Boris Johnson

Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

by Bill Browder  · 11 Apr 2022  · 335pp  · 100,154 words

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

Politics on the Edge: The Instant #1 Sunday Times Bestseller From the Host of Hit Podcast the Rest Is Politics

by Rory Stewart  · 13 Sep 2023  · 534pp  · 157,700 words

Development, and before that as Prisons Minister, Minister for Africa, Minister for Development, Environment Minister and Chair of the Defence Committee. He ran against Boris Johnson for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 2019. Earlier in his career he was briefly in the British Army, before serving as a diplomat

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London, would have to get their hands on the unpublished draft. For those stories are no longer included. Nor are my detailed attempts to analyse Boris Johnson, populism, the hope for the centre ground, or the place of ethics in politics. I left politics with a deep love for my constituency,

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Secretary, the most likeable of us, has his hands perfectly folded on his lap and is conveying meditative serenity. I keep closing my eyes. And Boris Johnson – ever the punchline – looks as though he is a celebrity contestant bracing for a custard pie in the face. More images tumble over the

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himself. ‘My question to you all is,’ says Lee, ‘can you guarantee to get your Brexit plan through Parliament by 31 October?’ I wince. Boris Johnson leans forward soberly on his chair to reassure him. The task that faces the winner of this contest is significant. We will be taking responsibility

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they really believed about him, or the European Union? Did he speculate on how willing they would be, if one of his rivals such as Boris Johnson took over, to shift their allegiance, champion a completely different position, and deny that any contradiction had occurred? Did he ask himself whether the

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had been the last representative of the old Blairite liberal order in British politics with all the flaws and strengths which that implied. Compared to Boris Johnson, who had almost become prime minister, Cameron had been diligent, truthful, and respectful of Parliament, courts and the opposition, and embraced a pluralist, socially

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. I was proud to support Theresa May. I wanted her to remain as prime minister and far preferred her to the alternative candidates such as Boris Johnson. A minister beside me spoke up calmly and clearly in her defence, disagreeing with Andrew. I nodded. Nicholas Soames growled about loyalty. Theresa May

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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

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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. His favourite technique was said to be pretending to

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May. The papers called this, in dramatic tones, a ‘false-flag operation’. Part Four 13. ‘A Balliol man in Africa’ I had first met Boris Johnson outside the sandbagged shipping container in which I lived in Iraq in 2005, when I was still working as an administrator and he was a

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a joint regional minister, with responsibility for the work in both departments. This meant I would now have two bosses: Priti Patel in development and Boris Johnson in the Foreign Office. The chief whip Gavin Williamson called me back to say the prime minister agreed. ‘But only,’ he said in a

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pushover, without quite having his heart in the debate. He concluded by saying I should confirm the details of my appointment with the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson. I presumed that Theresa May intended me to continue to focus on the Middle East and Asia in both departments. ‘Good morning Foreign Secretary,’

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control not only of the Foreign Office in Africa, but also of the entire annual £4 billion of DfID spend on the continent, and – so Boris Johnson insisted – ‘full plenipotentiary powers’ for dealing with forty-five countries scarred by colonialism and Cold War proxy wars, artificial borders, the decline of the

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wars, stoked in different eras by the CIA, Mossad, Ethiopia, the Cubans, Gaddafi, Uganda and others. In 2005, when I was still in Iraq meeting Boris Johnson, the US Congress – inspired by Christians, officials concerned about terrorism, and George Clooney, who was focused on a potential genocide – had voted to give $

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telegram by the Foreign Secretary? Do you not feel that your entire criticism, of Potemkin villages and charade foreign policies, would be better addressed to Boris Johnson?’ Thirty other ambassadors laughed. Discomfited, I ploughed on. I said it was vital to preserve the tradition of telling uncomfortable truths in diplomatic telegrams:

