tax bill, and he died in self-imposed exile in France in 1978. There are echoes of Boris Johnson in several aspects: his stream of ideas, his showmanship and, particularly, his cavalier attitude towards what constitutes appropriate behaviour for a minister. David Henshaw in his book The Great Railway Conspiracy argues that this crucial period in British railway history was the result of a coalition of interests inside and outside government that were trying actively to do the railway down.

No Such Thing as Society
by Andy McSmith
Published 19 Nov 2010

There was Paul Weller, lead singer of The Jam, a scaffolder’s son from Woking in Surrey, whose ambitious father nurtured his obsession with rock music and was his manager for thirty years. Weller was aged tweenty-one in 1979, when he saw television pictures of Eton schoolboys jeering at ‘Right to Work’ marchers. He retaliated with the song ‘Eton Rifles’, which reached No. 3. David Cameron and Boris Johnson, aged twelve and fifteen, were at Eton that year, and long afterwards Cameron appeared on a BBC programme called ‘The Jam Generation’ to claim that ‘Eton Rifles’ was his favourite song of all time, provoking a grumpy response from Weller – ‘Which part of it didn’t he get? It wasn’t intended as a fucking jolly drinking song for the cadet corps.’12 Another product of the times was the eight-member reggae band from Birmingham who thought it appropriate to call themselves UB40, after the form Unemployment Benefit 40, with which too many of their fans were familiar.

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Years later, two journalists researching the life of David Cameron came upon a photograph of the members of the Bullingdon Club, which Cameron had joined, for the academic year 1986–7. The photograph showed ten supremely confident young men posing in their navy-blue tailcoats, with white silk facings and gold buttons, and mustard waistcoats. Sitting on a step at the front was twenty-two-year-old Boris Johnson and standing languidly at the back, like the prince of all he surveyed, was David Cameron, aged nineteen or twenty.37 These ‘Buller’ lads needed funds way beyond the reach of most people of their age. Their tailcoats alone cost £1,000 at 1984 prices, and their alcohol-fuelled dinners at Oxford’s finest restaurants cost about £400 a time.38 Dinner of en ended with high jinks, in which these privileged kids displayed their indifference to law and order.

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Sales of the Sun in the Liverpool area crashed. The management admitted that circulation in central Merseyside fell from 140,000 to 100,000; in the whole Merseyside region, it is estimated to have gone down from 320,000 to 204,000.33 The boycott endured for years, eventually forcing a begrudging apology from the Sun and, later still, from Boris Johnson after the Spectator magazine, which he then edited, accused Liverpool of ‘wallowing in grief’, In the immediate aftermath, the Hillsborough tragedy did nothing to shift the government’s firmly held belief that the sole problem with football was the hooligans who followed it. Five months afterwards, in September 1989, the England team travelled to Stockholm for a World Cup qualifier, followed by a press corps who were expected to file stories of English hooligans on the rampage.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

As Colin Ley puts it, ‘global financial markets are supposed to register the collective judgement of the owners of capital about how profitable it is to operate in a given country where all factors, including the risk of adverse government policies, are taken into account’ (Ley, C. (2001) Market driven politics, London: Verso, p 21). 7 Johnson is the Mayor of London and, like Cameron, a former member of the exclusive Oxford Bullingdon Club (in other words, gang), whose members used to get drunk and run round Oxford and smash up restaurants – with impunity. See also Huffington Post UK (2013) ‘Is being a banker genetic? Boris Johnson looks to intelligence to explain equality gap’, 28 November, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/11/28/iq-intelligence-boris-johnson-_n_4355372.html. 8 Bourdieu, P. (1993) Sociology in question, London: Sage, p 14. 9 Chakrabortty, A. (2013) ‘Looking for a party funding scandal: try David Cameron’s Conservatives’, Guardian, 8 July, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/08/party-funding-scandal-david-cameron-conservatives. 10 Froud, J. et al. (2012) ‘Groundhog Day: elite power, democratic disconnects and the failure of financial reform in the UK’, CRESC Working Paper No 108, University of Manchester, p 16, http://www.cresc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Groundhog%20Day%20Elite%20power,%20democratic%20disconnects%20and%20the%20failure%20of%20financial%20reform%20in%20the%20UK%20CRESC%20WP108%20(Version%202).pdf. 11 The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (2011) ‘Tory Party funding from City doubles under Cameron’, 8 February, http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/02/08/city-financing-of-the-conservative-party-doublesunder-cameron/. 12 The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (2011) ‘Hedge funds, financiers and private equity make up 27% of Tory funding’, 30 September, http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/09/30/hedgefunds-financiers-and-private-equity-tycoons-make-up-27-of-tory-funding/. 13 Hutton, W. (2010) Them and us, London: Little, Brown, p 179. 14 Powerbase (2001) ‘New Labour: donors’, http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/New_Labour:_Donors. 15 Peston, R. (2008) ‘Pointing fingers at the plutocrats’, Telegraph, 26 January, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/2783334/Pointing-fingers-at-the-plutocrats.html. 16 Wintour, P. (2013) ‘Labour backer says £1.65m donation was given in shares to avoid tax’, Guardian, 6 June, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/jun/06/labour-party-backer-donation-tax.

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Much of what people – including Tea Party members – ‘freely’ pay out as rent and as interest on debt to rentiers, together with the profit they produce for their employer, is unearned; the recipients of these payments are the ones that the slogan should be addressed to. ELEVEN The myth of the level playing field People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. (C. Wright Mills, 1956)44 Privileged people born into rich families, like Tony Blair, David Cameron and Boris Johnson, love to gush about meritocracy, ‘aspiration’ and hard work so as to distract attention from their privilege. Margaret Thatcher loved to play up her humble grocer’s daughter origins, while keeping silent on the benefits of marrying a millionaire ex-public school boy who funded her training as a barrister and bought two houses for them, one of them in Chelsea.

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Formerly the Tory party got most of its money from membership dues and local fundraising. Now it gets most from business. Financial sector donations have taken the lead, doubling under Cameron’s leadership, to make up 50.8% of party funding,11 with 27% coming from hedge funds and private equity.12 In 2008, 77% of Boris Johnson’s London mayoral campaign was funded by hedge funds and private equity firms. Are you surprised that Johnson is an opponent of regulation for the City?13 Things have changed for Labour, too. Where it once got 90% of its income from trade unions, under New Labour, this fell to 30% by 2001 as Tony Blair and allies managed to win over corporate donors by distancing themselves from Labour’s working-class origins and ingratiating themselves with the rich.14 Between 2001 and 2008, private equity bosses Sir Ronnie Cohen and Nigel Doughty contributed £1.8 million and £1 million respectively to Labour, the former Goldman Sachs partner John Aisbitt gave £750,000 and hedge fund executive William Bollinger gave £510,000.

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth
by Selina Todd
Published 11 Feb 2021

Migration, Opportunity Hoarding and Regional Social Mobility in the UK’, National Institute Economic Review, vol. 240, no. 1, 2017. 21 Savage et al., Social Class in the 21st Century, pp. 267–70. 22 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Higher Education, N5744. 23 Stephen Armstrong, The New Poverty, Verso, 2017, p. 152. 24 Quoted in ibid, p. 153. 25 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, C5706. 26 Ibid. 27 ‘Council funds for libraries, museums and galleries cut by nearly £400m’, Independent, 25 January 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/libraries-museums-arts-galleries-funding-recourses-county-council-network-cnn-social-care-a8741271.html, consulted 30 January 2019. 28 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, C5706. 29 Office of National Statistics, ‘Percentage of graduates in non-graduate roles, parts of the UK, 2015–2017’, Annual Population Survey, ONS, 2018, https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/adhocs/008381percentageofemployedgraduatesinnongraduaterolespartsoftheuk2015to2017. 30 Danny Dorling, Inequality and the 1%, Verso, 2015, p. 107. 31 Mass Observation Archive: Replies to Spring 2016 Directive on Social Mobility, J5734. 32 Social Mobility Commission, Time for Change: An assessment of government policies on social mobility, 1997–2017, HMSO, 2017, p. 4; Louise Crewe and Annie Wang, ‘Gender Inequalities in the City of London Advertising Industry’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, vol. 50, no. 3, 2018, pp. 671–88. 33 Savage et al., Social Class in the 21st Century, chapter 8. 34 Katharine Burn and Ann Childs, ‘Responding to poverty through education and teacher education initiatives’, Journal of Education for Teaching, Vol. 42, no. 4, 2016. 35 Quoted in ‘Boris Johnson evokes Thatcher spirit with greed is good speech’, Guardian, 27 November 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/27/boris-johnson-thatcher-greed-good, consulted 5 June 2016. 36 Carla Ayrton et al., Monitoring poverty and social exclusion 2016, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2017. 37 Social Mobility Commission, Time for Change, p. 5. 38 Quoted in Diane Reay, ‘Social mobility, a panacea for our times’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, vol. 34, nos 5–6, 2013, p. 667. 39 Paul Bolton, ‘Education: historical statistics’, Note SN/SG/4252, House of Commons Library, 2012, https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/22771/1/SN04252.pdf. 40 On the impact of recession on private school rolls after 2007, see ‘Demand for state schools rises as recession hits’, Guardian, 19 December 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2008/dec/18/schools-private-recession, consulted 5 March 2018; ‘Recession forces many to give up private schools’, Telegraph, 23 November 2008, and ‘Eton headmaster: Private schools “may close”’, Telegraph, 27 January 2009.

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‘I want to see social mobility, as it did in the decades after the war, rising once again, a dominant feature of British life’, Prime Minister Blair announced.2 This commitment united all the governments that succeeded his: Gordon Brown’s Labour administration of 2007–10, David Cameron’s coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats between 2010 and 2015, and the Conservative governments of Theresa May and Boris Johnson that followed. But these politicians presided over growing inequality and a decline in chances to climb the ladder. The two were connected: as the highest rungs on the ladder grew further apart from the rest, they became harder to reach. Between the 1990s and the 2010s the richest 5 per cent of people in Britain grew wealthier, while everyone else fell further behind.3 Successive governments, together with those at the top of big business and the media, used the rhetoric of social mobility to justify this unequal status quo.

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Labour believed that social mobility could go hand in hand with social policies designed to narrow social and economic inequality. But the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats were in favour of significant disparities in wealth, and saw social mobility strategies as replacements for social policies that were designed to prevent or minimise poverty and inequality.34 In 2013 the Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson – an Old Etonian who would become prime minister six years later – made the case for focusing on social mobility rather than narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor. ‘[S]ome measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity’, he said.

The Great Post Office Scandal: The Fight to Expose a Multimillion Pound Scandal Which Put Innocent People in Jail
by Nick Wallis
Published 18 Nov 2021

Whilst the lawyers were shuttling back and forth between the parties to see if they could get anywhere, most journalists following the story had 16 December in their diaries. At 8.30am on 11 December 2019, I was looking at the prospects list in the 5 News morning meeting on the fifth floor of the ITN building in Gray’s Inn Road. It was the day before the general election, which would see Boris Johnson’s Conservatives confirmed in power for another five years. At 8.48am I got a text from Caroline Wagstaff at Luther Pendragon, Freeths’ PR firm. It read, ‘I am sending you an email at 9am so you might want to be near a computer.’ The email was the joint announcement of a settlement to the Bates v Post Office litigation. ____________________ 1 In civil law, something called the statute of limitations means that an action must normally be brought within six years of an event happening.

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Callanan was silent on the need for any sort of investigation into the Post Office, and when challenged directly on whether anyone was going to be held to account, he told his fellow peers, ‘the government do not propose to take any further action against current or former directors.’ If that was the settled position of the government, it was given a kick 24 hours later by Boris Johnson. During Prime Minister’s Questions the Labour MP Kate Osborne mentioned her constituent, Chris Head, a Subpostmaster claimant and energetic campaigner. ‘Will the Prime Minister,’ she asked, ‘today assure Chris and others that he will commit to launching an independent inquiry?’ Johnson was unequivocal.

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O’Connell, Dawn Subpostmaster, Northolt, London. Convicted of false accounting. Conviction posthumously quashed at Court of Appeal on 23 April 2021. O’Connell, Mark Dawn O’Connell’s brother. O’Connell, Matt Dawn O’Connell’s son. Osborne, Kate MP Elicited promise of public inquiry from Boris Johnson. Owen, Albert MP Participated in the Westminster Hall debate in December 2014. Owens, Les Post Office non-executive director in 2012. Page, Carl Subpostmaster, Rugeley, Staffs. Convicted of theft at Stafford Crown Court. Conviction quashed at Court of Appeal on 23 April 2021. Page, Flora Barrister who worked with Paul Marshall and Aria Grace Law representing Seema Misra, Tracy Felstead and Janet Skinner.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

As the most educated people move to global cities, those with fewer qualifications find themselves shut out. The newly risen global cities outside the West, such as Dubai, overcome this problem by importing labour from poorer countries and putting them on visas that can be annulled at short notice. Western cities, such as London and Chicago, have no such luxury. In 2011, Boris Johnson, then London’s mayor, saw the downside when the capital’s fringes went on the rampage for several days, smashing up shops and burning cars, looting what they could not have. Five years later Britain’s left-behinds vetoed London’s economic interests in the Brexit referendum. To the West’s economic losers, cities like London and Chicago are not so much magnets as death stars.

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Although I was a supporter of the European project, those six months inoculated me for life against working in a bureaucracy. It was a stifling experience. Journalism promised wind in my hair on an open road. A university friend urged me to look up his brother, a British journalist who had made his reputation lampooning the ways of Brussels. His name was Boris Johnson. His trade was slanted reporting. It was ‘better to be pissing in from the outside than pissing out from the inside’, Boris joked, paraphrasing Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous quip. Though I disagreed with Boris’s politics and his journalistic methods – he specialised in mischievous caricature – it was easy to see why he had gained such a following in the UK.

9 Lessons in Brexit
by Ivan Rogers
Published 7 Feb 2019

But, let me tell you, as someone dealing with both Presidents and their teams at the outset of this process: what the EU Institutions mean by Canada + is not remotely what ex-Brexit and Foreign Secretaries and the Institute of Economic Affairs scribes mean by it. The title page is the same; the contents pages are different. Not for nothing did an unkind Brussels source label Boris Johnson’s “plan A +” (another + of course), Chequers 3.0. That proposition, is, as he himself might have put it, “an inverted pyramid of piffle”. And aside from containing a wish list – an understandable wish list – of things that are not actually present in Canada’s EU deal, it does not solve the backstop.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 29 Aug 2018

Like Einstein and Dawkins, an illiterate maid also has free will, hence on election day her feelings – represented by her vote – count just as much as anybody else’s. Feelings guide not just the voters, but also the leaders. In the 2016 Brexit referendum the Leave campaign was headed together by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. After David Cameron resigned, Gove initially supported Johnson for the premiership, but at the very last minute Gove declared Johnson unfit for the position and announced his own intention to run for the job. Gove’s action, which destroyed Johnson’s chances, was described as a Machiavellian political assassination.4 But Gove defended his conduct by appealing to his feelings, explaining that ‘In every step in my political life I have asked myself one question: “What is the right thing to do?

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Gove’s action, which destroyed Johnson’s chances, was described as a Machiavellian political assassination.4 But Gove defended his conduct by appealing to his feelings, explaining that ‘In every step in my political life I have asked myself one question: “What is the right thing to do? What does your heart tell you?”’5 That’s why, according to Gove, he has fought so hard for Brexit, and that’s why he felt compelled to backstab his erstwhile ally Boris Johnson and bid for the alpha-dog position himself – because his heart told him to do it. This reliance on the heart might prove to be the Achilles heel of liberal democracy. For once somebody (whether in Beijing or in San Francisco) gains the technological ability to hack and manipulate the human heart, democratic politics will mutate into an emotional puppet show.

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Liberty 1 Margaret Thatcher, ‘Interview for Woman’s Own (“no such thing as society”)’, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, 23 September 1987. 2 Keith Stanovich, Who Is Rational? Studies of Individual Differences in Reasoning (New York: Psychology Press, 1999). 3 Richard Dawkins, ‘Richard Dawkins: We Need a New Party – the European Party’, New Statesman, 29 March 2017. 4 Steven Swinford, ‘Boris Johnson’s allies accuse Michael Gove of “systematic and calculated plot” to destroy his leadership hopes’, Telegraph, 30 June 2016; Rowena Mason and Heather Stewart, ‘Gove’s thunderbolt and Boris’s breaking point: a shocking Tory morning’, Guardian, 30 June 2016. 5 James Tapsfield, ‘Gove presents himself as the integrity candidate for Downing Street job but sticks the knife into Boris AGAIN’, Daily Mail, 1 July 2016. 6 In 2017 a Stanford team has produced an algorithm that can purportedly detect whether you are gay or straight with an accuracy of 91 per cent, based solely on analysing a few of your facial pictures (https://osf.io/zn79k).

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
by Leo Hollis
Published 31 Mar 2013

The glass dome, which rises above the original 1870s building, stands above the central debating chamber, allowing visitors to look down into the room and observe democracy in action. Foster + Partners repeated the trick in 2002 with the new City Hall in London, home for the recently created Greater London Authority and mayor (who have respectively called the building ‘the glass testicle’ [Ken Livingstone] and more primly ‘the glass gonad’ [Boris Johnson]). The ovoid building was completely created in glass, transparent from all directions. A more recent, and more radical, experiment in transparency can be found at City Hall in Tallinn, Estonia, designed by the groundbreaking Danish architects Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), who plan to create a vast periscope within the central council chamber, so that the politicians inside can look up and see the life upon the streets, focusing their minds on what they are supposed to be doing, and who they are supposed to be representing.

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In a 2010 survey 69 per cent of those tasked with developing policy in central London borough councils neither used social media nor were familiar with the term Gov 2.0. This was despite a strong governmental drive as outlined in the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury Report Power in People’s Hands and London mayors, first Ken Livingstone and then Boris Johnson, promoting transparency within London itself. In addition, the large public services were not keen on releasing their data. For some, the fear of losing control of the information and the prospect of painful scrutiny were too much to bear. In the case of much of the transport data, there was also a concern that it was too valuable to give away for free, as it could be used to generate considerable revenues.

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A similar injustice became apparent in April 2012 when Newham Council in the East End of London, the locale of the £9.3 billion Olympic Park, sent out letters to 500 families in local social housing informing them that they had to move out of London and relocate to the city of Stoke over 160 miles away. Months before, as part of the government’s austerity measures, a cap on all housing benefit had been imposed which made it almost impossible for London’s most needy to live in their home city. At the time, London mayor Boris Johnson caused controversy by calling the measure similar to Kosovan-style ‘ethnic cleansing’. When the news was announced, 350,000 were sitting on the housing waiting list for the whole city. Homes for London, the project set up by the charity Shelter, calculates that 1.8 million people will be pushed out of the city as a result of rising rents and the cap.

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All
by Laura Bates
Published 2 Sep 2020

The following year, DeVos proposed a major overhaul of college and university sexual misconduct procedures, including narrowing the definition of sexual harassment and increasing protections for students accused of misconduct. So the link between elected politicians and manosphere groups isn’t just a matter of conjecture. It is having a concrete impact. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has also regularly made apparent allusions to manosphere, alt-right ideology, once claiming that female MPs were flocking to the Labour Party for its ‘planned erosion of male liberty – such as ending the right to drink in public places’ – and suggesting that female voters were turning to the party owing to the ‘fickleness of their sex’.

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In particular, d’Ancona suggested a direct link between Bannon’s apparent strategic input and Johnson’s Islamophobic and misogynistic newspaper piece. Soon afterwards, d’Ancona later revealed, he was bombarded with angry calls from Johnson. ‘I stopped counting at 15 – though the calls continued,’ he wrote in an article for news outlet Tortoise.34 ‘Boris Johnson was furious with me for writing about his contact with Steve Bannon.’ Specifically, according to d’Ancona, Johnson was furious that the journalist had linked Bannon’s advice to his column. In other words, he seemed desperate to avoid the inference that Bannon’s input had led him to spout classic manosphere and alt-right rhetoric in the mainstream press.

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, The Conversation, 14 November 2017 29 ‘Betsy DeVos Plans to Consult Men’s Rights Trolls About Campus Sexual Assault’, Slate, 11 July 2017 30 ‘The so-called “manosphere” is peopled with hundreds of websites, blogs and forums dedicated to savaging feminists in particular and women, very typically American women, in general’, Southern Poverty Law Center, 2012 31 ‘Steve Bannon: Five Things to Know’, ADL 32 ‘How Donald Trump’s New Campaign Chief Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists’, Mother Jones, August 2016 33 ‘White Nationalists Rejoice Trump’s Appointment of Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon’ Southern Poverty Law Center, 14 November 2016 34 ‘The horror, the horror’, Tortoise, 3 April 2019 35 ‘Only a proper Brexit can spare us from this toxic polarisation’, Daily Telegraph, 15 April 2019 36 ‘Steve Bannon: ‘We went back and forth’ on the themes of Johnson’s big speech’, The Guardian, 22 June 2019 37 ‘MPs’ fury at Boris Johnson’s “dangerous language”, BBC, 25 September 2019 38 ‘Man arrested outside office of Labour MP Jess Phillips’, The Guardian, 26 September 2019 39 ‘Trump defends response to Charlottesville violence, says he put it “perfectly” with “both sides” remark’, USA Today, 26 April 2019 40 ‘Dominic Cummings: Anger at MPs “not surprising”, PM’s adviser says’, BBC, 27 September 2019 41 ‘Labour MP calls for end to online anonymity after “600 rape threats” ’, The Guardian, 11 June 2018 42 ‘Ukip MEP candidate blamed feminists for rise in misogyny’, The Guardian, 22 April 2019 43 ‘Police investigate Ukip candidate over Jess Phillips rape comments’, The Guardian, 7 May 2019 44 ‘Under Siege For His Comments About Rape, UKIP’s Star Candidate Carl Benjamin Has Recruited Milo Yiannopoulos To Join His Campaign’, BuzzFeed, 8 May 2019 45 ‘Steve Bannon Targeted “Incels” Because They Are “Easy To Manipulate,” Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Says’, Newsweek, 29 October 2019 46 ‘Reddit’s TheRedPill, notorious for its misogyny, was founded by a New Hampshire state legislator’, Vox, 28 April 2017 47 ‘Red Pill Boss: All Feminists Want to Be Raped’, Daily Beast, 29 November 2017 48 ‘New Hampshire State Rep Who Created Reddit’s “Red Pill” Resigns’, Daily Beast, 22 May 2017 49 ‘Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism’, New York Review of Books, 19 March 2019 50 ‘Op-Ed: Hate on Jordan Peterson all you want, but he’s tapping into frustration that feminists shouldn’t ignore’, Los Angeles Times, 1 June 2018 51 ‘Jordan Peterson: “I don’t think that men can control crazy women” ’, The Varsity, 8 October 2018 52 ‘Why Can’t People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Saying?’