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minute rugby match and he waved me out. 14. The People’s Political Consultative Conference The stakes in British international development were high. Politicians including Boris Johnson were becoming more openly contemptuous of the aid budget. Other government departments were trying every ruse to grab our money – even the navy wanted to

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People’s Political Consultative Conference. Britain still retained some influence in countries such as Kenya, but it was not helped by the startling fecklessness of Boris Johnson. I had issued a letter, for example, also signed by the American government condemning interference in the Kenyan elections. (Gunmen had attacked the deputy

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formal and informal, arguing that I was undermining the opportunity to reset a more positive relationship between Britain and Zimbabwe through Mnangagwa. I had convinced Boris Johnson to agree to my flying immediately to Zimbabwe. But the Foreign Secretary’s endorsement being apparently insufficient, I grabbed the prime minister herself in the

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in Northern Ireland, and they wanted more freedom to diverge from EU regulations. The Brexit Secretary resigned from the Cabinet in protest at the backstop. Boris Johnson was tempted to do the same. He had found his two years as Foreign Secretary humiliating. A man who enjoyed the improbable, the incongruous

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were rarely practical. Two of them compared their opposition to Theresa May’s deal to their dead fathers’ role in the fight against Nazi Germany; Boris Johnson drew analogies with the fight against colonisation; and Steve Baker – a lay-preacher who had also resigned as a junior minister – was wondering how

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which I had now seen in forty different prisons. My prison visits continued, and the Brexit story went quiet again. In the two months since Boris Johnson’s resignation a strange peace had settled over the Conservative Party. There had been no more resignations. Boris was often to be seen brooding outside

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, by promising to resign as prime minister if the deal was passed, she won back the majority of the Brexiteers, including Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson. Only twenty-eight – buoyed by watching Hollywood’s 300 – held out, calling themselves ‘the Spartans’. There were hopes that Labour might now support the

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challenge ‘Brexit ideologues’. I turned up to the meeting, hoping that it might have the potential to stop no-deal, and prevent the ERG and Boris Johnson from capturing the Conservative Party. Looking around the oak-lined room on our first meeting, however, I found the gathering a little troubling. I

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like frogs in slowly heating water. No-confidence votes, I reminded the room, had been snapping at the heels of colleagues. The emerging leadership candidates, Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab and Andrea Leadsom, were signalling that, if they took over, everyone would be obliged to accept a hard Brexit position. We would

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expected to dominate the leadership race – Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab and Matt Hancock – understood the arguments I had made against Boris Johnson, because they had sat around Theresa May’s Cabinet table, long before I joined. All understood a no-deal Brexit was a sudden, cliff-edge

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claimed to have discovered an Eleventh Commandment of Ronald Reagan: ‘never speak ill of a fellow conservative’. Even I had ceased my attacks on Boris Johnson on the understanding that he would announce his opposition to no-deal. Eight colleagues were clearly intending to run for the leadership, but because Theresa

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to hear from colleagues that they blamed me for breaking their momentum. The next morning, the Daily Mail ran the headline: ‘Rory Stewart brands Boris Johnson a LIAR in thinly veiled Pinocchio tweet.’ The Sun said that the leadership race had exploded into life. Matt Hancock’s attempts to introduce his

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portrayed me shouting ‘What are they smoking?’ and the Guardian was developing a vision of me riding a camel in robes, away from a lounging Boris Johnson, portrayed as a Turkish pasha with a hookah. The following day, Michael Gove, who had made stern moralistic judgements about drug-users and threatened

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undeclared MPs’ votes. It was a less predictable field than the Grand National and almost as large. The newspapers and TV covered little else. Boris Johnson remained the overwhelming favourite. His silhouette shimmered like a mirage in front of us all, and his campaigning style beckoned us into a children’s

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still borrowing. Such promises, in a party that prided itself on balancing the budget, would have been almost unthinkable in previous leadership contests. But Boris Johnson was proving that saying and doing things which previous leaders had been ashamed to do, would be rewarded. The Conservative Party in the country, instead

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‘You only vote for me if you want moderation and compromise.’ Yet, while championing restraint and moderation, I was showing neither in my attitude to Boris Johnson. The centre of my campaign was against him. He seemed the only truly dangerous one of the candidates. He alone could cloak a darker narrative

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nuclear submarines. But his omissions and equivocations still seemed to be convincing people that he was lying to everyone else, while being truthful with them. Boris Johnson referred to foreigners as people who cooked ‘goat curry on campfires’ and wore veils that made them look ‘like letter boxes’. He said, ‘Islam

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that only two candidates would be presented to the party in the country. Which meant in practice there would be only one slot free against Boris Johnson. One of the junior ministers in the leadership race immediately announced his withdrawal. I saw him outside Portcullis House, and I had never seen

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the International Development Secretary, that my constituency was 350 miles away, and his was an hour from Westminster. And I asked how much time precisely Boris Johnson spent in his constituency. He kept on writing, and backing Boris. The hustings held by the One Nation group of centrist MPs was probably

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promise tax cuts or make vast unfunded spending pledges, which would destroy confidence in our economy. I said that the Brexit policy being pursued by Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab, and increasingly echoed by almost every other candidate, would tear the Conservative Party apart. If they wanted the party in the

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. ‘I was the only leadership candidate who was in the meetings that drafted these values,’ I said, signing them. ‘But, the problem is even Boris Johnson would be quite happy to sign this.’ I read excerpts out loud. ‘He will even claim he believes “in a civilised, open respectful political debate

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broke his latest promise to the One Nation, forcing the Queen to prorogue Parliament. I sent out a tweet asking, ‘Can every candidate – starting with Boris Johnson – please now personally clarify that they completely rule out proroguing Parliament? Locking the door on Parliament would be offensive, undemocratic and ultimately futile. Please confirm

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will be realistic and honest … and who will be able to unite the nation behind any deal that is done. We believe that person is Boris Johnson.’ Boris Johnson had it seemed promised him the post of Lord Chancellor. The other campaigns had done their launch events in the meeting rooms of hotels and

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GDP will decline each year over the three years of the next spending review’. Theresa May’s chancellor, Philip Hammond, who was increasingly contemptuous of Boris Johnson, the hard Brexit fantasies and the reckless spending promises, followed up by asking the other candidates to sign this fiscal pledge. None did. But

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obtain the requisite first-round votes; my support more than doubled, and the latest Conservative Home poll finally showed me now in second place to Boris Johnson with the party membership. (Previous polls had just shown me leading with the general population.) The Spectator reported, ‘Rory has now messed up everyone

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town with his easy manner and silver tongue – a heady mix of showmanship, hypocrisy and artifice’. The Spectator insisted that it was me, not Boris Johnson, who was the archetypal politician, ‘all presentation and little substance’. Another journalist insisted in a blog that I was a liar who had entirely invented

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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. I am no longer a Cabinet minister,

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much from the volunteers, and battling for the smallest gains in the polls, against the machines of the established political parties. That campaign ends when Boris Johnson cancels the mayoral elections, for Covid reasons. In Penrith high street, five older Conservative Party members, in their thick scarves and boots, gather for

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relatively late age of forty-one. Secretary of State for Transport, and for Defence, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Remainer. First elected 2001 Boris Johnson (born 1964), MP for Henley from 2001 to 2008 and for Uxbridge and South Ruislip from 2015. Son of a Member of the European Parliament

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parliaments of five years but in practice prime ministers continued to be able to dissolve parliaments at will – as Theresa May did in 2017 and Boris Johnson did in 2019. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries only about one in seven adult males were eligible to vote. Successive reforms to

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but only one of the 650 seats. Prorogation The ending of a parliamentary session. Parliament cannot meet and vote until a new session begins. Boris Johnson used the Queen to prorogue Parliament in 2019 to prevent Parliament voting on Brexit. This was ruled to be illegal by the Supreme Court. Constituency