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
by Douglas Murray
Published 3 May 2017

This was done not just through charges of ‘racism’ and ‘bigotry’, but in a series of deflecting tactics that became a replacement for action. All of these were identifiable in the wake of Britain’s 2011 census, including the demand that the public should just ‘get over it’. In a column titled ‘Let’s not dwell on immigration but sow the seeds of integration’, the then Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, responded to that census by saying, ‘We need to stop moaning about the dam-burst. It’s happened. There is nothing we can now do except make the process of absorption as eupeptic as possible.’2 Sunder Katwala from the left-wing think tank ‘British Future’ responded to the census in a similar tone, saying, ‘The question of do you want this to happen or don’t you want this to happen implies that you’ve got a choice and you could say “let’s not have any diversity”.’

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Grayling, himself a hugely successful immigrant from Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia), said of the findings of the census, ‘I think on the whole it’s a very positive thing, a thing to be celebrated.’ The critic and playwright Bonnie Greer, also a highly successful immigrant (from America), agreed that it was a positive thing and said, like Boris Johnson, ‘It cannot be stopped.’5 Over the whole discussion the allure of this ‘get with the beat’ attitude prevailed. Perhaps the temptation to ‘go with the flow’ is so strong in this argument because the price for stepping outside the consensus is so uniquely high. Get a studio discussion about the budget wrong and you might be accused of financial ignorance or poor interpretation of the public mood.

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, BBC, 10 February 2012. 13 Andrew Neather, ‘Don’t listen to the whingers – London needs immigrants’, Evening Standard, 22 October 2009. 14 Tom Bower, Broken Vows: Tony Blair and the Tragedy of Power, Faber & Faber, 2016, pp. 171–8. 15 Hugh Muir, ‘Hideously diverse Britain: The immigration “conspiracy”’, The Guardian, 2 March 2011. 16 Bower, Broken Vows, pp. 175–6. 17 ONS figures. 18 Ibid., Migration Statistics Quarterly Report, November 2015. HOW WE GOT HOOKED ON IMMIGRATION 1 This conversation from March 1959 was recalled by his colleague and confidant Alain Peyrefitte in C’était de Gaulle (1994) and is the subject of some contention. 2 Boris Johnson, ‘Let’s not dwell on immigration but sow the seeds of integration’, The Telegraph, 17 December 2012. 3 Sunder Katwala quoted in ‘Census shows rise in foreign-born’, BBC News, 11 December 2012. 4 YouGov poll for The Sunday Times. Fieldwork 13–14th December 2012. Available at http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/w0hvkihpjg/YG-Archive-Pol-Sunday-Times-results-14-161212.pdf. 5 BBC Newsnight, 11 December 2012. 6 The Louise Casey review into Rotherham borough council, 4 February 2015. 7 Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain, Little Brown, 2004, pp. x and 2. 8 Barbara Roche speaking at TEDxEastEnd, uploaded 3 October 2011, ‘The British story of migration’ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Women & Power: A Manifesto
by Mary Beard
Published 2 Nov 2017

Trolls are not particularly imaginative or nuanced, and one Twitter storm tends to look much like any other. But just occasionally there are new angles, or at least revealing comparisons to be made. I was very struck during, and just after, the UK general election in the summer of 2017 by two disastrous radio interviews given by the Labour MP Diane Abbott and the Tory Boris Johnson. Abbott completely fell to pieces over the cost of her party’s policy on police recruitment – at one point coming out with a figure that would have suggested that each new officer would have been paid about £8 a year. Johnson showed an equally embarrassing and stumbling ignorance on some of the new government’s headline commitments; he didn’t appear to have a clue on his party’s policies on racial discrimination in the criminal justice system or on access to higher Education.

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s
by Alwyn W. Turner
Published 4 Sep 2013

I simply don’t know what to do.’ The government’s response was drastic but politically necessary. At an estimated cost of over £4 billion, some three and a half million cattle were slaughtered and their corpses burnt. It was a true holocaust in the purest sense of the word, as the journalist Boris Johnson took pleasure in pointing out, and it raised enormous logistical problems. Around the country there built up huge piles of carcasses awaiting incineration, some of which, it was revealed, were being secretly dumped at landfill sites in an attempt to clear the backlog. Discussions opened with the power industry to see if it was worth converting generating stations to run on dead animals, though this was not pursued, perhaps because the idea of cattle replacing coal as a primary fuel would be the mother of all PR disasters for a government already perceived to have lost its way.

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The Times even allowed room for William Rees-Mogg, its former editor, to float the outlandish suggestion that Alan Clark might be the man for the job: ‘he is rash, amusing, grand, Eurosceptic, outspoken, scandalous, clever, arrogant, the extraordinary rather than the ordinary.’ (Rees-Mogg’s inability to foresee the future had long been a standing joke at Private Eye, though the best gag came from Boris Johnson, who once wrote of him that he ‘has predicted twelve of the last two recessions’.) The rumours grew into open speculation during that final year before the general election, which was now widely expected to be held in May 1997. This was the last possible date that Major could call it, and the assumption was that he was holding on in the hope that the public might change minds that had been made up years ago.

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The Conservatives had convinced themselves that they were starting to make up some ground on Labour, but the death of Diana halted any such advance: ‘That single event stopped our recovery in its tracks,’ commented one shadow minister. Instead they looked entirely lost in this new Britain, where public displays of emotion (‘Latin American peasant hagiolatry’, in the words of Boris Johnson) were not only acceptable but almost compulsory. A former cabinet minister expressed the confusion that had descended on the Tories: ‘I walked through the crowds in St James’s and realised this was no longer a country I truly understand.’ Tony Blair, on the other hand, was universally judged to have played a blinder, and an opinion poll a month later showed him achieving record levels of approval.

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place
by Felix Marquardt
Published 7 Jul 2021

There isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that my father’s urge to get away from Germany had a lot to do with the weight of the country’s Nazi past (it also likely explains why the majority of his closest friends are Jewish). Nor is there any doubt in my mind that the specific brand of British Euroscepticism which eventually produced Brexit is intimately linked to the nostalgic, imperial vision of Britain contained in the school manuals of Boris Johnson, as academics Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson have compellingly argued.1 It’s a Britain that exists in the time just after a sort of parallel universe Second World War, with Britain the uncomplicated heroic victor, home of the Spitfire, Keep Calm and Carry On sangfroid, and bunting hung up in every street.

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In 2012, as part of her ‘hostile environment’ policy, Theresa May, the home secretary at that time, clamped down on student visas. Historically, international students who attended UK universities had two years to find a job following their studies. May reduced this to four months. The result was that a record low of 6,300 individuals stayed in the country after their studies. Boris Johnson’s administration reversed the policy in 2019, and so we may see greater numbers of young people staying in Britain after their studies. However, the first intake that this will affect is the coronavirus intake. It is a cliché, but the youth are the future. Any sane country should be at pains to attract young, dynamic people – not create a ‘hostile environment’ that pushes them away.

Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization
by Harold James
Published 15 Jan 2023

In the 1970s, there was a widespread notion that democracy had failed or (according to a celebrated book by Jean-François Revel) was dying, that industrial societies had become ungovernable, and that autocracies would soon have the upper hand.29 All that doubt about democracy has returned since 2020—because of another negative supply shock, which the Chinese government initially appeared to handle more effectively than its western competitors. For some observers of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is populist governments (or “illiberal democracies”)—those led by Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte—that have profoundly mismanaged the crisis. They took a populist stance on the benefits of lockdowns as an immediate containment measure, and rejected expert or “technocratic” advice. Even in rich countries where the crisis looks as if it has been well handled—in Germany or Japan—there is a surge of protest.

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Political systems had been riven by the populist revolts that culminated in the 2016 Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump; the outcome was a general push for bigger government. Trump’s substantial popularity even in the bleak circumstances of 2020 relied heavily on large government payments (“stimulus” checks or “stimmies,” mailed out and printed under the president’s name). The British Conservative (Tory) prime minister Boris Johnson won a spectacular election success by campaigning on a promise to revitalize declining northern English industrial areas: elect a Tory, it was said, and you will get a factory. This was an electoral model that was globalized—widely repeated over the whole world. It also represented a rather belated response to the logic of interest rates and debt during the 2010s, when it appeared that the low level of interest made government spending in effect free.

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Rich countries could afford to provide vulnerable citizens with a third dose of vaccine, but such use would restrict the number of doses available to poorer countries, where high transmission rates would lead to genetic modifications and virus mutations that might pose a more serious public health challenge to the whole world, including the rich countries. At the beginning, policy-makers made analogies with war and military mobilization. Xi Jinping on February 6, 2020, explained that China was engaged in a “people’s war.”37 On March 17, British prime minister Boris Johnson said, “We must act like any wartime government and do whatever it takes to support our economy”; and the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, claimed: “We have never faced an economic fight like this one.”38 On March 19, Donald Trump talked of “our big war,” identifying a foreign country as the enemy: “We continue our relentless effort to defeat the Chinese virus.”39 Trade adviser Peter Navarro, on March 28, said: “We are engaged in the most significant industrial mobilization since World War Two.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

Each of the parties ran its own campaign, hoping to leverage party loyalty to convince its base to back Remain and turn out to the polls. The Leave side, though structured as a cross-party effort, was equally divided. Vote Leave, the official Leave campaign, was chaired by Gisela Stuart, a Labour MP, but fronted by the Tory mayor of London Boris Johnson and Conservative MPs such as Chris Grayling, Andrea Leadsom and Michael Gove. Vote Leave’s rhetoric focused on ‘respectable’ arguments around sovereignty and the freedom for Britain to make its own trade deals with growing economies. A second effort, Leave.eu, funded by UKIP donor Arron Banks and fronted by the party leader, Nigel Farage, was an insurgent campaign which concentrated on the immigration question.

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Dave Prentis, of the Unison trade union, branded the UKIP poster ‘an attempt to incite racial hatred’ and reported it to the police. ‘To pretend that migration to the UK is only about people who are not white is to peddle the racism that has no place in a modern, caring society. That’s why Unison has complained about this blatant attempt to incite racial hatred and breach UK race laws.’ At Vote Leave, Boris Johnson distanced himself from the poster, declaring, ‘I am passionately pro-immigration and pro-immigrants.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury accused the poster of ‘pandering to people’s worries and prejudices, that is, giving legitimization to racism’. Farage remained unmoved: ‘This is a photograph – an accurate, undoctored photograph – taken on 15 October last year following Angela Merkel’s call in the summer … most of the people coming are young males and, yes, they may be coming from countries that are not in a very happy state, they may be coming from places that are poorer than us, but the EU has made a fundamental error that risks the security of everybody.’92 The racist charge is appropriate in my view because the poster encourages irrational fears of Muslim immigrants.

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Those of mixed race, who share common ancestors with White British people, are growing faster than all minority groups and 8 in 10 of them marry whites. In the long run, today’s minorities will be absorbed into the majority and foreign identities will fade, as they have for public figures with immigrant ancestors like Boris Johnson or Peter Mandelson. Britain shapes its migrants, migration doesn’t shape Britain. The share of Brexit voters wanting EU immigration cut to zero was 23 per cent among those who read the first or no passage, but opposition dropped to 15 per cent among those reading the second passage on assimilation.

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance)
by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
Published 28 Sep 2015

If you cast a shadow onto a set of bathroom scales, the light’s downward force is no longer there and you have created a negative weight. Unfortunately, no scales are sensitive enough to register such a tiny negative weight. A shadow covering the whole of greater London would only have as much effect on the capital’s mass as removing three Boris Johnsons. Russian scientist Pyotr Lebedev (1866–1912) first proved light exerts a force on an object due to its momentum in 1898. He suspended a wafer-thin piece of platinum foil in a vacuum jar and saw it move (very slightly) when a lamp was shone on it. Though the pressure exerted by light is imperceptible on Earth, one day it may be useful in space.

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Coventry has re-enacted the legend once a year on and off since 1678 with a ‘Godiva Parade’ or ‘Procession’. It was a bit coy to start with: in the first one Lady Godiva was played by a boy, and on another occasion, in Puritan times, the horse wore trousers. KATHY LETTE Do you think that would work today, if we suggested to Boris Johnson that if we rode naked through the town we could stop paying our taxes? STEPHEN Or maybe we could pay him not to ride naked through the streets of London. ALAN I prefer that idea. When did the first woman vote in Britain? It wasn’t in 1918. Some British women – those who owned property and were over 30 – won the right to vote in parliamentary elections in 1918.

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality
by Laurence Scott
Published 11 Jul 2018

Sky News created a sensational paradox in broadcasting these ‘off-camera’ remarks ‘caught on camera’. Both this weird clip’s form and its content suggest these two-sided times. Discussing Andrea Leadsom’s prospects, Clarke said, ‘So long as10 she understands that she’s not to deliver on some of the extremely stupid things she’s been saying.’ More recently, during a trip to a Myanmar temple, Boris Johnson was captured on camera muttering lines from a Rudyard Kipling poem, ‘Mandalay’. Given the colonial context of the poem, the UK Ambassador whispered to Johnson that it was ‘not appropriate’, and reminded him that he was ‘on mic’ for the duration of his idle performance. ‘Good stuff,’ Johnson replies, hoisting his smartphone to take a picture.

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Mike Matthews, Fremantle Media, 2015; ‘I know it’s …’, Instagram post by Nigella Lawson (@nigellalawson) on 25th July 2015 6 ‘a public health crisis …’, from the draft of ‘Republican Platform 2016’; ‘public health hazard …’, see Drafting Attorney RuthAnne Frost, ‘S.C.R. 9 Concurrent Resolution on the Public Health Crisis’, State of Utah, 29th March 2016. 7 ‘some told me …’, Maggie Jones, ‘What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn’, The New York Times, 7th February 2018. 8 ‘one of the …’, see Anjali Midha’s Twitter blog, ‘Study: Live-Tweeting lifts Tweet volume, builds a social audience for your show’, 18th September 2014. 9 ‘What an episode! …’, Tweet by Ross Kemp (@RossKemp) on 17th May 2016, www.twitter.com. 10 ‘So long as …’, see ‘Ken Clarke Ridicules Tory Candidates’, www.skynews.com; ‘not appropriate’, see ‘Boris Johnson recites Kipling poem in Myanmar temple’, Guardian News YouTube Channel, published 30th September 2017. 11 ‘New York is …’, Katie Couric interview for Crazy About Tiffany’s, dir. Matthew Miele, Quixotic Endeavors, 2016. 12 ‘an obscene amount …’, see ‘George Clooney on Why He’s Not Like the Koch Brothers’, NBC News YouTube Channel, published 18th April 2016. 13 ‘All right, I’ll …’, I was informed here by the work of Ian C.

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks
by David Rooney
Published 16 Aug 2021

As the days and hours before the UK’s withdrawal from Europe ticked down, a group of Brexit-supporting MPs demanded that Big Ben be reinstated so that it could toll defiantly to mark the momentous event. The Conservative MP Mark Francois led the campaign, assisted by such political heavyweights as Iain Duncan Smith, John Redwood, Nigel Farage, Matthew Hancock, Jacob Rees-Mogg and even the prime minister himself, Boris Johnson. Speaking imperiously in the House of Commons on January 9, 2020, Francois exclaimed: we will leave the European Union at 11 pm GMT on 31 January. As we leave at a precise specified time, those who wish to celebrate will need to look to a clock to mark the moment. It seems inconceivable to me and many colleagues that that clock should not be the most iconic timepiece in the world, Big Ben.

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In the end, rows over funding and costs meant the plan to ring in the moment of Brexit ground to a halt. Big Ben remained silent on the evening of January 31, as work on its refurbishment continued. Brexiteers, furious at what they described as “a Remainer plot,” found other ways to mark the moment.26 Boris Johnson banged a small gong inside 10 Downing Street. The journalist Ian Dunt reflected that “They spent the whole week talking about bongs on Big Ben. The sheer scale of the lunacy is difficult to fully comprehend. What you are seeing, more or less in real time, is a nation turn into the clown car model of itself.”27 It should have come as no surprise.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

It also has its more bombastic version, in the form of what Lorenzo Castellani and Rowland Manthorpe call technopopulism.17 Castellani coined the term to describe an unusual aspect of Italy’s Five Star Movement: in Rome and other places, he saw populist politicians such as Virginia Raggi surrounding themselves not with like-minded Jacobins but rather with “functionaries, magistrates, academics, and other professionals, the likes of whom you would never see at a Five Star meet-up.” British readers will recognise something similar in the way that the Brexit referendum and British prime minister Boris Johnson’s 2019 election victory have led to a rather technocratic-sounding drive to reform the civil service, to greatly increase public R&D investment, and to reform research funding bodies. These initiatives are backed by Dominic Cummings, who served as chief adviser to Boris Johnson and was associated both with the populist Vote Leave campaign and with a technocratic, technophilic desire to reform British institutions. (His WhatsApp description is “Get Brexit done, then ARPA.”)

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

(Reagan once called the peaceful transfer of power the ‘magic’ of the free world.) Thatcher’s Tories have abandoned the European single market she was once instrumental in developing, and have simultaneously abandoned many other economic orthodoxies, toying with more active industrial policies and ‘Buy British’ slogans – a new attitude that Boris Johnson in an unguarded moment happened to summarize as ‘fuck business’. His short-lived successor, Liz Truss, who famously declared that large-scale imports of cheese were ‘a disgrace’, tried to invoke the Iron Lady, albeit through her boldness rather than her policies. Instead, Truss railed against the ‘consensus of the Treasury, of economists, with the Financial Times’ that budgets should be balanced and went on to doom her premiership with a massive, unfunded package of energy subsidies and tax cuts, which markets refused to finance.

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What does the collective utopia look like that would fill the empty hearts of such diverse people as Stephen Fry, MrBeast, Elon Musk, Billie Eilish, Roger Federer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Danielle Steel, Richard Dawkins, PewDiePie, Robert Downey Jr, Nick Cave, LeBron James, Larry David, Donald Trump, Kylie Jenner, The Rock, Boris Johnson, Quentin Tarantino, Posh Spice, Robert Smith, Chris Rock, Blixa Bargeld, Neal Stephenson, Kim Kardashian, Lionel Messi, Johan Norberg and some 7.9 billion more?11 Liberalism is not based on ignoring the meaning of life but on believing that more people have a chance to find that meaning if they have the freedom to search for it.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

Global pandemic, global radicalisation The levels of oddness and denial among those who come to regularly stage anti-lockdown or anti-vaccine protests can be truly surreal, with an often-familiar cast of characters with tenuous connections to the corridors of power who can then allude to familiarity with the workings of the state to online and offline followers. One such figure in the UK is Jennifer Arcuri, who had an affair with prime minister Boris Johnson, and also received public money for her business during that time. During the pandemic, Arcuri appeared to suggest that Johnson’s new wife, Carrie Johnson, was a Satanist, alongside others in government. Her feed suggested that vaccines were a ‘genocidal initiative’ and accused people promoting jabs as ‘paid for shills’.70 This is hardly a problem unique to the Conservative party.

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Andrew Romano, ‘New Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows coronavirus conspiracy theories spreading on the right may hamper vaccine efforts’, https://news.yahoo.com, 22 May 2020. 68. Kathy Frankovic, ‘Why won’t Americans get vaccinated?’, https://today.yougov.com, 15 July 2021. 69. ‘Religious Identities and the Race Against the Virus: (Wave 2: June 2021)’, www.prri.org, 27 July 2021. 70. Simon Childs, ‘Boris Johnson’s “Ex-Lover” Has Gone Down a QAnon-Inspired Rabbit Hole’, www.vice.com, 21 December 2021. 71. ‘Anti-vax protesters shouting false Savile slurs target Keir Starmer – video’, www.theguardian.com, 7 February 2022. 72. Ibid. 73. Rob Price, ‘Gaia was a wildly popular yoga brand. Now it’s a publicly traded Netflix rival pushing conspiracy theories while employees fear the CEO is invading their dreams.’, www.businessinsider.com, 14 February 2021. 74.

Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen
by Peter Apps
Published 10 Nov 2022

Pointing out that call-outs to fires had reduced 40% in the last decade while spending had remained consistent, he said £200m in ‘savings’ could be found by fire authorities through the implementation of ‘efficiencies’.9 This meant cuts – primarily to staff. According to the National Audit Office, by 2017, fire authorities had lost a quarter of their staff. In 2010, they had 41,632 full-time equivalent employees. By 2017 the number was down to 32,761.10 These cuts were implemented in London by the mayor at the time: Boris Johnson. He pushed them through despite their rejection by the LFB’s governing body. In the eight years he was mayor of London, the brigade experienced cuts totalling £100m. It cut 552 firefighters, 27 fire engines and closed 10 fire stations. Crucially, the cut to jobs particularly affected support staff – with 324 posts removed, 29% of the total.11 Senior officers’ roles were also cut – giving the London Fire Brigade a much thinner ratio of support staff and senior officers to frontline firefighters compared to other forces.

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, Inside Housing, 13 June 2021. https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/grenfell-five-years-on-could-it-happen-again-76000 Chapter 18 1 Narrative verdict into death of Catherine Hickman, 28 March 2013. https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/sites/default/files/ec-inquisition-and-narrative-verdict-catherine-hickman.pdf 2 Kirkham, F., ‘Letter to LFB pursuant to Rule 43’, 28 March 2013. https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/sites/default/files/ec-letter-to-london-fire-brigade-pursuant-to-rule43-28March2013.pdf 3 Inquiry transcript, 16 November 2021. 4 Inquiry transcript, 27 September 2018. 5 Inquiry transcript, 5 October 2021. 6 Inquiry transcript, 20 September 2021. 7 Baigent, D., ‘One more last working class hero: a cultural audit of the UK Fire Service’, 2001. https://www.academia.edu/4254126/ONE_MORE_LAST_WORKING_CLASS_HERO_A_CULTURAL_AUDIT_OF_THE_UK_FIRE_SERVICE 8 Inquiry transcript, 20 September 2021. 9 Knight, K., ‘Facing the future’, May 2013. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/facing-the-future 10 National Audit Office, ‘Impact of funding reductions on fire and rescue services’, November 2018. https://www.nao.org.uk/report/impact-of-funding-reductions-on-fire-and-rescue-services/ 11 Hansard, 30 October 2019. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2019-10-30/debates/97A7B2AB-DD4E-427D-BBBF-431A1B8E7017/GrenfellTowerInquiry 12 BBC News, ‘Mayor Boris Johnson tells opponent to get stuffed’, 11 September 2013. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-london-24050870 Chapter 19 1 Inquiry transcript, 13 April 2022. 2 Inquiry transcript, 25 April 2022. 3 Inquiry transcript, 13 April 2022. 4 Ibid. 5 Inquiry transcript, 26 April 2022. 6 Inquiry transcript, 10 April 2022. 7 Inquiry transcript, 10 April 2022. 8 Interview with author.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 14 Oct 2018

This is a revolution; we’ve got truth and justice on our side; we owe the enemy nothing – and we really shouldn’t count our job done till we’ve crushed them, seen them driven before us and heard the lamentations of their women.’31 How can we put this kindly? Delingpole writes entertainingly enough in a sub-Boris Johnson sort of way but when it comes to climate change he’s about as authoritative as a carpet slipper. And yet he was regularly given space by mainstream newspapers and magazines to spout dangerous nonsense – let’s call it fake news – about something people who do know what they’re talking about consider to be a devastating threat to our species.

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But the same Brexit-boosting newspapers were – according to the European Commission itself 21 – the leaders in perpetrating myths about how the EU would destroy British sovereignty: bananas will have to be straight; cows will have to wear nappies; milk jugs will be banned; Bombay mix will be renamed; women will have to hand back old sex toys, and so on. One of the reporters who delighted in this style of reporting was Boris Johnson, the Telegraph’s man in Brussels in the early 1990s. One of his former colleagues, Jean Quatremer, wrote of his technique: ‘Johnson managed to invent an entire newspaper genre: the Euromyth, a story that had a tiny element of truth at the outset but which was magnified so far beyond reality that by the time it reached the reader it was false.’22 Johnson became one of the leading architects of Brexit and, later, British foreign secretary.

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I asked Ian Dunt, the (pro-Remain) editor of Politics.co.uk why more news organisations had not gone for a more balanced, factual, approach. ‘Oh we tried that,’ he said, ‘and literally almost no one read it. They don’t read about fishing quotas or aviation tariffs, however vital they are. But if you write about Boris Johnson, everyone will read it.’ 29. Gillmor, D. We the Media; see Bibliography 30. Archived at https://politicalscrapbook.net/2017/07/ 31. Sun, 31 October 2017 32. Twitter, 31 October 2017, 3.15 p.m.; @BarristerSecret 33. Daily Mail, 15 December 2017; Larisa Brown 34. Twitter, 14 December 2017, 11.55 p.m.; @AdamWagner1 35.

It's Easier to Reach Heaven Than the End of the Street: A Jerusalem Memoir
by Emma Williams
Published 7 Nov 2012

Her humanity and empathy allow her to see both peoples in all their individuality, rather than as political footballs...It is one of the most significant contributions to establishing the day-to-day reality of the time.” —Linda Grant “Emma Williams has pulled off an amazing literary and journalistic feat—a study of modern Israel that shows the best and the worst on each side of the tragedy, and which engages our sympathy with both. She writes beautifully.” —Boris Johnson “Brilliant and moving... one of the best of recent books about Israel and Palestine.” —William Dalrymple, New Statesman “[A] brilliant memoir... she succeeds like few others in her ability to view the situation through the eyes of Jew and Arab... Drawing our sympathy now to one, now to the other, she envies those with a ‘one-eyed view,’ undisturbed by the layers of complication...

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And the ambulance driver who tried to help them also shot: dead. Death on TV, caught by a France 2 camera crew. The death of Mohammed al-Dura mobilized an outcry on every Arab street, including the “Israeli Arab” street. It mobilized friends around the world—Jewish, Zionist, American, European—calling to ask what the hell was going on. Boris Johnson rang from his office at the Spectator: “Terrible things going on, terrible. Can’t believe what I’m seeing—is it really that bad your end? We could do with a piece—what it’s like to be there—working-mother stuff, kids and all that. Have you thought of writing? Could you? 1,200 words? By Monday?

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Professor Anthony King read, commented, steered, suggested, and guided me with extraordinary kindness and unwearying attention to detail, turning me from caution to confidence—no small task—and I am enormously grateful. Julita Arsenio looked after my children and gave me the time and space to write; without Julita there would have been no book. Boris Johnson and Stuart Reid repeatedly published me in the Spectator in not the easiest of circumstances for them. Phil Reeves of the Independent and Nicole Gauoette and Cameron Barr of the Christian Science Monitor kindly helped me to get started in their respective papers, while Marie Colvin suggested a long article for Vogue.

Are Trams Socialist?: Why Britain Has No Transport Policy
by Christian Wolmar
Published 19 May 2016

A series of announcements ensued, usually made by David Cameron wearing a cycling helmet, but while there has been support for the occasional project, the government crucially has no budget line solely dedicated to expenditure on cycling While a few towns with a tradition of cycling, such as Cambridge, York and Chelmsford, have experienced continued growth, the one city to benefit from considerable cycling investment has been London, where a massive increase in cycle use, stimulated from the grass roots largely by young people commuting to the central zone, has almost forced local politicians to respond. On some city centre streets, cyclists became the dominant users in rush hour. A few boroughs responded by installing cycle routes but many of these were inadequate or took users on a circuitous route. There was, however, a breakthrough in 2012, when the mayor, Boris Johnson, promised to spend £913 million over the next nine years on cycling. Although on examination some of this money was wishful thinking and there was considerable initial underspending on the allocation, it did represent a statement of intent and a genuine step change on previous policies. After his first election victory in 2008, Johnson had embarked on an ill-thought-out programme of cycling superhighways that proved to be expensive and poorly designed, which was highlighted by a series of deaths on the main route in east London.

Underground, Overground
by Andrew Martin
Published 13 Nov 2012

From 1910, to drum up custom, the Metropolitan would operate a luxury Pullman service from Verney Junction to Aldgate. In other words, they attached to the train two special coaches (called Mayflower and Galatea), which exceeded in plushness the Metropolitan’s ordinary first-class compartments. They were essentially restaurants on wheels. There was also a bar in the carriage. When he became mayor of London, Boris Johnson banned drinking on the Underground, but what would he make of City gents being served whisky and water in crystal glasses in the tunnel approaching Baker Street? ‘The scheme of decoration of the cars is that of the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, with remarkably artistic effect’, observed the Railway Magazine in 1910.

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For Livingstone, transport is all about the social good – and the aggrandisation of Ken Livingstone, of course. (So he would phase out the beautiful Routemaster bus in favour of the sinister but supposedly more user-friendly ‘Bendy Bus’ in 2005, which may in turn have been a factor in his defeat by Boris Johnson in the mayoral election of 2008. Johnson is a transport romantic, albeit with a romanticism not confined to public transport – the last time I looked, he was the motoring correspondent of GQ magazine – and he has commissioned a new Routemaster for the twenty-first century. But he is not steeped in transport, as Livingstone is.)

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

The emergence of self-driving vehicles, for instance, will rapidly diminish the points of leverage contained within transportation systems. The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers in the UK will have to face this problem directly in the near future, with self-driving trains already in operation and further expansion planned. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has explicitly stated that automation should be used to destroy one of the few remaining militant British unions.78 Crucially, however, leverage points remain, and new ones will emerge in the wake of restructuring and automation. For instance, as one author pointed out – in 1957! – ‘a strike by a very small number of workers is liable to hold up an entire automated factory’.79 A decline in the number of workers overseeing a process also means a concentration of potential power within a smaller group of individuals.

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Erik Olin Wright, ‘Working-Class Power, Capitalist-Class Interests, and Class Compromise’, American Journal of Sociology 105: 4 (2000), p. 962. 73.Jonathan Cutler and Stanley Aronowitz, ‘Quitting Time’, in Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler, eds, Post-Work: The Wages of Cybernation (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 9–11. 74.Cynthia Cockburn, Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change (London: Pluto, 1991). 75.McAlevey, Raising Expectations, p. 28. 76.Cutler and Aronowitz, ‘Quitting Time’, p. 17. 77.Ibid., pp. 12–13; Noam Chomsky, Occupy (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 34. 78.Murray Wardrop, ‘Boris Johnson Pledges to Introduce Driverless Tube Trains Within Two Years’, Daily Telegraph, 28 February 2012. 79.Paul Einzig, The Economic Consequences of Automation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1957), p. 235. 80.David Autor, Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth, Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2014, at nber.org, p. 26. 81.Anh Nguyen, Jason Yosinski and Jeff Clune, ‘Deep Neural Networks Are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images’, arXiv, 2015, at arxiv.org. 82.A classic resource here is Piven and Cloward, Poor People’s Movements.

War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers
by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum
Published 14 May 2020

They included the former emir of Qatar and, of equal note, a wealthy, well-known rabble-rouser—a half-Iranian Iranian nationalist from the UK named Darius Guppy. Guppy, like Michael Bagley, had been caught in elaborate illegal schemes to raise money for unclear purposes, and had once conspired with his friend and fellow Old Etonian British prime minister Boris Johnson to have a journalist physically beaten. Those were the connections that had so worried the anti-fascist activist who had helped me investigate this Londoner, for the information outlined the possibility that Jason had been contacted by someone with channels to power. His and Bagley’s circle of contacts also included the CEO of a media company who moved between Mexico and London and who published a website tracking oil prices and trading—that’s probably where the Venezuela documents (for yet another money raising scheme) came from.

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Chapter 21: The Reckoning “Bagley has never gotten past the discussion phase”: This information is based on publicly available court documents from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Virginia, Alexandria division. Case number 1:19mj315. physically beaten: Simon Murphy, “‘A Couple of Black Eyes’: Johnson and the Plot to Attack a Reporter,” Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/14/black-eyes-boris-johnson-plot-attack-reporter-darius-guppy. Index Affordable Care Act, 118 Ali-Shah, Omar and Idries, 134–35 alt-right movement AltRight Corporation and, 208–12, 213–23, 241–46, 266 (see also Jorjani, Jason Reza) Breitbart and, 241, 304n funding for, 217–20, 241–46 Unite the Right (Charlottesville) rally, 235–47 white nationalism of, 215–23 Andrade de Souza, Roxane, 134, 139, 177, 251–57 Antifa, 239 anti-Semitism.

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?
by David G. Blanchflower
Published 12 Apr 2021

If I’m forced to go out because we don’t have the right deal, then we have to close plants here in the UK and it will be very, very sad.”17 Votes have consequences. CNN Money has a “Brexit Jobs Tracker” that identifies companies moving jobs or investment from the UK because of Brexit.18 As of November 12, 2018, there were twenty-five on the list. After being praised by Boris Johnson for moving to London five years earlier, Japanese pharmaceutical firm Shionogi announced in March 2019 that it was moving its headquarters to Amsterdam. According to the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency, in January 2019 more than 250 companies were in discussions about Brexit-driven relocations.19 The Literature on Walking About and Not Sniffing the Wine Orley Ashenfelter from Princeton University is another believer.

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My cabbie pointed out something unusual about the shoppers that year: they had no bags and were only window shopping. People didn’t have any money to spend. I spoke to other London taxi drivers during the first half of 2008. London cabbies, I find, are always a good source of information on what is happening in London. At first, they were big supporters of the new mayor of London, Boris Johnson, but then they quickly turned against him. A number told me that they were having to work more hours to make their money every week. Some of them told me that they were fortunate because they could increase their hours but many of their friends and family weren’t as lucky. Hours of work were falling, and people were being laid off.

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It also turned out that the probability of being killed by a refugee terrorist was less than that of being killed by a shark, an asteroid, an earthquake, or a tornado; choking on food; or being stung by hornets, wasps, or bees.24 Brexit meant bringing back prosperity to declining coal, steel, and seaside towns. Boris Johnson, who became UK foreign secretary and recently resigned over Theresa May’s Chequers Brexit plan, complained about EU laws that determined the power of vacuum cleaners and what shape bananas had to be; he said such policies were “crazy.”25 Sovereignty meant that you could have any shape banana you want.

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere
by Christian Wolmar
Published 18 Jan 2018

The examples I have cited about people standing in front of vehicles would clearly need punitive legislation to prevent obstruction of vehicles. The Holborn problem might require huge stretches of fencing on city streets to prevent jaywalking, which is hugely damaging to the urban realm as it encourages speeding and makes walking far more difficult. That is why Boris Johnson took down miles of fencing across London when he was mayor. In other words, autonomous cars might be the 106 Who will drive the Queen? catalyst for all kinds of restrictions, rather than a force for freedom. They could be the excuse to pen in pedestrians, restrict cyclists, prioritize autonomous vehicles over conventional ones, and turn cities into driverless rat-runs.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

At the centre of the amphitheatre, a fountain is planned, which will take the form of Malaysia’s national flower.19 London is being turned into part of the global rentier economy, losing its distinctive character and shrinking the spaces that ordinary Londoners can use freely. Privatisation of the urban commons now has an informal acronym, POPS (privately owned public spaces), to signify the growing number of squares, gardens and parks that look public but are not. In 2009, Boris Johnson, then London’s mayor, bemoaned the ‘corporatisation’ of streets and public spaces that made Londoners feel like trespassers in their own city. Even his headquarters, City Hall, and its thirteen-acre site are owned by More London, an estate management company bought in 2013 by a Kuwaiti property corporation, St Martins, which owns swathes of prime London property.

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Michael Farmer, a hedge fund manager who has given over £6.5 million, was made co-treasurer of the party and given a peerage.21 Even more disquieting is the growing financial role of foreign plutocrats, often with questionable backgrounds. In one small but symbolic example, at the Conservatives 2014 summer fund-raising ball the wife of Putin’s ex-deputy finance minister, Vladimir Chernukhin, successfully bid £160,000 for a tennis match with David Cameron and then London Mayor Boris Johnson, and the auctioneer threw in the party co-chair as ball boy. The Conservative Party has also set up a Leader’s Group of donors who give at least £50,000 a year, enabling an international super-rich group of financiers and industrialists to have regular dinners with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor.

A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner
by Chris Atkins
Published 6 Feb 2020

In 2019, there was an 11% rise in assaults, self-inflicted deaths rose from 81 to 86, and there was a staggering increase in self-harm of 24% to an all-time high of 57,968 incidents. The MoJ revealed that one in seven prisons had a performance of ‘serious concern’ – the highest proportion since ratings began.11 Boris Johnson became prime minister in the summer of 2019 and law and order policy took a sharp turn to the right. Robert Buckland QC was appointed Justice Secretary,12 and Priti Patel (who had previously advocated the death penalty) became Home Secretary.13 The government immediately announced its intention to create 10,000 new prison places14 and proposals to increase sentence lengths.15 There were five different Justice Secretaries over my 30-month sentence.

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utm_term=.1b9349c58cd6 20 http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/Portals/0/Documents/Bromley%20 Briefings/Summer%202018%20factfile.pdf 21 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0834tmt 22 https://www.barnardos.org.uk/what_we_do/our_projects/children_of_prisoners.htm 23 https://www.barnardos.org.uk/what_we_do/our_projects/children_of_prisoners.htm 24 https://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/offenders/psipso/psi-2013/PSI-30-2013-incentives-and-earned-privileges.doc 25 http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/ForPrisonersFamilies/PrisonerInformationPages/IncentivesandEarnedPrivileges 26 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/multi-agency-publicprotection-arrangements-mappa--2 27 https://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/offenders/psipso/pso/PSO_2205_offender_assessment_and_sentence_management.doc Chapter 7: Spinsters and Spiceheads 1 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/449290/glossary-of-programmes.pdf; https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/justice-data-lab-pilot-statistics 2 http://www.equinoxcare.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/JD-Prison-Offender-Resettlement-Workers-NEW.doc 3 https://www.sparkinside.org/our-work/heros-journey 4 http://www.safeground.org.uk/prisons/man-up/ 5 http://www.safeground.org.uk/impact-evidence/full-list-programmeevaluations/ 6 https://s3-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/imb-prod-storage-1ocod6bqky0vo/uploads/2017/09/Wandsworth-2016-2017.pdf 7 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2844087/time-added-on-to-prisonerssentences-for-attacking-each-other-more-than-doubles-in-five-years/ 8 https://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/offenders/psipso/psi-2011/psi-64-2011-safer-custody.doc 9 http://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/05/29/spector.sentencing/index.html Chapter 8: Murder and Mutiny 1 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rioting-inmates-at-winson-greenbirmingham-used-keys-from-warden-to-unlock-cells-589f30k0w 2 https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/winson-greenpriosn-riots-inmates-12332465 3 https://www.expressandstar.com/news/crime/2017/09/29/hmp-birminghamriots-six-convicted-of-mutiny-after-worst-prison-riot-since-strangeways/ 4 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/12/painstaking-investigation-deutschebank-insidertrading 5 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2463202/riot-breaks-out-at-prison-as-60-inmates-take-control/ 6 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-42217789 7 https://www.itv.com/news/story/2013-11-01/18rated-movies-prison-ban/ 8 https://yjlc.uk/age-2/ 9 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/criminals-under-25-shouldnot-go-to-adult-prison-mps-commons-justice-select-committee-a7379811.html Chapter 9: Courtrooms and Cheeseburgers 1 https://www.imb.org.uk/independent-monitoring-boards/ 2 https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2016/09/07/prison-reformlooks-dead-in-the-water-under-liz-truss 3 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1392885/Prisoner-allowed-fatherchild-jail-human-right-family-life.html 4 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2057116/prisonofficer-found-guilty-ofmisconduct-after-collecting-lags-sperm-in-syringe-in-plan-to-conceivechocolate-baby/ 5 https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/crime/career-paedophile-roy-reynoldssentenced-to-16-months-in-jail-1-4844055 6 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-38586271 7 https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/750588/paedophile-sex-childrenconvicted-jail-spare-free-judge-sick-Daniel-Taylor 8 https://www.imb.org.uk/report/wandsworth-2017-18-annual-report/ 9 http://www.transformjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/TJ_March2018report.pdf 10 http://www.ppo.gov.uk/app/uploads/2014/07/Risk_thematic_final_web.pdf 11 https://www.itv.com/news/2015-07-21/hunt-for-inmate-mistakenly-freedfrom-wandsworth-prison/ 12 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5178663/The-number-prisonerswrongly-released-jail-10.html 13 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3947584/Prisoners-cushy-life-Ministers-want-jail-softer.html 14 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2987950/hmp-berwyn-wrexham-uk-cellscost/ 15 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/exposed-prisoners-partying-drugsvodka-11305994 16 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2205824/Ill-stop-jails-like-holidaycamps-says-new-minister-justice.html 17 https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/nick-ferrari/nick-ferrari-sort-outholiday-camp-prisons/ 18 https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/jun/15/reading-for-freedomlife-changing-scheme-dreamt-up-by-prison-pen-pals-shannon-trust-actionfor-equity-award 19 https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/cjji/media/press-releases/2015/03/learningdisbailitiespt2news/ 20 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/05/jail-reading-scheme-lettertom-shannontrust 21 https://www.shannontrust.org.uk/support-us/ Chapter 10: Despair and Dancing Queen 1 https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmpubacc/400/400.pdf 2 https://twitter.com/MoJGovUK/status/733345232117436416 3 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/26/prison-suicides-inengland-and-wales-reaches-record-high 4 http://www.swlondoner.co.uk/revealed-wandsworth-prisons-tragic-suiciderates-highest-country/ 5 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4183510/HBOS-banker-jailed-11-years-1bn-fraud.html 6 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2786265/hbos-rotters-used-posh-yacht-toscam-fortune-during-1bn-asset-stripping-trial/ 7 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/feb/02/hbos-manager-andother-city-financiers-jailed-over-245m-loans-scam 8 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/30/cash-cruises-sex-partieshbos-manager-lynden-scourfield 9 https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answersstatements/written-question/Lords/2017-12-21/HL4432/ 10 http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/justice-committee/prisonreform/oral/44534.html 11 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/jail-go-up-like-dynamite-10601487 12 https://hansard.parliament.uk/pdf/Commons/2017-01-25 13 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1972-04417-001 14 https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/08/im-blame-blunkettsindefinite-prison-sentences-and-thousands-still-locked 15 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/aug/14/liz-truss-get-grip-backlogprisoners-held-beyond-interdeminate-sentence-ipp 16 http://www.ppo.gov.uk/app/uploads/2014/07/Risk_thematic_final_web.pdf 17 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26561380 18 https://inews.co.uk/news/worboys-forensic-psychologist-horrified-lackevidence-behind-prisonsex-offender-courses/ 19 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48683296 20 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4635876/Scandal-100million-sexcrime-cure-hubs.html 21 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-mindfulness-makes-criminals-worse-3sd6xf5fh 22 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38931580 23 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08hnpml 24 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5674345/Female-prison-officer-25-started-personal-relationship-prisoner.html 25 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3865078/Prison-guard-inmate-said-pretty-smuggled-phones-jail-send-sex-texts-murderer-infatuated-him.html 26 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2900379/prison-crackdown-will-includetough-but-fair-agenda-to-prevent-lags-reoffending/ 27 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04tczmv 28 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-43115364 29 https://www.doingtime.co.uk/how-prisons-work/the-first-weeks-in-custody/personal-officer/ 30 https://www.ft.com/content/eb01cd18-4f63-11e7-bfb8-997009366969 31 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4246586/Police-hunt-murderer-twoarmed-men-help-escape.html 32 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/prisoners-being-left-insqualid-courtroom-cells-by-private-escort-companies-and-told-they-haveonly-a6723336.html 33 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-48747398 34 https://www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/law-and-rights/prison-leavers/ 35 https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http:/www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/cabinetoffice/social_exclusion_task_force/assets/publications_1997_to_2006/reducing_summary.pdf 36 http://bouncebackproject.com 37 http://www.cellspitch.com 38 https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2900379/prison-crackdown-will-includetough-but-fair-agenda-to-prevent-lags-reoffending/ Chapter 11: Paedophiles and Prizes 1 https://www.mdx.ac.uk/our-research/researchgroups/prisons-researchgroup/learning-together 2 https://www.judiciary.uk/announcements/coa-news-release-crim-appealsheard-more-quickly-11122012/ 3 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/29/hmp-wandsworth-ianbickers-governor-leaves-prisoners 4 https://www.gov.uk/life-in-prison/healthcare-in-prison 5 https://www.imb.org.uk/report/wandsworth-imb-2016-17-annual-report/ 6 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/aug/22/prison-healthcare-so-badit-would-be-shut-down-on-outside-say-doctors 7 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/05/healthcare-jailskilling-female-prisoners-black-women-annabella-landsberg 8 https://www.nursingtimes.net/news/mentalhealth/cqc-prosecutes-mentalhealth-trust-over-prisoner-suicide/7029362.article 9 http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/offenders/psipso/psi-2011/psi-49-2011-prisoner-comms-services.doc Epilogue 1 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jun/04/hmp-wandsworth-losesreform-prison-status-ian-bickers 2 https://www.ft.com/content/eb01cd18-4f63-11e7-bfb8-997009366969 3 https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prisonreform-open-letter-fromthe-justice-secretary 4 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/prison-violenceself-injury-uk-highest-level-record-inmates-figures-hmp-liverpoolnottingham-a8177286.html 5 https://www.gov.uk/government/ministers/secretary-of-state-for-justice 6 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/justice-secretary-david-gauke-sets-outlong-term-for-justice 7 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/06/26/scrap-jail-terms-less-12-months-serious-offences-says-prisons/ 8 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/fairer-prisoner-incentives-toencourage-rehabilitation 9 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/19/liverpool-prison-worst-conditions-inspectors-report 10 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45214414 11 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49110327 12 https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/07/cabinet-audit-whatdoes-appointment-robert-buckland-justice-secretary-mean 13 https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/07/cabinet-audit-whatdoes-appointment-priti-patel-home-secretary-mean-policy 14 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49309112 15 https://www.channel4.com/news/boris-johnson-pledges-to-increase-prisonsentences-for-violent-and-sexual-crimes 16 https://tpa.typepad.com/home/files/the_failure_of_the_prison_service_in_the_uk.pdf 17 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/mar/01/grayling-reaches-33msettlement-over-brexit-ferry-fiasco-court-case-eurotunnel 18 https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ianbickers-a4515625 19 https://twitter.com/ian_bickers/status/1033990834881011712?