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so that the MP can run on behalf of the party (as happened with the ‘Maastricht rebels’ – Eurosceptics who defied John Major’s government). Boris Johnson, however, used this power in 2019 to strip the whip off his major internal opponents, and then held an election, in which they were prevented

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– often ruling less through ‘Cabinet government’ and more through their own office in 10 Downing Street. In my time David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson were prime ministers. Leadership candidate An MP who runs to be leader of their party. In 2016 and 2019, the winner automatically became prime minister

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

by Peter Geoghegan  · 2 Jan 2020  · 388pp  · 111,099 words

has become an increasingly partisan issue. Many prominent figures have been keen to silence any conversation about the flaws in our democratic system. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has kicked proposals for electoral reform into the long grass. All the while, democratic norms have been eroded. Judges were branded enemies of the people

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journalists. Many saw the spirit of Dominic Cummings behind the onslaught of disinformation. Having vowed to “deliver Brexit” in government, Cummings was credited with instigating Boris Johnson’s controversial decision to suspend Parliament in August 2019 in an unsuccessful attempt to force through an accelerated departure from the EU. (The Supreme Court

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during the referendum, and after. The Electoral Commission eventually chose Vote Leave as the official pro-Brexit campaign. Vote Leave also had another major boost: Boris Johnson. On Friday, 19 February, the former London mayor and Conservative MP wrote two columns in the Daily Telegraph about the forthcoming referendum. (Until he became

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became a paid-up culture warrior, first at Elliott’s partisan news site Brexit Central then with the libertarians at the Institute of Economic Affairs. Boris Johnson – who had dismissed claims of Vote Leave’s law-breaking as “utterly ludicrous” – became prime minister, with Michael Gove by his side. One former Labour

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1980s. The chair of the independent UK Statistics Authority described Vote Leave’s claim as “a clear misuse of official statistics” in a letter to Boris Johnson. Nevertheless, Cummings continued to push this message through targeted Facebook ads. Cummings believed this was a crucial factor in winning a tight referendum. “If Boris

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was later removed. * On a warm afternoon in early September 2019, I arrived in Westminster to meet Conservative MP Damian Collins. It was noticeably quiet; Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament had not yet been declared unlawful. A handful of protestors waving starry EU banners stood in the autumn sunlight. Police in

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at the influential British Irish Association in September 2018 to host a gala dinner in Fermanagh for then Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson. Two months later, Boris Johnson was the star attraction at the DUP’s annual conference in Belfast. The then former foreign secretary declared that May’s withdrawal agreement was “a

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by Australian spin doctor Sir Lynton Crosby which ran the 2015 and 2017 Conservative general election campaigns, and which later donated money and staff to Boris Johnson’s successful Tory leadership bid.42 Just how much money the ERG raised from private donors is impossible to gauge. The European Research Group is

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Bridge’s most prominent British supporters would later play leading roles in Vote Leave and the ascendant Brexit-supporting wing of the Conservative Party, including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. That Atlantic Bridge got off the ground at all is a testament to Fox’s determination. The first decade of this century

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more influential. Many of those involved became key players in British politics, particularly in the European Research Group. Steve Bannon would develop a friendship with Boris Johnson, even claiming that he helped compose the foreign secretary’s resignation speech in July 2018.53 Writing on the Young America’s Foundation website in

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were to be attracted by it, became an accepted part of British political debate. Speaking on a visit to Australia as foreign secretary in 2017, Boris Johnson echoed his idol Winston Churchill’s praise for “the special genius of the English-speaking people”. Talk of ‘Global Britain’ increased markedly after Johnson became

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force her withdrawal agreement through Westminster, donations to the Conservatives fell by half on the same period the previous year, to £3.7 million. When Boris Johnson took over, promising a hard Brexit, donations increased sharply. During the subsequent general election, the Tories broke records for the most funds raised in a