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
by Michael J. Sandel
Published 9 Sep 2020

Henry Wallace, who was probably the nation’s greatest agriculture secretary, studied at Iowa State. 55 The rising credentialism of recent decades has also failed to improve governance in the United Kingdom. Today, only 7 percent of the British population attends private schools, and fewer than 1 percent attend Oxford or Cambridge universities. But the governing elites are drawn disproportionately from these places. Nearly two-thirds of Boris Johnson’s 2019 cabinet attended private schools, and almost half are Oxbridge graduates. Since World War II, most Conservative cabinet ministers, and about a third of ministers in Labour governments, have come from private school backgrounds. 56 But one of the most successful British governments since the war was its least credentialed and most broadly representative in class terms.

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Figures on portion of general population who attend private schools (7 percent) and Oxford or Cambridge (1 percent) are from Elitist Britain 2019: The Educational Backgrounds of Britain’s Leading People (The Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission, 2019), p. 4, suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Elitist-Britain-2019.pdf ; figures on Boris Johnson cabinet and percentage of cabinet who attended private school over time are from Rebecca Montacute and Ruby Nightingale, Sutton Trust Cabinet Analysis 2019, suttontrust.com/research-paper/sutton-trust-cabinet-analysis-2019 . 57 . Sutton Trust Cabinet Analysis 2019; Adam Gopnik, “Never Mind Churchill, Clement Attlee Is a Model for These Times,” The New Yorker , January 2, 2018, newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/never-mind-churchill-clement-attlee-is-a-model-for-these-times . 58.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
by Scott Patterson
Published 5 Jun 2023

At the time, Covid-19 had killed a few hundred people. Thousands more had become severely ill. Beijing had implemented a sweeping lockdown on the region. It all seemed so very far away. Few believed serious measures were required outside China. U.S. President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson dismissed the virus as another seasonal flu that would fade away with the spring. Stock markets hit records in America, Europe, Asia. Good times lay ahead. Taleb, whose once coal-black beard had lately turned snow-white, learned that some epidemiologists estimated Covid-19 had an R0—called an “R naught” or “R zero”—of three or four, maybe higher.

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He’d wander for hours, often alone, over the storied green hills that were once the inspiration of the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (and Peter Rabbit author Beatrix Potter). A diligent student, he did well in school and earned entrance into Balliol College at Oxford University. While there, he got to know another Balliol scholar, future UK prime minister Boris Johnson. After graduating in 1987, he moved to the U.S., where he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Rutgers University, specializing in the arcane writings of yet another influential Austrian thinker, Ludwig Wittgenstein. America shocked Read—the rampant industrial pollution of northern New Jersey, the colorful sunsets caused by the chemicals in the atmosphere, the blatant divisions between rich and poor, black and white.

The Price of Life: In Search of What We're Worth and Who Decides
by Jenny Kleeman
Published 13 Mar 2024

You can mould statistics to make them say whatever you want them to say.’ The government is being dishonest, of course. Nobody here will know it until the story breaks a year later, but the evening before this march, there was a secret party in Downing Street. Two weeks earlier, there was a gathering in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s own flat – one of dozens of parties that will ultimately come to light. But no one knows about this yet. It is still a time when most of us would feel sheepish if we sat on a park bench with our grandparents, because this would be breaking the law. Santa gets arrested near Grosvenor Square and the elves scatter.

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Her strong eyebrows and multiple piercings, in her nose and upper lip, make her look like a force to be reckoned with, but there was a softness to her as she hugged her knees into her chest in her chair. Before the pandemic, Louise worked in the constituency office of her local Labour MP, Lloyd Russell-Moyle. Her former boss told Brighton’s newspaper, The Argus, that he thought what Louise was doing was ‘tantamount to bonkers’. When Boris Johnson gave his sombre televised address on 23 March 2020 committing the nation to lockdown, Louise supported the idea. ‘I could tolerate it,’ she explained to me. ‘We didn’t know about the virus. Three weeks was tolerable.’ But at the end of those three weeks, lockdown was extended. ‘Sir Patrick Vallance said – live on TV – that it was worth remembering that the ONS [Office for National Statistics] data comes from people that have got Covid-19 on their death certificate, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re infected, because many of them weren’t tested.

Free Speech And Why It Matters
by Andrew Doyle
Published 24 Feb 2021

This belief in a direct causal link between forms of expression and violent crime should be interrogated, not least because it is already informing various governments’ justifications for hate speech legislation and politicians’ pleas for the moderation of language in the media and in parliament. During a House of Commons debate in September 2019, Labour politician Paula Sheriff invoked the memory of Jo Cox – a member of parliament who had been murdered by a far-right extremist in June 2016 – in order to criticise prime minister Boris Johnson’s ‘pejorative language’. ‘We stand here under the shield of our departed friend with many of us in this place subject to death threats and abuse every single day,’ Sherriff said. ‘Let me tell the prime minister they often quote his words – “surrender act”, “betrayal”, “traitor” – and I for one am sick of it.

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain?
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 6 Oct 2011

Starting at £3.60 an hour for adults, it immediately pushed up the pay of 1.2 million low-paid workers, most of them women. The Tories, having fought its introduction, then said they were in favour, making the national minimum a permanent gain for Labour. By 2010 the rate had risen, but only to £5.91. The minimum could not support a family. First Ken Livingstone and then Boris Johnson as mayors of London agreed a benchmark ‘living wage’ for their employees and contractors – £7.60 in London, £7 elsewhere in 2010. Ministers hammering on about ‘getting the poor off benefits and into work’ forgot that many who worked were still living below the poverty line. When pollsters asked about poverty the public thought Shameless and scroungers, not hospital cleaners, security guards, street cleaners, old people’s care assistants, dinner ladies, check-out staff or nursery assistants.

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His vote, just 15 per cent of the London electorate’s first-choice preferences, with barely a third of eligible Londoners bothering to vote at all, showed the public’s lack of enthusiasm. And this for a new office with huge potential. Livingstone won again, standing for Labour, only to lose to the clownish Boris Johnson in 2008. Conventional wisdom said lowish turnout and lack of public interest – especially in the assembly created alongside the mayor – resulted from the Greater London Authority’s lack of powers. Alternatively, too many people were uninterested in local self-government. That seemed to explain the tepid response to Labour’s attempt to push mayors in towns and cities outside London.

Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution
by Beth Gardiner
Published 18 Apr 2019

What do you think, Professor Kelly?’ And of course, they were all expecting him to say, ‘This is just Birkett being hysterical.’” Instead, Kelly agreed the estimates seemed reasonable.4 “Once you’d had somebody as respected as Frank saying, ‘Those numbers are about right,’” Birkett tells me, “that blew the lid off.” Boris Johnson had by then succeeded Livingstone as mayor, and he published a new study, with an updated number for London: 4,267.5 Birkett’s calculations hadn’t been far off. Meanwhile, Heather Walton, the voice on the other end of the phone when he’d glimpsed the government spreadsheet, had moved to King’s College, where she’d joined Frank Kelly’s group and was running a study that would revisit the London number yet again, this time adding the toll from the capital’s worryingly high nitrogen dioxide pollution to estimates that had until then considered only particles.

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And beyond the original mistake, what bothers me is the absence, for so long, of any action to reverse it. Instead of trying to solve the problem, David Cameron’s government, then Theresa May’s, put their energy into fighting off lawsuits demanding a serious pollution strategy, and seeking extensions to EU air quality mandates. As mayor, Boris Johnson delayed and diluted his predecessor’s more aggressive cleanup plans, and even sprayed dust suppressants near pollution monitors to artificially lower readings. One of the politicians engaging most seriously with the problem, trying to rectify the errors that have poisoned his city’s air, is Sadiq Khan.

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
by Shashi Tharoor
Published 1 Feb 2018

In such matters Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their times: in fact Churchill’s statements appalled most of his contemporaries. Even the positive gloss placed on him today seems inexcusable: ‘He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconcilable imperialist romantics,’ wrote Boris Johnson in his recent admiring biography of Churchill. ‘Die-hard defenders of the Raj and of the God-given right of every pink-jowled Englishman to sit on his veranda and…glory in the possession of India’. Mahatma Gandhi, increasingly exasperated by the British, argued that Nehru’s pro-Allied position had won India no concessions.

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Hodson, The Great Divide, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008; Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, New York: Harper Collins, 1997; Nicholas Mansergh, The Transfer of Power 1942–47, London: HM Stationery Office, 1983; and Lord Archibald Wavell, Viceroy’s Journal (ed.), Penderel Moon, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. For a short account, see also my own Nehru: The Invention of India, New York: Arcade Books, 2003. ‘It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi’: Ramachandra Guha, ‘Statues in a Square’, The Telegraph, 21 March 2015. ‘He put himself at the head of a movement’: Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, New York: Riverhead Books, 2014, p. 178. ‘bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi’: Alex Von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History Of The End Of An Empire, New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2007. ‘he represents a minority’: Hajari, Midnight’s Furies, p. 41.

Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy
by Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin
Published 7 Nov 2023

Only Andy rivaled Finn’s own ethic, similarly able to work for days without sleep. There was one instance when Finn decided unilaterally to make himself known to a teammate in person. At the end of July, Hong Kong activists in London rented out one of the city’s beloved red double-decker buses, campaigning for the newly elected prime minister Boris Johnson to put Hong Kong on the top of his agenda. Sitting on the top deck of the bus, Finn noticed a young woman some rows in front of him, her light-brown dyed hair bright against her all-black outfit. Finn had an intuition that this was the person he’d been talking to for hours since she’d organized “Sing for Hong Kong,” a demonstration where she and others traveled around London singing protest anthems.

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A journalist asked Zhang if China was worried about retaliation from the US, including sanctions. “Of course we’re not afraid,” he replied. “The era when the Chinese cared what others thought and looked up to others is in the past, never to return.”2 INTERNATIONAL CONDEMNATION WAS SWIFT AND IMMEDIATE. A SPECIAL weight was attached to the words of British prime minister Boris Johnson, who declared that China was in “clear and serious breach” of the Joint Declaration. Johnson’s government went a step further. On July 1, 2020, Johnson announced that his government would upgrade the British National (Overseas)—BN(O)—status to offer a pathway to residency in the United Kingdom.

Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
by Brett Chistophers
Published 25 Apr 2023

Then Global Investors Bought In.’, Washington Post, 15 December 2021. 22 Andonov, Kräussl and Rauh, ‘Institutional Investors and Infrastructure Investing’, p. 3888. 23 A. Chopra, ‘Saudi Wealth Fund “Shopping Spree” Belies Economic Pain’, Agence France-Presse, 12 June 2020. 24 P. Wintour, ‘Saudi Crown Prince Asked Boris Johnson to Intervene in Newcastle United Bid’, Guardian, 15 April 2021. 25 M. Shemirani, Sovereign Wealth Funds and International Political Economy (New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 7. 26 Andonov, Kräussl and Rauh, ‘Institutional Investors and Infrastructure Investing’, p. 3890. 27 Preqin, ‘The $1bn Club: Largest Investors in Private Equity’, June 2018 – at preqin.com. 28 Andonov, Kräussl and Rauh, ‘Institutional Investors and Infrastructure Investing’, p. 3888. 29 Cited in G.

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Scherrer, ‘State-Owned Enterprises and the Low-Carbon Transition’, OECD Working Paper No. 129 (April 2018), p. 29. 48 Ibid., p. 16. 49 Ibid., p. 17. 50 Ibid., p. 18. 51 A. Pettifor, The Case for the Green New Deal (London: Verso, 2019); K. Aronoff, A. Battistoni, D. A. Cohen and T. Riofrancos, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (London: Verso, 2019). 52 K. Adam, ‘Boris Johnson says Britain Needs Its Own Green New Deal’, Washington Post, 18 November 2020. 53 E. McNally, ‘Whose Green New Deal?’ New Left Review – Sidecar, 4 May 2021 – at newleftreview.org. 54 Although the inclusion in the legislation of so-called direct-pay provisions may create some space for the public sector to assume a more involved role.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
by Adam Tooze
Published 31 Jul 2018

Farrell, “JP Morgan Boss: Up to 4,000 Jobs Could Be Cut After Brexit,” Guardian, June 3, 2016. 43. T. McTague, “Boris Johnson Slaps Down ‘Part-Kenyan’ Barack Obama over Brexit Push,” Politico, April 22, 2016. 44. T. McTague, “9 Takeaways from Barack Obama’s Brexit Intervention,” Politico, April 22, 2016; and B. Gurciullo, “Obama to the British People: Just Say No to Brexit,” Politico, April 22, 2016. 45. S. Watkins, “Oppositions,” New Left Review 98 (2016). 46. T. McTague, A. Spence and E.-I. Dovere, “How David Cameron Blew It,” Politico, June 25, 2016. 47. S. Chan, “Boris Johnson’s Essay on Obama and Churchill Touches Nerve Online,” New York Times, April 22, 2016. 48.

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All Treaty articles could just continue to apply to the UK.”26 It would be up to London to assert itself. It was a far cry from Cameron’s promise of January 2013 that Britain could initiate a fundamental rethink of the EU’s purpose. It was much less than the British prime minister needed to hold the Tory party together. Immediately, two Tory heavyweights—mayor of London Boris Johnson and education minister Michael Gove—broke away to launch the “mainstream” Tory wing of the Brexit campaign in the referendum that was now set for June 23, 2016. II When confronting Syriza the year before, German finance minister Schäuble had declared that as far as he was concerned, elections could not be allowed to interfere with the fundamentals of economic policy.

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What the Remainers underestimated was the risk they were running. They did not appreciate that along with the desire to put two fingers up to the establishment, immigration and xenophobia were, in fact, winning cards. The racial politics did not stop even at the person of the president of the United States. What right, Boris Johnson demanded to know, did Obama have to suggest to Britain concessions of sovereignty that the United States would never accept? Why should Britain trust a president who had removed the bust of Churchill from the Oval Office? “Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire—of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.

The Serious Guide to Joke Writing: How to Say Something Funny About Anything
by Sally Holloway
Published 2 Nov 2010

Bush had his watch stolen, a number of topical shows took the angle of what his watch might be like, or whether he could tell the time, again avoiding the actual subject of the watch being stolen. Other stereotypes used by satirical shows are that the lovely David Beckham is a bit thick, while Jordan, Posh, Paris Hilton, etc, are seen as shallow bimbos. Ex-President Clinton is usually portrayed as randy, Boris Johnson as a buffoon, Prince Philip is a racist and all British MPs are now seen as on the fiddle. Topical gag writers use stereotypes as short-hand in jokes and so can you. Exercise 7: Writing Punchlines from Set-Ups Look at the following set-up lines from satirical news shows over the years and see if you can find the joke.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 17 Jul 2018

Rich, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life (Rand Corporation, 2018). 2,140 false or misleading claims: Glenn Kessler and Meg Kelly, “President Trump Made 2,140 False or Misleading Claims in His First Year,” Washington Post, Jan. 10, 2018. False claims about the U.K.’s: Anoosh Chakelian, “Boris Johnson Resurrects the Leave Campaign’s £350M for NHS Fantasy,” New Statesman, Sept. 16, 2017. “There is no such thing”: Pope Francis, “Message of His Holiness Pope Francis for World Communications Day,” Jan. 24, 2018, http://w2.vatican.va/​content/​francesco/​en/messages/communications/documents/papa-francesco_20180124_messaggio-comunicazioni-sociali.html.

Commuter City: How the Railways Shaped London
by David Wragg
Published 14 Apr 2010

Originally it had been intended to locate London’s third airport at Foulness, not too far from Shoeburyness on the former London, Tilbury & Southend Railway, but the dangers of unexploded shells from the army firing range at Shoeburyness and the fact that the area was a focal point for migrating birds, which don’t mix well with aircraft, and the cost of a high speed connection to London, all went against Foulness and eventually Stansted was chosen. The revised plans are for a Heathrow replacement, with the current mayor of London, Boris Johnson, seeing the site of Heathrow redeveloped as a business park. It would be some business park, and would have to be to justify the continuation of Heathrow’s existing railway links and the collapse of property values once the airport goes. The new airport would be further south towards the Kent side of the Thames Estuary, and could possibly use the high speed service to St Pancras of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, otherwise known in railway circles as High Speed 1, or HS1.

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The most obvious change will be that at last the Metropolitan Line will have its ‘A’ stock replaced by a new fleet of what has been dubbed ‘S’ stock, with variations of this following later for the other sub-surface lines. However, the new ‘S’ stock will have fewer seats, with the current 2+3 configuration being replaced by 2+2 and also longitudinal seating in the interests of extra standing room. In defence of the new stock, the current Mayor for London, Boris Johnson, has suggested that the three-abreast seats on the ‘A’ stock are so cramped that they are seldom used efficiently. Others have suggested that those boarding trains at the outermost stations are likely to get a seat, but this ignores their homeward journey! There has for long been a proposal for a line between Chelsea and Hackney, which some believe could be completed by 2025, but with Crossrail and the mounting deficit in the public finances, this is a project that may remain a dream for many more years.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
by Matt Ridley

If nurture were everything, those children who had experienced poor schools could be written off as having poor minds. Nobody thinks that. The whole idea of social mobility is to find talent in the disadvantaged, to find people who have the nature but have missed the nurture. In 2014 an article in a British newspaper criticised Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, for believing in genetic influences on intelligence, yet its headline said that ‘gifted children are failed by the system’ – which assumes the existence of (genetically) gifted children. One of the surprising things to emerge from behaviour genetics is that heritability of intelligence increases with age.

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Largely in vain had the philosopher Herbert Spencer* fought back against top–down history, arguing that Carlyle was wrong. Leo Tolstoy too devoted a part of War and Peace to an argument against the Great Man theory. But then the twentieth century seemed to prove Carlyle right, as great men and women – for good and ill – changed history repeatedly: Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Churchill, Mandela, Thatcher. As Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has argued in his book The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, it is almost impossible to conceive of any other British politician close to power in May 1940 who would have chosen not to negotiate with Hitler in search of peace, however humiliating. Nobody else in the War Cabinet had the courage, the insanity, the sheer effrontery to defy the inevitable and fight on.

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation
by Brendan Simms
Published 27 Apr 2016

Ein deutsche-britischer Vergleich (Berlin and New York, 2010), pp. 96–107, especially p. 105. 9. See Tim Coates, Lord Kitchener and Winston Churchill: The Dardanelles Commission Part I, 1914–15 (London, 2000), and Defeat at Gallipolli: The Dardanelles Commission Part II, 1915–1916 (London, 2000). 10. Quoted in Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor. How One Man Made History (London, 2014), p. 309. 11. See Brock Millman, Managing Domestic Dissent in First World War Britain (London, 2001). See also Jo Vellacott, Pacifists, Patriots and the Vote. The Erosion of Democratic Suffragism in Britain during the First World War (Basingstoke, 2007). 12.

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Plädoyer für die Vereinigten Staaten von Europa (Munich, 2016). 29. Mr Winston Churchill speaking in Zurich, 19 September 1946 (The Churchill Society. London: http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/astonish.html). There is a lively and very fair-minded discussion of Churchill’s engagement in Europe in Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor. How One Man Make History (London, 2014), pp. 295–310. 30. Quoted in A. Lemaire, ‘Keep Britain within the EU’ in A. Hug, Renegotiation, Reform and Referendum: Does Britain Have an EU Future? (The Foreign Policy Centre, 2014), p. 59. 31. See Bruno Waterfield and Francis Waterfield, ‘Poland Will Support EU Benefit Curbs in Return for NATO Base’, The Times, 5.1.2016, p. 14.

Siege: Trump Under Fire
by Michael Wolff
Published 3 Jun 2019

It was not the deal that was in the referendum.” (There was, in fact, no deal in the referendum, other than unspecified departure from the EU.) The deal, as now proposed, would “definitely affect trade with the United States—unfortunately in a negative way.” He then heaped praise on one of May’s main Tory Party antagonists, Boris Johnson, who had just resigned from her cabinet as foreign minister over the May government’s more cautious Brexit plan. Commenting on the speculation that Johnson would shortly commence a leadership fight against May, Trump said: “I think he would make a great prime minister. I think he’s got what it takes.”

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See also border security; Wall Europe and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) impeachment Ingraham, Laura intelligence community Internal Revenue Service (IRS) In Touch Iowa primaries Iran ISIS Israel Italy Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Ronny James, Letitia Jews Jobs, Steve Johnson, Boris Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Woody Judge, Mark Judicial Watch Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA, 2016) Justice Department (DOJ) Barr as attorney general and Criminal Fraud Division indictment of sitting president and Kavanaugh and McGahn and pardon power and Whitaker as acting attorney general and Karem, Jordan Kasowitz, Marc Katyal, Neal Kavanaugh, Brett Kelly, John Coats firing and Don Jr. and Helsinki summit and Jared and McCain and Melania and midterms and NATO summit and Porter and resignation of Singapore summit and Team America and Trump-Hannity phone calls and Trump’s relationship with Kelly, Megyn Kennedy, Anthony Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, John F.

A United Ireland: Why Unification Is Inevitable and How It Will Come About
by Kevin Meagher
Published 15 Nov 2016

The use of baton rounds and water cannons to quell civil disturbances has become a regular feature of the policing and security response in Northern Ireland. Yet they remain unused in Britain. In fact, the thought of their use in any British city, or against, say, student demonstrators, would be utterly unthinkable. When he was Mayor of London, Boris Johnson rashly purchased two second-hand water cannons following the London riots of 2011, but was publicly slapped down by then Home Secretary Theresa May, who flatly refused him licences to deploy them. But, in most of the media coverage of the various disputes in Northern Ireland, their regular usage merits little more than a passing remark.

Paint Your Town Red
by Matthew Brown
Published 14 Jun 2021

These elements were undeniably present in political and popular discourse up to and surrounding the referendum, culminating in the tragic murder of Jo Cox MP, and should not be dismissed or underplayed. However, what this narrative ignores is the extent to which voting Leave also functioned as an economic and anti-establishment protest by an economically neglected and politically disregarded demographic. Despite the deeply establishment origins of pro-Leave proponents like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, and despite the extent to which poorer post-industrial areas of the UK have benefited from EU funding for infrastructure and agricultural subsidies, a vote to Leave was nonetheless seen in many such areas as a vote to spite and upset a political ruling class which had systematically ignored and acted against their interests for decades.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

The Spectator is the house newsletter of Britain’s conservative establishment, the product of a literary and political hothouse whose writers are known for throwing the best parties in London and causing the occasional political scandal with their high-profile extramarital high jinks. Don’t be deceived by its modest circulation of less than sixty-five thousand; three editors of the Spectator have gone on to serve in the cabinets of Tory prime ministers, and one, Boris Johnson, is currently the mayor of London. The phrase “young fogey” was coined on the pages of the Spectator in 1984, and the magazine remains proud to speak in a posh accent—you’ll learn more in the Speccie, as its devotees call it, about fox hunting than you will about pop stars. That’s why the Spectator’s pronouncements on elite English culture should be taken seriously.

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This is not a group that plays hooky: the conference room is full from nine a.m. to six p.m. on conference days, and during coffee breaks the lawns are crowded with executives checking their BlackBerrys and iPads. The 2010 lineup of Zeitgeist speakers included such notables as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, London mayor Boris Johnson, and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz (not to mention, of course, Google’s own CEO, Eric Schmidt). But the most potent currency at this and comparable gatherings is neither fame nor money. Rather, it’s what author Michael Lewis has dubbed “the new new thing”—the insight or algorithm or technology with the potential to change the world.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

Karen Tumulty, “How Donald Trump Came Up with ‘Make America Great Again,’” Washington Post, January 18, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-donald-trump-came-up-with-make-america-great-again/2017/01/17/fb6acf5e-dbf7-11e6-ad42-f3375f271c9c_story.html?utm_term=.064c24103851. 2. Officially, the slogan was “Taking Back Control,” though most politicians invoking the slogan did not use the gerundive form. See “Boris Johnson: UK ‘Should Take Back Control,’” BBC News, http://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-35739955/boris-johnson-uk-should-take-back-control; and Joseph Todd, “Why Take Back Control Is the Perfect Left-Wing Slogan,” New Statesman, March 13, 2017, http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2017/03/why-take-back-control-perfect-left-wing-slogan. 3. This is one of the reasons that minorities are, in most countries, much less tempted by populist politicians on both the far right and the far left.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization
by Michael O’sullivan
Published 28 May 2019

As an academic he had believed that policy stemmed from theory and research and that this could be translated directly into government action. As he begins to understand how power works, Reich is desperate to be “in the loop” but is ultimately not as successful at this as more seasoned Washington insiders.15 A further contrast in political types might help illustrate this point further. In July 2018, Boris Johnson resigned as British foreign secretary. Britain no longer has an empire, but the office of foreign secretary is still respected. During his tenure, however, Johnson made a number of gaffes and was generally seen to have damaged rather than advanced Britain’s interests. Similarly, in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, he was also seen as a natural leader of the Tory Party, but the way he has conducted himself since then has led many party colleagues to the view that, even by the standards of politicians, he is too self-serving, and he has lost support within his party.

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As political resignations go, this one was seen to be selfless and principled and stands in contrast to the tactical maneuvering of some politicians today. Carrington, along with many contemporary central bankers (Paul Volcker, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Mario Draghi, for instance), is a good example of sincere public service, and his behavior stands in contrast to that of successors like Boris Johnson. The problem, then, is to attract more outsiders into public life and also to have them discover how politics works. The distinction I wish to draw is to have policy makers who are more responsible for and focused on policy making than on their own personal advancement. Advancing oneself is, of course, prevalent across all organizations and institutions, but the difference with politics is that people’s lives are affected by bad policy making.

World Cities and Nation States
by Greg Clark and Tim Moonen
Published 19 Dec 2016

Well over three‐quarters of the money spent both by the Mayor and by the boroughs comes via central government grants and programmes, rather than locally generated and managed funds. Each year the Mayor negotiates with the Government over the size of the GLA’s grant, and must constantly lobby to achieve strategic goals or to pay for new items of infrastructure. The first two London Mayors, Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, were very effective at using their profile to advocate for modest concessions for London. The Greater London Authority Act that set up the new mayoral system left many opportunities for central government to intervene in city government activity (for example, to impose a minimum budget for police or for transport).

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These include, in particular, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Treasury, but also the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Department of Transport, the Home Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The role of the Mayor is still very much linked to the ability to use influence, network and publicity to raise awareness of London’s needs to these departments. As Mayor Boris Johnson explained in 2013, “that is part of the pitch I have to make to government. If you want London, the motor of the economy, to keep roaring, then you must make sure that you invest in infrastructure, housing and transport” (Johnson, cited in Pickford, 2013). In summarising the first 16 years of the new governance system in London, the national Communities and Local Government Committee (2016: 42) simply states that, “Devolution to London…has been a success.”

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again
by Johann Hari
Published 25 Jan 2022

The people who say YouTube radicalizes you argue that this effect happens over time. You create a profile, you log in, and gradually YouTube builds up knowledge of your preferences, and to keep you watching, the content it feeds you gets more extreme. But the research Nir cites didn’t study any logged-in users. All they did was go to a video on YouTube—say, Boris Johnson giving a speech—and without logging in, they looked at the recommendations that appeared along the side. If you use YouTube in this highly unusual way, the videos don’t become more extreme over time, and it might be fair to say YouTube is deradicalizing. But huge numbers of YouTube users do log in.

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It was a mild winter in London too, and I assumed I was caught in a cold draft, but by the time I got home half an hour later, I was shivering and shaking. I crawled into bed, and I didn’t get out again, except to go to the bathroom, for three weeks. I had a raging temperature, and I became feverish and almost delusional. By the time I was able to understand what was going on, British prime minister Boris Johnson was appearing on television telling everyone that they must not leave their homes, and then, soon after, he was in the hospital himself, almost dead. It was like a stress dream, where the walls of reality start to collapse. * * * Up to this point, I had been applying what I’d learned on this journey steadily, step by step, to improve my own attention.

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back
by Guy Shrubsole
Published 1 May 2019

This has led most plutocrats to acquire expensive London apartments and mansions, where a rise in property values can be pretty much guaranteed – often leaving those properties vacant while they jet-set between their many homes. It’s also led a few of the very richest to buy up swathes of farmland to take advantage of generous farm subsidies and inheritance tax breaks on agricultural land. Boris Johnson, when Mayor of London, defended foreign investment in the capital, while weakly protesting that the city’s houses shouldn’t be treated as ‘just blocks of bullion in the sky’. But to many of the world’s super-rich, they are precisely that. This then has a ripple effect on property prices, worsening the housing crisis.

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Theresa May’s government has already accepted the principle of doing so, and increased the surcharge from 50 per cent to 100 per cent. But at current levels, it’s unlikely to do much to discourage the wealthy, offshore owners who leave them empty. If a 300 per cent council tax premium on empty homes still proves too low, why not do as Boris Johnson suggested when he was Mayor of London, and raise the rate to 1,000 per cent? Beyond these two measures, the English Land Commission should be tasked with reporting on the best form of land value tax to levy in England. Land value tax is often proposed by land activists as a solution to the housing crisis – indeed, to some devotees of the thinker Henry George, land value tax is a silver bullet solution to all our woes.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

The renaming delivers short-term relief, but ultimately it backfires: Fake Roth is still ensnared in what Roth terms “pipikism,” or bellybuttonism, “the antitragic force that inconsequencializes everything—farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything.” Is it possible to escape a tractor beam like pipikism? Once an idea has been pipiked, can it ever be serious again? This, in some sense, is the trouble with all the monstrous clowns that have reshaped modern politics in recent years: Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. And then there is Putin casting himself as a global truth-teller about the crimes of Western colonialism and an upholder of the anti-imperialist, anti-fascist traditions—Putin as Pipik. These figures spread pipikism everywhere they go.

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.; We Stand in Solidarity convoy and individualism, individuality; Covid and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Indonesia infant mortality Inflamed (Marya and Patel) influencers information Infowars Inquisition Instagram intellectual property Intercept, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Internal Family Systems International Criminal Court International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association International Monetary Fund internet; see also social media Internet for the People (Tarnoff) Internet Gaming Entertainment In the Presence of Absence (Darwish) Invasion of the Body Snatchers investigative journalism iPhone Iran Iraq Ireland ISIS Israel; boycott, divestment, and sanctions against; as colonial project; Defense Force in; Holocaust and; Palestinians and; Roth and Italy James I of England January 6 United States Capitol attack Japanese Americans Jean Paul “Jerusalem” (Amichai) Jesus Jewish Currents Jewish Labor Bund Jewish National Fund Jewish Question, The (Leon) Jewish Voice for Peace Jews; anti-Semitism and; author’s Jewishness; blood libel and; Christians and; communist and socialist ideologies as attractive to; conspiracy theories about; in France; Hasidic; “hereness” and; “Jewish Question” and; as moneylenders; in Nazi Germany, see Nazi Germany, Jews in; Orthodox, and Covid; Roth and; in Russia; satanism associated with; in Vienna; Zionism and; see also Israel Jim Crow jobs Johnson, Boris Johnson & Johnson Jones, Alex Jones, Jonathan Jordan Jordan, June Jordan, Michael journalism Judaism Juneteenth Jung, Carl justice Kaba, Mariame Kamatovic, Tamara Kamloops Indian Residential School Kanitz, Otto Felix Kanner, Leo Kendzior, Sarah Kennedy, John F., Jr. Kennedy, Robert F., Jr.

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics
by John B. Judis
Published 11 Sep 2016

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn waged a halfhearted campaign for staying within the EU that probably failed to sway potential supporters among the “left-behinds” while further alienating what had once been Labour constituencies. UKIP led the campaign against the referendum along with two prominent Tories, former London Mayor Boris Johnson and former Cabinet member and MP Michael Gove. Farage conducted the referendum campaign in classic populist fashion, pitting the people against the establishment. On May 20, he told reporters, “It is the establishment, it is the wealthy, it is the multi-nationals, it is the big banks, it is those whose lives have really done rather well in the last few years who are supporting remaining and against it is the people.”

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

See also Responding to Populist Rhetoric: A Guide (Counterpoint, 2015). 11 Joel Busher, The Making of Anti-Muslim Protest: Grassroots Activism in the English Defence League (Routledge, 2015). 12 Dratman, ‘We need political parties’. 13 Kate Forrester, ‘New Poll Reveals Generations Prepared To Sell Each Other Out Over Brexit, www.huffingtonpost.com,12 April 2017. 14 Jonathan Freedland, ‘Post-truth politicians such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are no joke’, Guardian, 13 May 2016. Miriam Valverde, ‘Pants on Fire! Trump says Clinton would let 650 million people into the U.S., in one week’, 31 October 2016, www.politifact.com. Polling data was taken from www.realclearpolitics.com poll tracker. 15 B. Nyhan and J. Reifler (2010), ‘When corrections fail: The persistence of political misperceptions’, Political Behavior, 32 (2), 303–330. 16 Dolores Albarracin et al. (2017), ‘Debunking: A Meta-Analysis of the Psychological Efficacy of Messages Countering Misinformation, Psychological Science, 28 (11), 1531–1546. 17 Paul Lewis, ‘“Fiction is outperforming reality”: how YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth’, Guardian, 2 February 2018. 18 Nicholas Confessore, ‘For Whites Sensing Decline, Donald Trump Unleashes Words of Resistance’, New York Times, 13 July 2016. 19 Southern Poverty Law Centre, ‘Richard Bertrand Spencer’, https://www.splcenter.org.

Pocket London Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Oxo Tower Restaurant & Brasserie (Click here) To-die-for views matched by excellent fusion menu. Min Jiang (Click here) Peking duck and panoramas of Kensington Gardens. Skylon (Click here) SKYLON © Best Drinking & Nightlife There’s little Londoners like to do more than party. From Hogarth’s 18th-century Gin Lane prints to Mayor Boris Johnson’s decision to ban all alcohol on public transport in 2008, the capital’s obsession with drink and its effects shows absolutely no sign of waning. Some parts of London only come alive in the evening and surge through the early hours. Pubs At the heart of London social life, the pub (public house) is one of the capital’s great social levellers.

Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project
by Hans Kundnani
Published 16 Aug 2023

Nevertheless, the meaning of Brexit is often simply reduced either to the views of individual figures like Nigel Farage, or alternatively to certain subsets of the 17.4 million people who voted to leave the EU, such as the “white working class”. Even if the focus is restricted to political entrepreneurs, the picture is complicated. There were two campaigns: the official Vote Leave campaign, which was supported by Conservative politicians such as Boris Johnson and focused more on economic arguments for leaving the EU; and the unofficial campaign founded by Arron Banks, which focused more on immigration. UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage also in effect ran his own campaign—including the notorious “Breaking Point” poster which depicted a queue of non-white people, perhaps asylum seekers.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 2 Mar 2015

Jennifer Lynch and Peter Bibring (6 May 2013), “Automated license plate readers threaten our privacy,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/alpr. It enforces London’s: The police also get access to the data. Hélène Mulholland (2 Apr 2012), “Boris Johnson plans to give police access to congestion charge cameras,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/apr/02/boris-johnson-police-congestion-charge. automatic face recognition: Dan Froomkin (17 Mar 2014), “Reports of the death of a national license-plate tracking database have been greatly exaggerated,” Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/03/17/1756license-plate-tracking-database.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 10 Oct 2018

Private equity is perhaps the clearest illustration of financialisation at work, but many of the techniques it pioneered have spread to other business sectors, egged on by law and accounting firms and the banks which set up so many of these schemes. The question now is: how do these techniques and financial flows play out across a whole country, and what other risks might they be storing up? 10 The March of the Takers In 2012 Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, stood under an umbrella by a busy road, his blond hair whiffling in the wind. ‘A pound spent in Croydon is far more of value to the country from a strict utilitarian calculus than a pound spent in Strathclyde,’ he gushed.1 ‘Indeed you will generate jobs and growth in Strathclyde far more effectively if you invest in Hackney or Croydon or in other parts of London.’

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Likewise, many people argue that Britain is too dependent on London and its outsized financial sector, which has grown so large and powerful and extractive that other sectors of the economy struggle to survive, like seedlings starved of light and water under the canopy of a giant, deep-rooted and invasive tree. So does London subsidise the rest of the country? Is Boris Johnson right when he says that spending and wealth in Croydon, London and south-east England grow and spread out to places like Strathclyde? Or is London the centre of a financialising machine that sucks power and money away from the peripheries: a march of the takers, sabotaging the march of the makers?

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life
by Ian Dunt
Published 15 Oct 2020

Anti-immigration, anti-European voters were, in his mind, a true expression of the people. Pro-immigration, pro-European figures were simply members of an elite conspiracy determined to thwart the people’s will. Cummings attracted two key figures from the mainstream, respectable right to front Vote Leave. The first was Boris Johnson, a jovial and self-interested Conservative who had once been mayor of London. Johnson had no ideology to speak of and indeed appeared to have no convictions whatsoever other than the centrality of his own advancement. Certainly he was not ideologically committed to Brexit or nationalism. If the wind had blown another way – as it had when he was mayor of London – he would have pursued an inclusive pro-European message for Remain.

…

In May 2019, her voice cracking with emotion, May stood outside Downing Street and confirmed she was stepping down. May’s defeat precipitated another flight from reality. In the ensuing Conservative leadership contest, members penalised candidates who recognised the difficulties of Brexit and rewarded those who denied them. Boris Johnson walked into Downing Street. His approach to the issue was summarised by a mantra, which would be repeated over and over again in the months to come: Get Brexit Done. Johnson was no more a nationalist than May, but it was expedient to accept Cummings’ agenda – politically, culturally and methodologically.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

The previous day the Tory government, despite taking on an almost comically inept opposition with a leader wildly to the Left of anyone in British electoral history, had managed to lose their majority in Parliament. More disturbing, though, they had been massacred among the under-forties and professional classes. The result itself was not the really alarming thing, and would be corrected two and a half years later when the Conservatives won a majority under Boris Johnson. Far more worrying was that, as I headed deep into the happiness U-bend of middle age, no one I knew was becoming more conservative. It had been said before, in the 1960s and 1920s and probably before, that the young were Left-wing and so the future was socialist or liberal; then those cohorts had matured, or perhaps just become more bitter and cynical as they aged, and so had adopted conservative worldviews; but this was no longer happening, and my personal observations were matched by growing amounts of data.

…

The Cameron faction wanted us to accept social liberalism just as Blair accepted Thatcherite economic liberalism, but I wondered how much this was because of the wider electorate and how much because conservative elites now move in circles that are overwhelming liberal and they just want to be liked, or at least not hated. I understand, since most of my social network is Left-of-centre, and if I went into politics I would probably lose a lot of friends. It takes courage to stand out, and the Notting Hill set came from quite liberal cultural milieus, at least compared to previous Tory leaders. Boris Johnson’s metropolitan background explains why his persona as a fun-loving multicultural mayor always seemed less false than his subsequent Brexit nationalist rebrand; indeed, one reason he agonised over the referendum was that it meant falling out with family and friends, something I could relate to on a smaller scale.

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds
by Dominique Mielle
Published 6 Sep 2021

Few, like George Soros and Tom Steyer, are notorious Democrats—very few. But this was different. For one thing, all extreme-right politicians look the same these days. Namely, they have a turkey neck. Lindsey Graham: turkey neck. Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump: turkey necks. And watch, it is going global: Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro? Turkey necks. Understandably, part of it is the natural upshot of being old and fat, but I still find it somewhat uncanny. Do they screen for it? If they do, no wonder Macron, Trudeau, and Obama had to be on the left. More to the point, do you remember when Trump attacked the federal judge who was presiding over the lawsuit against his university?

Fun Inc.
by Tom Chatfield
Published 13 Dec 2011

The second critique was published in 1930, and comes from the cantankerous pen of the French author Georges Duhamel, who argued in his book, Scenes from the Life of the Future, against the evils of the new medium of film. And the third comes from a British politician, the Conservative Member of Parliament and current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who used his column in the Daily Telegraph in December 2006 to highlight the menace of video games. He went on to explain that they were ‘a cause of ignorance and underachievement’ because they distracted modern youth from productive activities like reading, turning them instead into ‘blinking lizards’.

Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water
by Peter H. Gleick
Published 20 Apr 2010

In January 2008 the Minneapolis City Council approved $500,000 for the construction of ten new public drinking fountains, each designed by a different Minnesota artist.20 Community groups in New York are calling for the city to improve the condition of park fountains. In the summer of 2008 the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, called for new water fountains to be put in parks and public spaces across the city, in part as an alternative to plastic bottled water. Said the mayor, “If this place is generally getting hotter and people are going off buying bottled water, I think we should have a new era of public fountains.”21 A recent study in German grade schools found that water fountains, combined with lesson plans about the benefits of drinking water, led to a drop in the number of overweight children, prompting calls for new school fountains.22 The city council of Toronto voted in December 2008 to ban the sale and provision of bottled water in city facilities and to invest in fixing old water fountains and installing new ones.

Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy (Bicycle)
by Elly Blue
Published 29 Nov 2014

In some cities, this basic incompatibility of heavy freight with urban life is recognized. In Japan, for instance, depots for large trucks are on the outskirts of cities, and loads are delivered to their final destination in smaller box trucks. In London, trucks are involved in nearly half of cycling fatalities. The mayor, Boris Johnson, after he was nearly killed by a truck in an incident that was caught on tape and made worldwide news, proposed in 2010 to ban all large trucks from central London. Heavy trucks would unload outside the city, as in Japan, and goods would be delivered in more appropriate sized vehicles. He only partly succeeded—large trucks are now banned on city streets at night.

Day One Trader: A Liffe Story
by John Sussex
Published 16 Aug 2009

Things would get pretty heated during these lengthy debates. The non-executive chairman Jack Wigglesworth was too nice to have been in charge. He needed to be tougher. Daniel Hodson, the chief executive officer, would respond to this by trying to take control of meetings. Hodson had a similar manner to the London Mayor Boris Johnson, though his thin greying hair gave him a very different appearance. When he tried to take charge of meetings it would anger some of the other directors as it appeared to them that he was pushing his own agenda. He had long recognised that electronic trading was going to take over. But he did not have an easy time trying to convince the board of this.

Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health
by David Nutt
Published 9 Jan 2020

In fact, ‘uppers and downers’ is the most popular combination in the history of drug-taking. Another example of this is cocaine and alcohol. Back in the 1890s, when cocaine was legal, a wine called Mariani from Italy contained both. And it was endorsed by the Pope, no less. And you may have heard the rumours about David Cameron, Boris Johnson and other Bullingdon Club members allegedly taking cocaine and drinking alcohol at parties.5 The reason why people might do this is in order to be able to drink more and for longer. Interestingly, when in the 1990s the Icelandic government passed a law to allow 24-hour drinking, there was subsequently an increase in amphetamine use.6 One of the issues with cocaine and alcohol is that they work together in the body to produce a new chemical, called coca-ethylene (CE).

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger
by Matthew Yglesias
Published 14 Sep 2020

According to the International Monetary Fund, for example, in 2018 the per capita GDP in the United States was $62,870 while in Denmark it was $60,900. The United States, in other words, was about 3 percent richer. Market exchange rates are, however, very volatile. Over the course of July 2019, for example, the value of the British pound fell about 5 percent relative to the value of the US dollar thanks to the growing realization that Boris Johnson was going to become prime minister. That 5 percent decline had some real implications for the living standards of the British people (it was really bad news for anyone who had already booked an August vacation to the United States) and contains serious information about investors’ sense of the long-term implications of the situation in British politics.

Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff
by Dinah Sanders
Published 7 Oct 2011

More than just a personal issue that everyone needs to examine in their own lives, it’s also a cultural issue on a massive scale. Mooallem also noted that the United States now has 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space—more than seven square feet for every man, woman, and child in the country—despite the size of the average American home almost doubling in the past 50 years. Non-Americans: Don’t look smug. As Boris Johnson pointed out in 2009, Europe has started to follow the same path: “If the self-storage industry keeps growing at this rate, the day is not far off when we will all be Tutankhamuns, trying to cheat death with a secret funerary display of all the things that are most personally suggestive, most symbolic of our lives, and the things we couldn’t bear to chuck.”

Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists
by Joan Smith
Published 5 Apr 2019

One of the things I do, aside from being a writer, is chairing the committee at City Hall that draws up the Mayor of London’s strategy to reduce violence against women and girls (the VAWG Board, for short). I’ve been co-chair since 2013 and I talk regularly to senior police officers, prosecutors, local politicians and representatives of women’s organisations. In 2014, when Boris Johnson was Mayor, we began publishing maps of London showing incidents of rape, serious sexual assault and domestic violence in each of the thirty-two boroughs, using data on recorded crime from the Metropolitan Police. Unlike most of the general public, who seem unaware of how dire the situation is, I am staggered by the prevalence of violence towards women in London; it’s one of the reasons why reports of domestic abuse leap out at me when I read about men who’ve committed other violent crimes, such as terrorism.

Night Trains: The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper
by Andrew Martin
Published 9 Feb 2017

The room rate at that hotel, the Pera Palace, built by Nagelmackers and famed for its Orient Express connections, had proved disturbingly cheap (and well down on what it had been a few months before). The cost of a British Airways return flight was also unexpectedly low, which was just as well because on the day before I bought my euros, Boris Johnson had announced (possibly having flipped a coin) that he favoured Brexit, so sterling had slumped. I took out my tickets and my European Railway Map. I had a second class ticket on this TGV to Munich. I then had a ticket for the Hungarian-operated EuroNight train from Munich to Budapest. I would be spending most of the day in Budapest before taking the Romanian EuroNight train to Bucharest, for which I also had a ticket.

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining
by James Meek
Published 5 Mar 2019

That said, there are recitals, and anyone can arrange a tour, if they can get together a party of fourteen, at £30 a head. When aristocrats own so much land, when all the peers I’ve mentioned, out of the thousands of possibilities, attended the same secondary school, the one attended by David Cameron and Boris Johnson, it might seem strange to say that the powers of the lords of Norfolk have waned. But in some senses they have. They no longer wield local power over hundreds of tenants and agricultural workers and their families on their estates; commuters, retirees and second-homers live in the villages now.

Deadly Quiet City: True Stories From Wuhan
by Murong Xuecun
Published 7 Mar 2023

Ren Zhiqiang, a former Party loyalist and property tycoon, shares among friends (and soon the world) a blistering rebuke of Xi Jinping, denouncing the Party for cheating the WHO and ridiculing its self-flattery and ritualised blindness to the truth, all represented by ‘a clown with no clothes on who was still determined to play emperor’. Three days later, Ren Zhiqiang disappears. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is hospitalised with COVID-19. Two days earlier he had joked that ‘he was still shaking hands with everyone, including at a hospital treating coronavirus patients’. Wuhan’s South China Seafood Market remains boarded up. An ‘unbearable stench’ hangs over surrounding streets from the food that’s rotted in the refrigerators.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business
by Alan Murray
Published 15 Dec 2022

The share of all income going to the middle-income group dropped from 62 percent to 43 percent, while their share of wealth dropped even faster. The 2008 shakeup led to a cascade of events, including Brexit—a bold and potentially disastrous rejection of corporate and political common sense—and the advent of leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, who flouted centuries of conventional wisdom without replacing it with any stable alternative. And just as real was the backlash on the Left, personified in the United States by Bernie Sanders. Sanders launched two presidential campaigns that, while ultimately unsuccessful, harnessed the impressive energy and influence of the younger population and pulled the Democratic party in his direction.

A Book for Her
by Bridget Christie
Published 1 Jul 2015

In this book I will be exploring all different types of fun and girly things, like misogyny, female oppression, why women treat each other like shit sometimes, the hypersexualisation of our culture, female genital mutilation, the current state of feminism, feminist infighting, gratitude within feminism, role models, anti-rape pants, gendered language, the objectification of women’s bodies, ladies’ pens and why clever women – who should know better – fancy Boris Johnson. Oh God, I can hear you thinking, not another funny feminist book! (And that’s just the feminists.) We’ve already had one funny book about feminism in the entire history of feminism – Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman – we don’t need another one, surely? At least not for another fifty or a hundred years, anyway.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020

To the Swiss-German historian Daniele Ganser the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ is a ‘political battle cry’ invented by the CIA – an unlikely scenario considering that Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper used the term in 1940, seven years before the CIA was created.29 On 8chan, users can post questions to Q, as if approaching an oracle:30 What is the big secret in Antarctica? Will stock markets fail? Is Boris Johnson trust-worthy? And May good or bad??? Is time travel possible? Is Mueller working for us? Is Michelle Obama a man? One time, Q and I’ll shut up. Is ZOG/MARX both going down? Some anons also get annoyed by hived-off conspiracy theories:31 Just to shut the Flat Earthers up, Q. Is the earth flat?

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All
by Martin Sandbu
Published 15 Jun 2020

Emmanuel Macron’s rhetoric of “a Europe that protects” has been more modestly deployed in a similar way, combining liberalising labour market reform in France with pushing for a tightening of “posted workers” rules at the European level (see chapter 12). And while it remains to be seen whether Boris Johnson’s government elected in December 2019 will keep its promises, the rhetoric of “levelling up” the country seems at least to have created political room on the right for a big shift towards regional investment and other interventionist measures to reconfigure the UK economy. I mention these examples simply as illustrations of how the political support for an economics of belonging could be built.

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit
by William Keegan
Published 24 Jan 2019

Of all British institutions, the Foreign Office, or FCO, had been the most passionately pro-European. But as I was departing along the august corridors of the FCO’s palatial building – still very much a reminder of the days of the British Empire – a passing attendant broke the news that the new Prime Minister, Theresa May, had just made Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson, one of the leading advocates of departure from the European Union, Foreign Secretary. Foreign Secretary! A leading Brexiter. What an insult to a hallowed institution! I was leaving the building with two students, one of whom was doing a course at King’s College, London, where I had been made a visiting professor.

The Last Job: The Bad Grandpas and the Hatton Garden Heist
by Dan Bilefsky
Published 22 Apr 2019

Old-school criminals though they were, the men seemed to like the good life: Angel was the surrounding bourgeois neighborhood in the north London borough of Islington, which has hosted, among others, former prime minister Tony Blair, Salman Rushdie, and the former London mayor-turned-foreign-secretary Boris Johnson. It was the kind of place where you could find French gourmet cheese shops, Bauhaus furniture stores, and the flagship restaurant of the star chef Yotam Ottolenghi. But while the men sought out discretion toward the back of the pub, they could be easily seen as they sipped their beers and bantered.

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income
by Guy Standing
Published 3 May 2017

Recognizing the reality that the gift is not shared as God intended, a basic income would entail the fortunate sharing with the majority.17 In a 2015 Encyclical Letter, Pope Francis wrote: ‘The earth is essentially a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone.’18 He went on to uphold the principle of inter-generational equity, arguing that ‘Each community can take from the bounty of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for the coming generations.’ The Christian argument for basic income stands in sharp contrast to the class-based perspective voiced most stridently by Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, in 2013. He used the analogy of a shaken packet of cornflakes in which the best rise to the top, arguing that those with above-average genetic endowments were entitled to greater economic rewards. A Christian riposte would surely be that as such endowments are the gift of God and are unequally bestowed, those most blessed should be most taxed, and those least blessed should be entitled to compensation.

The Knife's Edge
by Stephen Westaby
Published 14 May 2019

Innovation, speculation, even the exploration of the planet and outer space – all depend on putting something you cherish on the line in the hope of greater rewards. Thus risk-taking is the world’s principal driver for progress, but it requires a particular character type, one defined by courage and daring, not reticence and prudence – Winston Churchill rather than Clement Attlee, Boris Johnson not Jeremy Corbyn. In 1925, when Henry Souttar first stuck a finger into the heart and tried to relieve mitral stenosis, it posed a risk to his reputation and livelihood. When Dwight Harken removed a piece of shrapnel from a soldier’s heart in the Cotswolds, it was a risk that went against all he’d learned from the medical textbooks of the day.

Talk on the Wild Side
by Lane Greene
Published 15 Dec 2018

But when supporters of staying in the EU pointed this out, they were dismissed as “elites” with no standing to talk about what the real British people – sick of elites – wanted. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the language on the side of the bus, which obeys all of Orwell’s rules. The problem was voters’ grasp of the facts. The polite faces of the Leave campaign were Boris Johnson, who had just been the Conservative mayor of London, and Michael Gove, the former justice and education secretary. But its real powerhouse was Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party. Mainstream politicians dismissed Farage as a buffoon – it is hard to find a politician more often photographed with a pint of beer and a cigarette in his hands.

Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World
by Paul Collier
Published 30 Sep 2013

Two Meanings of Multiculturalism Like everything about migration, the cultural narrative appropriate for migrants is highly politicized. At one end of the spectrum is assimilation: migrants intermarry with the indigenous population and adopt the ways of that population. I am the product of assimilative migration. So is Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, whose grandfather was a Turkish immigrant. At the other end of the spectrum is permanent cultural isolation of migrants in a hermetic community where schooling and language are separate and marriage outside the group is punished by expulsion. While such people can be citizens in the legal sense, they are only meaningfully part of society if it is seen as radically multicultural.

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity
by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Published 27 Aug 2018

In the decades after Singapore came into being, many theorists of globalization predicted that the process would reverse itself: the nation-state, we were told, would be demoted to middle management, a mere node in a vast transnational flux of capital and labor, of banking treaties and trade pacts, of the supranational security arrangements required for transnational adversaries, from drug cartels to terrorists. The national age was to be edged aside by the “network age.” What’s everywhere in evidence today, instead, are the forces of resistance to this sort of globalization. Boris Johnson, first London’s mayor, then Britain’s foreign secretary, tapped into them when he said in 2016 that Brexit was “about the right of the people of this country to settle their own destiny.” But which people was he talking about? Not the Scottish people, who voted overwhelmingly against taking Britain out of Europe; two years earlier, in fact, more than 40 percent of them favored taking themselves out of Britain.

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats
by Maya Goodfellow
Published 5 Nov 2019

They produced a bright-red billboard that declared, ‘Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU.’ Next to these words was an image of a trail of footsteps passing through a door that was made to resemble a British passport. They argued that people from Turkey would ‘create a number of threats to UK security’, and Boris Johnson and Michael Gove wrote a joint letter to David Cameron, warning that ‘the public will draw the reasonable conclusion that the only way to avoid having common borders with Turkey is to vote leave and take back control on 23 June.’ These pieces of propaganda were not the same as the ‘breaking point’ poster, but their messages were still deeply racialised.34 The country that is the former seat of the Ottoman Empire was not directly described as a predominantly Muslim one, but this fact loomed large in the background of discussion.

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival
by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan
Published 8 Aug 2020

It primarily affects the elderly; the average age of death so far in the UK has been about 80; and even then the younger deaths are mainly amongst those with other severe medical problems, co-morbidity in the jargon. This is a group largely dependent on others to help with daily living, and thus stopping their carers from producing goods and other services to swell GDP per head. The original, herd immunity, strategy of Boris Johnson might, it was at the time suggested, have raised deaths in the UK by 250,000 in 2020, but this needs to be set against the normal total deaths of nearly 500,000 p.a., an increase of some 50/60% in one year. Given the age and frailty of those likely to die, this increased death toll in 2020 would have been almost entirely offset by sharply lower death tolls over the subsequent decade.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

It makes people feel that they need to work longer hours to earn more income to buy unnecessary stuff, just so they can have a bit of dignity.41 In this sense, inequality creates an artificial scarcity of well-being. In fact, this effect is quite often wielded as an intentional strategy by economists and politicians. The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson once stated that ‘inequality is essential for the spirit of envy’ that keeps capitalism chugging along. Planned obsolescence is another strategy of artificial scarcity. Retailers seek to create new needs by making products artificially short-lived, to keep the juggernaut of consumption from grinding to a halt.

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

It was chaired by Paulette Rowe, who went on to head up Facebook’s global payments division, but who was then managing director at Barclaycard, the company responsible for running TfL’s contactless payments infrastructure. The Penny for London directors included former CEO of Barclays Bob Diamond and hedge fund mogul Lord Stanley Fink. Hosted by the then Mayor Boris Johnson within his Mayor’s Fund, the campaign included trustees from Santander Bank, Goldman Sachs, and Promontory Financial Group: here, an altruistic project is composed of a cosy group of financial insiders whose charitable efforts also happen to promote digital payments. The examples above are just the tip of the iceberg of a lobbying and influencing infrastructure set up to wage a covert Cold War against cash.

Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War: 1938-1941
by Alan Allport
Published 2 Sep 2020

At the very least, Halifax would surely have seized the opportunity to reopen the discussion of peace talks that he had been forced to abandon on 28 May. Churchillian hagiography today would have it that it was the prime minister’s iron will alone which kept Britain in the war in 1940. ‘Take away Churchill,’ according to Charles Krauthammer, ‘and Britain would have settled with Hitler – or worse. Nazism would have prevailed.’16 Boris Johnson echoed the same view in 2014, when he wrote: ‘without Churchill, Hitler would almost certainly have won […] only he could have done it.’17 But it was the success of DYNAMO, not Churchill imposing his resolve, however formidable, on his foreign secretary, that clinched the matter of whether Britain fought on in May 1940.

…

Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, 5 vols, London, HMSO, 1979 James Lansdale Hodson, Through the Dark Night, London, Gollancz, 1941 James Lansdale Hodson, Towards the Morning, London, Gollancz, 1941 Bruce Hoffman, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917–1947, New York, Knopf, 2015 Quintin McGarel Hogg, The Left Was Never Right, London, Faber & Faber, 1945 James Holland, The Rise of Germany, 1939–1941, New York, Grove Atlantic, 2015 Brett Holman, The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908–1941, Farnham, Ashgate, 2014 Alistair Horne, To Lose a Battle, London, Macmillan, 1969 Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defence Policy in the Era of the Two World Wars, London, Temple Smith, 1972 Richard Hough and Denis Richards, The Battle of Britain, New York, Norton, 2008 Daniel Hucker, Public Opinion and the End of Appeasement in Britain and France, Farnham, Ashgate, 2011 Matthew Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936–1939, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019 Talbot Imlay, Facing the Second World War: Strategy, Politics, and Economics in Britain and France, 1938–1940, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003 Alan Jackson, The Middle Classes, 1900–1950, Newton Abbott, Thomas, 1991 Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003 Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, London, Little Brown, 1994 Kevin Jefferys, Politics and the People: A History of British Democracy since 1918, London, Atlantic, 2007 Roy Jenkins, The Chancellors, London, Macmillan, 1998 Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor, London, Riverhead, 2015 Ian Johnston and Ian Buxton, The Battleship Builders: Constructing and Arming British Capital Ships, Barnsley, Seaforth, 2013 Cyril Joly, Take These Men, London, Constable, 1953 John Jordan and Robert Dumas, French Battleships, 1922–1956, Barnsley, Seaforth Publishing, 2009 Hilda Kean, The Great Cat and Dog Massacre, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2017 Hugh Kearny, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006 Edward Keith-Roach, Pasha of Jerusalem, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1994 Stephen Kelly, Idle Hands, Clenched Fists: The Depression in a Shipyard Town, Nottingham, Spokesman, 1987 Darren Kelsey, Media, Myth, and Terrorism: A Discourse-Mythological Analysis of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ in British Newspaper Responses to the July 7th Bombings, London, Palgrave, 2014 Greg Kennedy, The Merchant Marine in International Affairs, 1850–1950, London, Cass, 2000 Paul M.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 14 May 2014

Around the world local governments are reasserting themselves, upending national politics, and scrambling old ideological divisions in the process. Local governments have some of the most vivid figures, such as Rahm Emanuel in Chicago and Ron Huldai in Tel Aviv. They also have some of the great ideological cross-dressers: In London Boris Johnson, a conservative, embraced what he called “an entirely communist scheme” of bike sharing while his predecessor, “Red” Ken Livingstone, introduced the entirely free-market scheme of road pricing. Local politicians are increasingly leaping over national politicians in the public mind. People not only trust them far more but are often more interested in what they have to say as well.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
Published 30 Aug 2021

The fear of losing autonomy, or the realization that it has been lost already, is easily leveraged. In his book, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, journalist Fintan O’Toole credits this fear as a major contributor to the UK’s exit from the European Union.50 Politicians like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson understood how much many in England resented the collapse of the British Empire, the increase in immigrants, and their real or perceived loss of autonomy to the European Union.51 “Make Britain great again,” they said. “Don’t let those EU bureaucrats outlaw your favorite prawn cocktail-flavored potato chips!”

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change
by Dieter Helm
Published 2 Sep 2020

Keynesians believe that borrowing for spending is generally a ‘good thing’, and that we should not overly worry about passing on the debt to the next generation because the extra spending will create growth and hence pay for itself. It is the logic behind Donald Trump’s tax cuts and spending increases, and Boris Johnson’s new-fangled ‘boosterism’. Perhaps it could better be called ‘cakeism’: the Johnsonian approach to having the spending and greater prosperity and decarbonising. A critical distinction comes into play here. Aggregate demand is made up of both consumption and investment. Investment in the ‘right things’ holds up demand and keeps people employed.

Work! Consume! Die!
by Frankie Boyle
Published 12 Oct 2011

In the UK, as bailiffs cleared out protestors at the peace camp outside parliament, one was filmed stamping on a protestor. And with that one vicious act of violence, the area was officially no longer a peace camp and just another London park. The area is now going to be used as a holding pen for Boris Johnson’s mistresses. I never understood why men go to war. Then I thought, men have children. The average length of a war is four or five years, which is also the amount of time it takes for a child to stop being really fucking annoying. Men are saying to themselves, ‘Do I want to be here, listening to this wee guy scream because I’ve cut his toast into triangles instead of squares?

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It
by Daniel Knowles
Published 27 Mar 2023

So it continues. In Britain, on average, the richest 20 percent of people drive 7,500 miles per year each, whereas the poorest 20 percent drive only about 2,800. Richer people also tend to have more political power. And they vote and lobby for policies that help cars. The power of rich drivers is why, when Boris Johnson became mayor of London in 2008, the first thing he did was scrap the extension of the congestion charge to west London. It is also why in Westminster, the center of London, where space is at a premium, resident car owners can still get a car parking permit that entitles them to a patch of land to leave their vehicle on for the grand sum of £155.

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017
by Ian Kershaw
Published 29 Aug 2018

Three-quarters of members of the House of Commons favoured remaining in the European Union. Cameron threw all his weight behind the ‘Remain’ campaign. But important members of his cabinet were given free rein to support ‘Leave’. Prominent among them were the Justice Secretary Michael Gove and the former Mayor of London Boris Johnson – a toff with the common touch, whose instantly recognizable mop of unruly blond hair and well-honed combination of buffoonery and verbal dexterity made this product of one of England’s most exclusive public schools (Eton) one of the most popular politicians in the land (if a highly divisive figure).

…

She had passively rather than wholeheartedly supported ‘Remain’. Once in office, she swiftly showed the zeal of a convert. Her task, she outlined, was to implement ‘the will of the people’. ‘Brexit means Brexit’ was her vacuous mantra. Three arch-Brexiteers were placed in charge of preparing the ground for the negotiations to leave. Boris Johnson, to widespread surprise, was elevated to the post of Foreign Secretary (once a high office of state associated with exemplary skills of diplomacy that few accredited to the new incumbent). Liam Fox, a long-standing militant opponent of the European Union and strong, neo-liberal advocate of free trade, was given the remit of winning new trade deals around the globe to compensate for the potential effects of a fall in trade with the European Union – Britain’s biggest trading partner by far.

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance
by Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John
Published 7 Oct 2010

By 1967 the specifications had been adopted by all new towns, all local authority housing departments and most private developers. The Parker Morris standards were abolished in 1980. Under Mrs Thatcher’s iron rule, local authorities were urged to give priority to market forces instead. There are still no national minimum space standards for the UK, though in 2008 Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, pledged to reintroduce them for the capital in an updated, 10 per cent more generous form. Today almost three-quarters of UK residents say there’s not enough space in their kitchen for three small recycling bins,while half complain they don’t have enough space to use their furniture comfortably.

Britain Etc
by Mark Easton
Published 1 Mar 2012

I remember filming on an estate in Yorkshire where the central shopping area was dominated by a breezeblock structure prickling with razor wire and CCTV cameras, the entrance reached via a security turnstile. It turned out this was the community library. The more we emphasise the boundary between public and private space, the more vulnerable we feel. Shared urban environments are a social safety valve, a place for people of all backgrounds to mingle on equal ground. London Mayor Boris Johnson once described public space as ‘the glue that holds a city together’. It is the territory where trust and confidence are forged. When people call for the return of the bobby on the beat, it is both they mean. They want the reassurance they think a greater police presence will bring, but what they really crave is their streets back.

The Curse of Cash
by Kenneth S Rogoff
Published 29 Aug 2016

There is a somewhat different set of concerns in the United Kingdom, where euros move particularly easily in and out of the country, despite the restriction that all travelers carrying more than 10,000 euros are supposed to fill out a form reporting their cash holdings. European citizens have easy access in and out of the UK, and will surely continue to do so in any future regime. By some estimates, there are as many as 300,000–400,000 French citizens living in London, leading London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, in 2013 to observe that he was mayor of the sixth-largest French city.7 For the United Kingdom, it certainly will be much easier to phase out paper currency (soon to be plastic currency) in coordination with Europe. However, controls of the type SOCA and the Treasury have already implemented could easily be extended to other large-denomination foreign notes.

The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy
by Brian Klaas
Published 15 Mar 2017

He is, in some ways, a hybrid of east and west himself. Abhisit spent his formative years at the elite Eton College boarding school just outside of London. Then, he progressed onto St John’s College, Oxford, where he rubbed elbows with the future British elite, including current foreign secretary Boris Johnson. He is, therefore, someone who is sympathetic to Western governments. He understands the West’s point of view far better than most Thais. But upon taking power in 2008, no British education could have prepared Abhisit for the complexities, disarray, and violence of Thai politics. â•… In the spring of 2010, his government found itself facing more than 100,000 protesters clogging the streets of Bangkok.

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Jan 2017

It was striking how little coverage the news of London becoming a ‘majority-minority’ city received when it was first announced by the ONS at the end of 2012. The Evening Standard did not even put the news on its front page, tucking it away on page 10. And the BBC London television news had it as its seventh item. Boris Johnson’s usually ubiquitous blond bob was nowhere to be seen. Official London tirelessly celebrates diversity yet its shyness about this landmark moment seemed to be an implicit recognition of how unsettling it was to many people. According to Janan Ganesh demographic and social trends are remaking Britain in the freewheeling image of its capital city.

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks
by Ken Jennings
Published 19 Sep 2011

The last time the city revised the map, it decided it could do without the pale blue line representing the Thames River—do you really need to know where the river is when you’re riding a train?—and erased it. It was thoroughly unprepared for the resulting outcry, as Londoners reacted as if the actual river itself had been dammed. A BBC News editor compared the move to “removing the smile from the Mona Lisa.” London Mayor Boris Johnson, in New York on business when the change was made, was furious. “Can’t believe that the Thames disappeared off the tube map whilst I was out of the country! It will be reinstated,” he tweeted to his constituents. Maps change, of course—the globe in my office doesn’t have Yugoslavia on it, let alone Pangaea—but we rely on them to pretend at all times that they don’t

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution
by Janette Sadik-Khan
Published 8 Mar 2016

“If current trends continue, while the rest of the nation says no, Seattle says yes—we can be a livable city and an affordable city. Seattle can move forward.” More and more cities are moving forward with plans to expand pedestrian, transit, and biking zones. Dublin, Ireland, in 2015 announced a €150 million ($164 million) plan to improve downtown streets for people who walk, ride bikes, or take transit. London mayor Boris Johnson has embarked on a bike superhighway building spree through the heart of the city, with expenditures on bike lanes tripling to £913 million ($1.4 billion) over ten years. Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo has led the way with a plan to sharply reduce private vehicles in central Paris by 2020, launching its own €150 million plan to double the city’s network of bike lanes and triple ridership to 15 percent of trips.

Uncharted: How to Map the Future
by Margaret Heffernan
Published 20 Feb 2020

The aims of the wars were different, as were the tactics, talents and circumstances. 9 Neustadt, Richard E. and May, Ernest R., Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers, The Free Press, New York, 1988 10 Macmillan, Margaret, The Uses and Abuses of History, Profile, London, 2010. More recently, Boris Johnson tried to puff his own government by drawing an analogy between himself as Churchill (as he is wont to do). The historian Simon Schama blasted back: ‘You are not Churchill and the EU is not the Third Reich. You do not have a war cabinet and THERE IS NO WAR. How DARE you invoke the sacrifices of those [who] fought one.’ 11 More recently, Mervyn King, a former governor of the Bank of England, compared Theresa May’s Brexit deal to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s too: ‘In the 1930s, with appeasement; in the 1970s, when the British economy was the “sick man” of Europe and the government saw its role as managing decline; and now, in the turmoil that has followed the Brexit referendum.

Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus
by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green
Published 7 Jul 2021

As a medical doctor working on the clinical trial, Andy was one of the first in line. Since I was not a healthcare worker or in any of the other priority groups, I would have to wait my turn. That evening, with case numbers and deaths continuing to soar, and the NHS on the verge of being overwhelmed, the prime minister, Boris Johnson, put the country back into lockdown. Schools and non-essential retail would be closed again, and mixing between households banned. The clinically extremely vulnerable were once more asked to shield themselves. Our vaccine was being rolled out into a grim situation and for a few days the media seemed determined to seek out negatives that only added to the sense of desperation.

How Long Will Israel Survive Threat Wthn
by Gregg Carlstrom
Published 14 Oct 2017

Though he sits in the opposition, he often refuses to criticize the government: “we’re an alternative, not the opposition,” in Zivan’s words. Sometimes he serves as an unofficial foreign minister, jetting around Europe and North America to meet with senior Western officials. He took credit when the mayor of London removed pro-BDS ads from the Underground in February 2016. “I approached London mayor Boris Johnson, who’s a great friend of Israel, and explained that the state of Israel will not accept this,” Lapid said afterwards. In August of that year he traveled to Stockholm for a public rally, where he led a small crowd in chants of “we love Israel!” On the Palestinians, he speaks largely in platitudes, with talk of “regional initiatives” and “involving the Arab states”.

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal
by Duncan Mavin
Published 20 Jul 2022

From as early as March, and for months thereafter, Lex hit Cameron with a barrage of text messages, urging the former PM to pull strings in Whitehall and at the Bank of England to get Greensill access to the suite of government bailout schemes. This intense lobbying, directed by Lex, was happening as the UK hit the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, much of it when Prime Minister Boris Johnson was himself hospitalized with the disease. While the rest of us were thinking about how we might get through the lockdown and the worst healthcare crisis in generations, Lex was thinking about how he could tap an unprecedented pool of government money. At the time, the Bank of England governorship was in transition, from Canadian Mark Carney to Andrew Bailey, a City veteran.

Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath
by Bill Browder
Published 11 Apr 2022

They’ve ordered us to release you. The warrant is invalid.” My spirits soared. My phone buzzed. I stood. “Can I use my phone now?” “Sí.” No translation necessary. I snatched up the charge sheet along with my phones. I had 178 missed calls. There was a message from the British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, asking me to call as soon as possible. Every news outlet—ABC, Sky News, the BBC, CNN, Time, the Washington Post—all of them wanted to know what was going on. Same with Elena, David, and friends from all around the world, including several in Russia. I texted Elena that I was fine and would call her soon.

Halting State
by Charles Stross
Published 9 Jul 2011

Clearly by calling the Polis, Wayne has pissed in Hackman’s pint, but he’s too much of a professional to let your arrival perturb him. “We’re grateful that you could come, but really it’s not necessary—” “And Barry Michaels, our Chief Technology Officer.” Michaels is plump and rumpled in an old-Fettes-schoolboy Boris-Johnson sort of way, with a port nose and a boyish cow-lick of black hair: You peg immediately that he’s probably as bent as a three-bob note, but unlike Hackman, he’s not some kind of toxic-waste-eating Martian invader from the planet Wall Street. He nods nervously, looking like he’s eaten something disagreeable.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work
by Iain Gately
Published 6 Nov 2014

In 2006, in contrast, ‘with similar overall levels of traffic, bikes were just 19 per cent of the total’. Their number has since been supplemented by the so-called ‘Boris bikes’, which are publicly owned bicycles available for short-term private hire and named after Livingstone’s Conservative successor as mayor, Boris Johnson. In 2013, the Boris bike scheme owned 8,000 cycles that could be picked up or dropped off at 570 docking stations, and registered up to a million rides a month. Cycle commuting has also been encouraged at the national level. The ‘cycle2work’ scheme, introduced in 1999, enables cyclists to reclaim tax on money spent on a new machine and any related safety equipment.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business
by Ken Auletta
Published 4 Jun 2018

Most people think he gets down in the weeds. I don’t think that’s true. Martin has rarely told me what to do.” To understand Sorrell as a manager one has to begin with his self-identity as a founder, not a manager. He flicks aside the shareholder critics, not to mention former London mayor Boris Johnson, who railed against his steep pay—£43 million in 2014 and £70.4 million in 2015, making him the highest compensated executive in England. In an op-ed page piece he wrote for the Financial Times in June 2012, Sorrell declared, “I have been behaving as an owner, rather than as a ‘highly paid manager.’

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z
by Deyan Sudjic
Published 17 Feb 2015

The introduction to Miyake, through the shop, was enough to get Chipperfield to Japan, where he was one of the earliest Western architects to build in the Tokyo of the Bubble Economy. London in 1985, as depicted by Blueprint, was an unimaginably different place from the London presided over by Boris Johnson. As unlike the present incarnation of the magazine to the one written on typewriters and prepared for press by pasting down photographs and columns of type on layout boards with Cow Gum glue. In fact, the very first issues used an ancient technology, Letraset, the dry-transfer lettering system, for headlines.

A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-Or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine
by Gregory Zuckerman
Published 25 Oct 2021

Gilbert woke most days around four a.m., mulling ways to improve her vaccine approach, before biking to the Jenner Institute, where she worked into the evening.1 For weeks, she and her colleagues pushed forward on their jabs, working on a shoestring budget, desperate for funding. At one point, Jenner researchers joked about sending a professor on a train to 10 Downing Street to impress upon Prime Minister Boris Johnson the importance of supporting their efforts. By the end of March, though, Gilbert had lined up more than enough backing from U.K. bodies and others to push the program ahead. The Oxford team had a clear advantage over other Covid-19 efforts. By then, Gilbert and Hill had developed vaccines for MERS, the flu, Zika, the tropical disease chikungunya, and others, all based on their chimp-adenovirus approach.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje
Published 14 Aug 2020

I use the term ‘state centre’ to refer to these weakening but still powerful remnants of the old political order we’re likely to see in the future, usually based around the old capital cities and the wealthy regions surrounding them that remain loyal to them, and where the familiar trappings of economic and political power remain concentrated. The conservative journalist and politician Boris Johnson has framed this bluntly in economic terms: ‘I am sure they are an estimable bunch, but Preston Council are not the locomotive of the UK economy.’ For Johnson, this accolade goes to London, which, in his words, ‘is to billionaires what the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan. It is their natural habitat.’3 Interestingly, Johnson became British prime minister after an election that tilted in his favour largely thanks to voters in northern cities defecting from their traditional support for leftist parties because of his promise to deliver Britain’s exit from the European Union – another supersedure, perhaps, and one that ironically seems certain to further hasten the economic decline of England’s north, at least in terms of conventional economic development.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Far-right parties have also gained ground in many other countries including in Germany, arguably the country that has done more than any other in the world to purge extremism from its society given its Nazi past. Britain has recently joined the ranks, having selected one of the three horsemen of Brexit, Boris Johnson, as Prime Minister in July 2019 and showing that the reactionary, xenophobic rot in the ostensibly center-right British Conservative Party runs deep. But this is not just a Western phenomenon, it is global — with countries as disparate as the Philippines and Brazil also turning to the far right and proving that the narrative of white working-class discontent combined with anti-immigration sentiment is not the sole explanation for the appeal of these leaders.

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator
by Keith Houston
Published 22 Aug 2023

It ran on a “luggable” Toshiba PC whose screen rendered everything in shades of orange, and as a schoolboy rather than a businessman, I had no idea why this esoteric piece of “magic paper” could possibly be useful. I still used that Toshiba every chance I got, because, even in orange, Prince of Persia was and remains a sublime videogame. EPILOGUE Boris johnson, who was, at the time of writing, Britain’s most controversial prime minister for many years, has been wrong about a lot of things. But in a career built on questionable opinions and outrageous pronouncements, one in particular of Johnson’s proclamations hits close to home for fans of the pocket calculator.

Invention: A Life
by James Dyson
Published 6 Sep 2021

When we developed our electric motor turbines in wind tunnels, we did so alongside Rolls-Royce aero engines. The latter might be very much bigger and more powerful than our tiny electric motors, yet the principles of airflow are equally important to the successful working of both. As if by chance, Prime Minister Boris Johnson called me on March 13, 2020, saying he needed fifty thousand ventilators in six weeks in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The project was announced publicly four days later. We repurposed the very buildings at Hullavington that had been devoted to the development of the car. It was fortunate that we had a pristine new factory available to make a medical product such as this.

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World
by Tim Marshall
Published 14 Oct 2021

The British, who along with the French are the leading European military nation, then promised a significant re-enforcement – a mechanized long-range reconnaissance task group of 250 personnel to ‘reach parts of Mali that most militaries cannot, to feed on-the-ground intelligence back to the [UN] mission headquarters’. In other words, to go where other governments preferred not to send their troops. It was a high-risk decision by Prime Minister Boris Johnson: the UN mission, the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), set up in 2013, has the highest UN peacekeeping mission casualty rate in the world, with well over 200 UN peacekeepers killed. President Macron has been keen to persuade Algeria to commit its well-equipped ‘Armée nationale populaire’ to the fray, but, given colonial history, Algiers is not about to put its troops in effect under the command of Paris.

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason
by Lee McIntyre
Published 14 Sep 2021

But the amazing thing is that they did not seem at all ashamed of this. One fellow explained this by saying, “Flat Earthers are more ‘sensitive’ to conspiracy theories than other people.” But to believe that all world leaders are in on a secret that the world is flat? Does anyone think that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson could keep a secret like that? Apparently so. Time and again, Flat Earthers would come right out and tell me that belief in conspiracy theories was at the foundation of their reasoning.31 (Indeed, in one of the seminars on how to recruit new believers into Flat Earth, one of the speakers said, “If you run into someone who says they don’t believe in conspiracy theories, walk away.”)

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 12 Jun 2017

For the moment, there are sections on: ‘vote’ (when a vote is ongoing), ‘laws’ (EU, Parliament, Regions), and ‘Shield’ and ‘Fundraising’ are active. It’s too early to know if and how this might change the dynamics of the movement. 42. Jonathan Freedland, ‘Post-truth politicians such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are no laughing matter’, Guardian, 13 May 2016. 43. Art Swift, ‘Americans’ trust in mass media sinks to new low’, Gallup, 14 September 2016, http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx. 44. According to Corriere della Sera, Pittarello is seen as ‘the custodian of Casaleggio’s agenda’, and one of the very few people who has the blog’s password.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson
Published 8 Dec 2016

But this demand no longer resonates so easily with ordinary people. Politicians and policy-makers and bankers and financiers and advertisers now find they have to work much harder to encourage the kind of spending that will ‘put the economy back on track’. Opening a huge new shopping centre at the height of the financial crisis in October 2008, London Mayor Boris Johnson waved a credit card in front of the TV cameras, as though over-extended credit had nothing to do with the mess we were already in. Londoners had made a ‘prudent decision to give Thursday morning a miss and come out shopping’, he said of the huge crowds who attended the opening.4 In the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, George Bush famously appeared in front of the cameras with a similar exhortation: ‘Mrs Bush and I would like to encourage Americans everywhere to go out shopping.’

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

The next two weeks witnessed 3,753 new cases, the two weeks after that 109,995. By mid-November, 150,000 cases were being added per day. In the early days, this exponential growth was something the public and policymakers – in America and Europe, at least – proved unable to grasp. Politicians from Donald Trump to Boris Johnson consistently downplayed the risk exponential growth represented. Early research, released during the first year of the pandemic, demonstrated exponential growth bias at play. At all stages of the pandemic, people underestimated the future course of the spread. Given three weeks of actual data for the growth of the virus, participants were asked to predict infection levels one week and two weeks later.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

This was crucial, since the Leave leadership of the far-right UK Independence Party was aligned with Thatcherite neoliberal conservatives in the Conservative Party. The identification of elite powers as foreign, instead of capitalist, dovetailed perfectly into their anti-immigration campaign and the subsequent election of Boris Johnson, a surge in reactionary Blue Labour, and the defeat of the Remain vote. Alongside a working-class rejection of the EU’s catastrophic status quo agenda, one of the principal drivers of the vote for Brexit was white racial anxiety about immigration rates should the UK remain in the EU.22 Brexit also added fuel to the fire of other far-right movements, whose opposition to globalization and the EU directly correlates with imperial nostalgia and anti-immigration sentiments.

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City Forever
by Christian Wolmar
Published 30 Sep 2009

While Crossrail, too, will be administratively separate from the Underground, passengers will pass seamlessly from its platforms to those of the Tube using their Oyster cards. London is, therefore, at last, getting the type of integrated railway that Ashfield and Pick strived for and came close to achieving. There are still obstacles to overcome. Like those two illustrious pioneers, the current London Mayor, Boris Johnson, would like suburban rail services to be run by London government. In his 2012 re-election campaign manifesto, he proposed that Transport for London take over national rail franchises, to run them like the London Overground. It would be a sensible move towards a genuinely integrated system, but successive governments have been reluctant to extend the mayor’s powers in that direction.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe
Published 26 Jan 2021

Others were being told they had to go to the office despite the lockdown. And then there was the immigration question. The games industry, Agwaze noted, depended on immigrant labor—he himself was an EU migrant living in the United Kingdom, a status that could be disrupted by Brexit and, under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the government’s intention to crack down on migrants. The pandemic exacerbated these problems: workers who lost jobs were unsure about their visa status, and with the backlog at both the Home Office and employment tribunals, there was a lot of uncertainty among workers that brought them to the union for help.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

This alliance should be expanded geographically, to include a preapproved group of allies like Japan (which is keenly aware of China’s growing technological might), France, Germany, and Norway. The foundations for such a bloc are already apparent, whether through that prospective Japanese-Indian-Australian supply-chain partnership, ideas like the Aspen Institute’s proposal for a Tech 10,46 or UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s proposal to expand the G7 to a new D-10—a ten-nation democratic coalition that can collaboratively fund and create alternatives to Chinese 5G technology.47 In late November 2020, the E.U. proposed a Transatlantic Trade and Technology Council with the United States, to establish shared technology standards and coordinate issues like screening foreign investors.48 Components manufactured in these countries—whether drones or database servers—would be considered as secure as if they were produced in Boston or Virginia.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser
Published 21 Oct 2019

Let’s look at the key players and where we can expect to see still more of the same, for the sake of group vigilance: Cambridge Analytica and The SCL Group have been dissolved, but what does that mean? Many of my former colleagues are still out there, consulting on elections and working in data analytics. This includes Alexander Nix, who, according to press reports, met with former prime minister Theresa May upon her exit and the newly minted prime minister Boris Johnson. Given the unfinished business of the ICO and parliamentary inquiries, I am concerned about where the Brexit and campaign support conversation has gone. And, besides Alexander, while many former Cambridge Analytica staff were bright, well-meaning professionals, some were definitely the opposite—and they are up to their old tricks and have not yet been brought to account for their actions.

Very Bad People: The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption
by Patrick Alley
Published 17 Mar 2022

How do we make sure it gets in the Queen’s Speech and it doesn’t drop off the agenda?’ Rachel said. ‘We contacted loads of private-sector firms that we knew on the TI side of things, asking them to write letters to 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 the pledge will survive into the next parliamentary session, but we’re not complacent about that. On 29 May 2019, a ten-bedroom mansion in The Bishops Avenue, Hampstead – one of London’s most expensive streets – was hit by an Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO) secured by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA).

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers
by Stephen Graham
Published 8 Nov 2016

This is almost equal to the entire investment going to house the 50 per cent of the city’s population – fully 4 million people – who live on earnings of less than £50,000 per year.72 Such a situation is the direct result of an obsession among London’s governing elite with sycophantically luring in the global super-rich. Such elites, Boris Johnson, London’s mayor from May 2008 to May 2016, said in November 2013, echoing Mayor Bloomberg’s comments in New York, ‘deserve our humble and hearty thanks’. For if they didn’t ‘employ eau de cologne-dabbers’, he added, ordinary families ‘might otherwise find themselves without a breadwinner.’73 Real estate economics are also obviously pivotal.

Lustrum
by Robert Harris
Published 6 Sep 2010

The allure of power and the perils that attend it have seldom been so brilliantly anatomised in a thriller' Nick Rennison, Sunday Times 'Harris has taken the DNA of Cicero's great speeches and animated them with utterly believable dialogue … Harris's greatest triumph is perhaps in the evocation of Roman politics, the constant bending of ancient principles before the realities of power, and in his depiction of what it was like to live in the city: the mud, the guttering lamps, the smell of the blood from the temples … I would take my hat off to Harris, if I hadn't already dashed it to the ground in jealous awe' Boris Johnson, Mail on Sunday * * * * * 'Gripping … A compelling narrative, full of plots, murder, lust, fear, greed and corruption … No writer is better at creating excitement over political theatre' Leo McKinstry, Daily Express 'Harris is the master. With Lustrum, [he] has surpassed himself. It is one of the most exciting thrillers I have ever read' Peter Jones, Evening Standard 'Vivid, so beguiling … it conjures a trick often missed by historical novels: flavoursome facts give a sense not just of a place and time but of developing lives.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure
Published 18 May 2020

That may be something that does not slow down for some time to come. In December 2019 the most unequal countries of the affluent world were ruled by very right-wing men: Donald Trump in the United States, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Sebastián Piñera in Chile, and Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom. In contrast, women were increasingly winning power in countries where greater equality was also being won. This was most notable that month in Finland with the appointment of the new prime minister, Sanna Marin of the Social Democratic Party, who then governed in coalition with Li Anderson (Left Alliance), Katri Kulmuni (Centre Party), Maria Ohisalo (Green League), and Anna-Maja Henriksson (Swedish People’s Party of Finland).41 Pause to think of how much has changed in such a short space of time, and it is easy to become more optimistic.

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
by Richard Dawkins
Published 15 Mar 2017

Godley, full of Latin rhyming jokes designed to appeal to Englishmen of Bertie’s class who would have learned Latin at school: http://latindiscussion.com/​forum/​latin/​a-d-godleys-motor-bus.10228/​. ‘Bendy buses’ was the nickname given to the articulated buses introduced into London in the early 2000s and later controversially withdrawn from service by Mayor Boris Johnson. *3 Cricket, of course. A googly is a spun ball where the bowler’s hand action misleads the batsman as to the direction of spin. Devious spin bowlers sometimes intersperse googlies in among other, more conventionally spun balls. *4 A rather specialized verb which, I suspect, is unknown in American English, scrumping means stealing apples, raiding an orchard.

Straphanger
by Taras Grescoe
Published 8 Sep 2011

Paris: The Biography of a City. New York: Penguin, 2006. Jones, Joseph. The Politics of Transport in Twentieth-Century France. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s, 1985. Lamming, Clive. Métro Insolite. Paris: Parigramme, 2002. Mees, Paul. Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age. Oxford: Earthscan, 2009. Milmo, Dan. “Boris Johnson Told He Must Plug £460m Tube Funding Gap.” The Guardian, March 10, 2010. Ovenden, Mark. Paris Underground: The Maps, Stations, and Design of the Métro. London: Penguin Books, 2009. Pascual, Julia. “RER á conduite sous pression.” La Libération, December 4, 2010. Studeny, Christophe. L’Invention de la vitesse, France, VVIIIe-XXe siècle.

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 31 Mar 2009

The largest protest in British history—a two-million-strong march against the invasion of Iraq in February 2003—was co-organized by the Muslim Association of Britain. Prince Charles once suggested that when he becomes king he will change his title from “Defender of the Faith” to “Defender of the Faiths,” partly in recognition of Islam’s arrival on Britain’s shores. In 2008, Boris Johnson, London’s new mayor, helped organize a festival in Trafalgar Square to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Johnson is no fan of political correctness; he was simply being practical. Across Europe mayors have to worry about things like setting up temporary abattoirs to cope with the slaughter of sheep for the annual Eid al-Adha feast in December, or organizing the parking around mosques on Fridays.

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World
by Tom Burgis
Published 7 Sep 2020

The Brits, they continue their long fade from imperial power to global network of financial secrecy connected to the City of London 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 decades and on the wall of whose London office hang the British prime minister’s autographed ping-pong bats. During the 2019 general election campaign, Johnson refused to publish a parliamentary report on Russian interference in British politics.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
Published 3 Oct 2022

Local doctors, fearing the takeover of such a large part of the British medical infrastructure by a private American company, scrambled to oppose it. But the takeover was a fait accompli. The COVID-19 epidemic provided a major test of the country’s retooled health-care system. Prime Minister Boris Johnson entrusted the all-important test-and-trace effort to the former McKinsey consultant Dido Harding, now Baroness Harding. She and the country’s top health officials turned to private companies, not the NHS, to run the program. McKinsey alone charged £563,400 to provide a “vision, purpose and narrative” of the Harding-led program.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

The prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, took to the stage at COP26 to implore world leaders to “try harder” to avoid the kinds of temperature rises that would leave low-lying and island nations like hers literally underwater.173 She told delegates including President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson that their “failure to provide enough critical funding to small island nations is measured in lives and livelihoods in our communities.” These failures were, she told delegates, “immoral and… unjust.” Yet the agreement that was hammered out at COP26 fell far short of the action that would be required to meet Mottley’s call to arms.

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right
by Philippe Legrain
Published 22 Apr 2014

We need to harness these new forms of political action to mobilise a coalition for change: a European Spring. With luck, some mainstream politicians will seize on the need for economic and political reform. Like the economy, politics is going through a huge upheaval that offers opportunities for political entrepreneurs of all persuasions. Among conservatives, witness how Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, has crafted an optimistic, pro-investment, pro-immigration alternative to the narrow-minded negativity in Downing Street. See how a new centrist party, the Unión de Progreso y Democracia, is thriving from disenchantment with traditional parties in Spain. Admire the reform drive of Denmark’s centre-left coalition government.

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge
by Faisal Islam
Published 28 Aug 2013

It is going to take an Olympian effort to douse the Eurozone’s flames. Mario Draghi arrived at a conference nakedly designed by the British government to promote investment and trade on the back of the Olympic opening ceremony. Cookies dusted with icing sugar and formed in the shape of the Olympic rings tempt delegates. Mayor Boris Johnson entertains CEOs from across the world with jokes about how London has more Michelin-starred restaurants than Paris and less rain than Rome. The setting is Lancaster House, a mansion owned by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The place has seen some history – including the birth of new nation-states such as Malaysia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton
Published 30 Sep 2010

At the last moment, though, Prime Minister David Cameron conceded that its recommendations should be cast with an eye to the City’s competitiveness. The City had lost none of its grip. Financial lobbyists do not buy votes in the British legislature in quite the way they do in the US Congress, but they do fund individual politicians’ election campaigns. For example, 77 per cent of Boris Johnson’s mayoral campaign in 2008 was funded by hedge funds, private-equity firms and their managers. Big donors included John Lionel Beckwith (London and Edinburgh Trust, Pacific Investments), Lord Jonathan Marland (Clareville Capital), Edwina Herrmann (lobbyist and wife of Jeremy Herrmann, from Ferox Capital), Edmund Lazarus (Englefield Capital) and Stanley Fink (International Standard Asset Management).

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House
by Ben Rhodes
Published 4 Jun 2018

On the flight over, I emailed back and forth with Cameron’s staff about an op-ed that Obama was publishing in The Daily Telegraph making the case for Britain to stay in the European Union. It was unusual to coordinate so closely with a foreign government, but the Brits were different, and Brexit would be calamitous, a crucial piece of the post–World War II order drifting off into the sea. After we landed, I showed Obama a dueling op-ed that had been written by Boris Johnson, the bombastic mayor of London and a chief proponent of Brexit. To counterprogram our trip and appeal to nationalist sentiment in the UK, the whole lead-in was an indictment of Obama for swapping out a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office. “Some said,” Johnson wrote, “it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire—of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.”

The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World
by John Dickie
Published 3 Aug 2020

Many more people crowded the street outside. Projected images of St Catherine and Joan of Arc looked down on the scene from the wall behind the rostrum. The winner of the typewriter was announced: it was Ali Kemal, the young correspondent of the Constantinople daily Ikdam (and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s grandfather). Then, finally, all eyes turned to see Léo Taxil take to the stage. He cleared his throat, and addressed the audience with a broad smile: ‘Reverent Fathers, ladies, and gentlemen…’ It was, of course, a hoax. All of it, right from Léo Taxil’s conversion, and the murder he had confessed.

The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine
by Christopher Miller
Published 17 Jul 2023

The train took a roundabout path out of the capital, eventually arriving the next morning in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk. Around 6:30 a.m., Zelensky’s iPhone began ringing again. Recognizing the caller ID, he answered and put it on speaker phone for several people in the room to hear. It was British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the first Western leader to call that morning. He wanted to express his support and ask Zelensky what he planned to do. The Ukrainian president shouted into the phone in English: “We will fight, Boris! We will not give up!” A series of other high-level calls followed, including one on a secure line with President Joe Biden.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

On Trump’s association with Roy Cohn, see Jonathan Mahler and Matt Flegenheimer, “What Donald Trump Learned from Joseph McCarthy’s Right-Hand Man,” New York Times, June 20, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/us/politics/donald-trump-roy-cohn.html, accessed September 8, 2021. 51.Maureen Dowd, “Chickens, Home to Roost,” New York Times, March 5, 2016, http://nyti.ms/1U27ZJ5, accessed April 27, 2021. See, also, Elizabeth Lunbeck, “The Allure of Trump’s Narcissism,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 1, 2017, accessed September 15, 2021. 52.Peter Oborne, The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020); Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America (New York: One World, 2021). 53.Mattathias Schwartz, “Pre-Occupied,” New Yorker, November 20, 2011, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/28/pre-occupied, accessed June 28, 2021; Jamie Lalinde, Rebecca Sacks, Mark Guiducci, Elizabeth Nicholas, and Max Chafkin, “Revolution Number 99,” Vanity Fair, January 10, 2012, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2012/02/occupy-wall-street-201202, accessed June 28, 2021. 54.

Meat: A Benign Extravagance
by Simon Fairlie
Published 14 Jun 2010

The Co-op had already banned swill-fed pork from their shops in 1996, stating that it ’was not a natural feeding practice’;18 and in the UK there was a conspicuous silence from the champions of recycling, Friends of the Earth, who were no doubt afraid that raising the swill issue might alienate some of their vegetarian supporters. One of the rare voices raised against the swill ban was that of Boris Johnson, then MP for Henley. At a parliamentary debate in 2004 he reported: To take one example, Phyllis Court Hotel in Henley must now pay an extra £1,000 a year to a licensed collector, whose responsibility is to remove wet waste that previously went to a pigswill feeder. Given that there is room for only three years’ waste in our land fill sites, that is not the cleanest and greenest solution.

The Enemy Within
by Seumas Milne
Published 1 Dec 1994

But the neoliberal spell had been broken and the pressure for economic and social alternatives had begun in earnest. Well before Thatcher’s death, true believers were already alarmed at the collapse of their heroine’s reputation. As the full costs of her financial free-for-all and industrial scorched earth policy became undeniable, the Tory London mayor Boris Johnson complained that the former prime minister’s name had become a ‘boo-word’, a ‘shorthand for selfishness and me-firstism’. Her one-time PR guru Maurice Saatchi fretted that ‘her principles of capitalism are under question’. If only young people realized, the irreconcilables insisted, what a basket case Britain had been in the 1970s – the High Tory commentator Simon Heffer declared the country had felt like the Soviet bloc, as men with ‘bad teeth and ill-fitting suits’ (by which he meant union leaders) called the shots in public life – they would understand why millions had to lose their jobs, industries and communities had to be destroyed, and billions handed over to the wealthy.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

In the UK, both before and since the Brexit referendum, the ‘default position’ of anti-EU politicians and journalists on the Right has, as Nick Cohen observes, been explicitly ‘to rouse the rabble by depicting parliament, the judiciary and the civil service as sinister forces conspiring against their own country’.16 Is it any wonder that those robbed of dignity while being whipped up against ‘the Establishment’ voted to leave? Anything is better than the status quo. Those ‘who own nothing’, to use Davies’s terms, have, as Mann says, ‘nothing to lose’.17 The wonder, rather, is that the UK’s new prime minister, Boris Johnson, having described the EU membership referendum as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime chance to vote for real change’, has, for all his impeccable Etonian and Oxbridge establishment credentials, managed to persuade people that support for him, as for Brexit, represents opposition to the establishment and the status quo – all the while that Jeremy Corbyn, the politician offering real change and Johnson’s vanquished rival in the 2019 general election, has been pilloried in Leave-voting regions as a representative of the ‘metropolitan elite’ liberal establishment.

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth
by Michael Spitzer
Published 31 Mar 2021

EMI and her daughter Emily turn out to be hopeless on bigger works such as Mozart or Beethoven piano sonatas, which sound trite, technically clumsy and, frankly, boring. The experience of listening to a sonata by Emily is as disconcerting as attending to a politician’s speech (I’m writing this during a British national election campaign). One recognises their tone of voice and rhetorical tics (‘Aha! Vintage Boris Johnson!’), and easily understands the individual words. Yet the overall flow of the sentences makes no sense, and there doesn’t appear to be any punctuation. In short, it has proven impossible to extract musical algorithms beyond the very local level of a musical phrase. There might be a grammar for a concise hymn tune such as a Bach chorale; there is no grammar for a St Matthew Passion.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

Democracy; Mounk, Great Experiment; Yascha Mounk, “Pitchfork Politics,” Foreign Affairs, Aug. 18, 2014. www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2014-08-18/pitchfork-politics; Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 3 (2016): 5–17; Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Signs of Deconsolidation,” Journal of Democracy 28, no. 1 (2017): 5–15; Yascha Mounk, “The Week Democracy Died: Seven Days in July That Changed the World as We Know It,” Slate, Aug. 14, 2016, www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/08/the_week_democracy_died_how_brexit_nice_turkey_and_trump_are_all_connected.html; Yascha Mounk, “How a Teen’s Death Has Become a Political Weapon,” New Yorker, Jan. 21, 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/how-a-teens-death-has-become-a-political-weapon; Yascha Mounk, The Populist Curtain, BBC Radio 4, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00048p9; Jordan Kyle and Yascha Mounk, “The Populist Harm to Democracy: An Empirical Assessment,” Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, Dec. 26, 2018; Yascha Mounk, “Attack of the Zombie Populists,” Atlantic, Oct. 26, 2022, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/boris-johnson-donald-trump-zombie-populists/671865/; and Yascha Mounk, The Good Fight, podcast, open.spotify.com/show/3nhfO2XVPsv2wZafZ5n7Hk. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT accelerated the takeover: See chapter 7. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT are deeply polarized: Yascha Mounk, “The Doom Spiral of Pernicious Polarization,” Atlantic, May 21, 2022, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/us-democrat-republican-partisan-polarization/629925/.

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

The new prime minister, David Cameron, scrapped the third runway within days, while ruling out expansion at London’s other airports, Gatwick and Stansted. His government vowed to curb “binge flying” with new taxes, promising to build a new high-speed rail network across Britain instead. Meanwhile, London mayor Boris Johnson, the disheveled Tory toff who ousted the Socialist Livingstone, has talked up plans for an $80 billion replacement on a man-made island in the Thames estuary—unlikely considering the new government’s intransigence. The nonpartisan Town and Country Planning Association pleaded with Tony Blair’s government to “retire” the airport altogether and plan a successor somewhere far beyond the suburbs.

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism
by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
Published 31 Dec 2018

David Cameron chose for strategic reasons, not personal convictions, to hold a referendum on EU membership – hoping to secure his authority over his recalcitrant backbenchers and to see off UKIP.67 Yet rather than proving a major threat to the electoral fortunes of the Conservative Party, like many related fringe parties, UKIP has remained a marginal force in British politics. It lost its raison d’etre once the Conservative Party pledged to Leave but also, like many fringe parties, it was unable to overcome the many logistical, financial, and organizational obstacles facing small parties contesting seats in Majoritarian electoral systems. The leaders of Leave – Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – were motivated recklessly by their own leader­ship aspirations to take over from Cameron more than any deep rooted Euroscepticism or even belief that they would actually win.68 The result of the consultative Brexit referendum was extremely close and, like similar contests in Ireland and Denmark, could have been rerun, or the rules could have required a qualified majority to win.

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

Khan, Maintaining the AI Chip Competitive Advantage of the United States and Its Allies (Center for Security and Emerging Technology, December 2019), https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Maintaining-the-AI-Chip-Competitive-Advantage-of-the-United-States-and-its-Allies-20191206.pdf; Khan, Securing Semiconductor Supply Chains. 186China has 60 percent of the global demand: Platzer, Sargent, and Sutter, Semiconductors, 26. 186buying power will tend to bend supply chains: Antonio Varas and Raj Varadarajan, How Restrictions to Trade with China Could End US Leadership in Semiconductors (Boston Consulting Group, n.d.), https://media-publications.bcg.com/flash/2020-03-07-How-Restrictions-to-Trade-with-China-Could-End-US-Semiconductor-Leadership.pdf; Andre Barbe and Will Hunt, Preserving the Choke Points (Center for Security and Emerging Technology, May 2022), https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/preserving-the-chokepoints/. 187technology-leading democracies to band together: Anja Manuel, “How to Win the Technology Race with China,” Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, June 18, 2019, https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/how-win-technology-race-china; Anja Manuel, Pavneet Singh, and Thompson Paine, “Compete, Contest and Collaborate: How to Win the Technology Race with China,” Stanford Cyber Policy Center, October 17, 2019, https://fsi.stanford.edu/publication/compete-contest-and-collaborate-how-win-technology-race-china; Martijn Rasser et al., Common Code: An Alliance Framework for Democratic Technology Policy (Center for a New American Security, October 21, 2020), https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/common-code; Jared Cohen and Richard Fontaine, “Uniting the Techno-Democracies: How to Build Digital Cooperation,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-10-13/uniting-techno-democracies; David Howell, “It’s Time to Replace the Outmoded G7,” Japan Times, February 15, 2021, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2021/02/15/commentary/world-commentary/g7-g20-d10-uk-russia-us-boris-johnson/; Marietje Schaake, “How Democracies Can Claim Back Power in the Digital World,” MIT Technology Review, September 29, 2020, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/29/1009088/democracies-power-digital-social-media-governance-tech-companies-opinion/; Joe Biden, “My Trip to Europe Is About America Rallying the World’s Democracies,” Washington Post, June 5, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/05/joe-biden-europe-trip-agenda/. 187a new “D10” group of democratic, tech-leading countries: Lucy Fisher, “Downing Street Plans New 5G Club of Democracies,” Times (London), May 29, 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/downing-street-plans-new-5g-club-of-democracies-bfnd5wj57. 187Potential areas of collaboration: Rasser et al., Common Code. 187“critical- and emerging-technology working group”: The White House, “Quad Leaders’ Joint Statement: ‘The Spirit of the Quad,’” March 12, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/12/quad-leaders-joint-statement-the-spirit-of-the-quad/. 187Trade and Technology Council (TTC): The White House, “U.S.

Pauline Frommer's London: Spend Less, See More
by Jason Cochran
Published 5 Feb 2007

The centerpiece is the preposterously carved and gilt Lord Mayor’s Coach, built in 1757—a carriage so extravagant it makes Cinderella’s ride look like a skateboard. The procession marks the only time the coach is permitted to venture outside of its air-conditioned garage inside the Museum of London. That’s a lot of hubbub for a city official whose role is essentially ceremonial; the Mayor of London (currently Boris Johnson) wields the true power. All that highfaluting strutting is followed by a good old-fashioned fireworks show over the Thames between the Blackfriars and Waterloo bridges. It’s held on the second Saturday in November, and it’s usually broadcast on TV. Lord Mayor’s Show (www.lordmayors London Film Festival (% 020/ show.org): What sounds like the world’s 7928-3535; www.lff.org.uk): An impor- dullest cable access program is actually a October or November State Opening of Parliament (www. parliament.uk): There’s not much to see in person—just a white-haired monarch zipping in and out of Parliament in a state coach with a cavalry contingent—but the rest is shown on television.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

MacDonald), At Home: A Short History of Private Life; The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (Bill Bryson), A Curious Discovery: An Entrepreneur’s Story (John Hendricks) Rubin, Rick: Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu, translation by Stephen Mitchell), Wherever You Go, There You Are (Jon Kabat-Zinn) Sacca, Chris: Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived (Laurence Shames and Peter Barton), The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Whiskey Know-It-All; The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert (Richard Betts), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel (Mohsin Hamid), I Seem to Be a Verb (R. Buckminster Fuller) Schwarzenegger, Arnold: The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (Boris Johnson), Free to Choose (Milton Friedman), California (Kevin Starr) Sethi, Ramit: Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson), The Social Animal (Elliot Aronson), Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got (Jay Abraham), Mindless Eating (Brian Wansink), The Robert Collier Letter Book (Robert Collier), Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time (Keith Ferrazzi), What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School (Mark H.

Great Britain
by David Else and Fionn Davenport
Published 2 Jan 2007

These range from the Evening Standard, London’s commuter favourite, and city dailies like the Manchester News or Swansea Evening Post – the latter famous as the paper where Dylan Thomas cut his journalistic teeth – to obscure but much-loved small-town newspapers such as the Oban Times where we have seen the immortal headline ‘Remarks Lead To Incidents’. Weekly news magazines include the right-wing Spectator, established in 1828 and until recently edited by Boris Johnson, now the mayor of London; the left-wing New Statesman; and that champion of free trade and globalisation, The Economist. And then there’s the fortnightly Private Eye, child of the sixties and scourge of the establishment, peddling a very British brand of satire. TV & Radio Alongside the wide range of newsprint stands an equally wide range of TV and radio.

…

Her monetarist policy and determination to crush socialism sent unemployment skyrocketing and her term was marked by civil unrest. In 2000 the modern metropolis got its first Mayor of London (as opposed to the Lord Mayor of the City of London), an elected role covering the City and all 32 urban boroughs. The position was taken in 2008 by Boris Johnson, a Conservative known for his unruly shock of blond hair, appearances on TV game shows and controversial editorials in Spectator magazine. One thing the bicycle-riding mayor will have to contend with is the city’s traffic snarls. A congestion charge on cars entering the central city had initial success when introduced by his predecessor, but rush-hour congestion has now increased to pre-charge levels.

The Rough Guide to England
by Rough Guides
Published 29 Mar 2018

Apps like Hailo and Uber can come in handy, too, though at the time of going to print TfL had decided not to renew Uber's licence to operate in London; check for updates before you travel. BY bike Boris bikes The city’s cycle rental scheme – or Boris bikes, as they’re universally known, after former Mayor of London Boris Johnson – has over 700 docking stations across central London. With a credit or debit card, you can buy 24hr access for just £2. You then get the first 30min on a bike free, so if you hop from docking station to docking station you don’t pay another penny. Otherwise, it’s £2 for each additional 30min.

England
by David Else
Published 14 Oct 2010

Her monetarist policy and determin­ation to crush socialism sent unemployment skyrocketing and her term was marked by civil unrest. In 2000 the modern metropolis got its first Mayor of London (as opposed to the Lord Mayor of the City of London), an elected role covering the City and all 32 urban boroughs. The position was taken in 2008 by Boris Johnson, a Conservative known for his unruly shock of blond hair, appearances on TV game shows and controversial editorials in Spectator magazine. One thing the bicycle­-riding mayor will have to contend with is the city’s traffic snarls. A congestion charge on cars entering the central city had initial success when introduced by his predecessor, but rush-hour congestion has now increased to precharge levels.