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The Conservatives’ growing dependence on decentralised private capital, and particularly hedge funds, did not go unnoticed. In September 2019, former chancellor Philip Hammond declared that Boris Johnson was in league with financiers who stood to profit handsomely from a no-deal Brexit. The prime minister’s own sister, Rachel, agreed. But there

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to make. A sudden shock to the system, like Brexit, can create volatility, which creates new opportunities for profit. The British sociologist Will Davies describes Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage as “kindred spirits in the project of injecting a bit of chaos into the liberal economic system”.74 It is striking, too

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and its financial backers “because it was no longer stabilised by a powerful organic connection to capital, either nationally or locally”.76 Business? “Fuck business,” Boris Johnson declared. So, what happens when the party of government is captured by a small group of donors? We can look across the Atlantic to get

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benefit particular niche interests. Already there are signs of obscure deregulatory projects making their way onto the political agenda. During the 2019 Conservative leadership contest, Boris Johnson promised to “take back control of our regulatory framework”, echoing Vote Leave’s referendum slogan. He pledged to review a levy on sugar (designed to

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and senior Republicans in Washington agreed. Britain could simply replace the EU with the Anglosphere, and all would be well. During the 2019 general election, Boris Johnson pushed a message that was markedly different from his leadership stump speeches. The prime minister-in-waiting promised public investment and state aid for struggling

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European Union, for corporate lobbyists and think tanks, the transatlantic “Brexit influencing game” had already begun. * Daniel Hannan’s think tank, which was launched by Boris Johnson on Foreign Office premises in 2017, was initially called the Institute of Free Trade but was forced to change its name as it did not

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movement.59 The winner, a civil servant in the British embassy in Manila named Iain Mansfield, was later briefly appointed as a special advisor in Boris Johnson’s pre-election administration. Once the referendum result was in, think tanks quickly began to frame Brexit as a historic opportunity to radically shrink the

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Arrangements Commission gained influence at the highest levels of the British government. Twice in as many days in late August 2019, newly installed prime minister Boris Johnson publicly endorsed what he called the commission’s “excellent paper” on the Irish border. The report was widely cited as offering a compromise between the

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spoke to gave a blunt assessment of Westminster’s libertarian think tanks: “They are corporate lobbyists, nothing more.” * In early August 2019, a week after Boris Johnson became prime minister, the IEA returned to the Villiers Hotel in Buckingham for the start of a two-day staff retreat. The atmosphere could scarcely

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world of digital politics, truth and falsehood have become malleable concepts. Anything goes. During a TV debate ahead of the 2019 British general election between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, the Conservative Party renamed its Twitter account factcheckUK, and then used it to push out partisan messages designed to look like independent

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election slogan: “Get Brexit Done”. The mantra was endlessly repeated by just about every Conservative politician who came within spitting distance of a microphone. Online, Boris Johnson’s party ripped up the British political rule book. There were combative digital messages, dubious claims delivered in comic sans across numerous tech platforms, and

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awkward questions about the legality of the Brexit referendum, according to a November 2019 report in Politico.79 Around the same time, May’s successor Boris Johnson took the highly unusual step of refusing to publish a report by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee into Russian meddling in British politics, citing

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technological revolution in politics is more likely to speed up than slow down. A few weeks before the 2019 British general election, a video showing Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn endorsing each other for prime minister spread online. It was obviously a fake – created in an attempt to demonstrate the potential for

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British politics; the drafting of the Conservatives’ winning 2019 election manifesto was overseen by Munira Mirza, a one-time RCP member who later worked for Boris Johnson as London mayor and prime minister.10 For Fox, there is no contradiction between taking money from American oil billionaires and claiming to represent ordinary

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Hosking, who donated heavily to Tory candidates in the 2017 general election, announced that he was backing the Brexit Party. Jon Wood, who donated to Boris Johnson’s Tory leadership campaign, gave money; Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based businessman and one-time member of the ‘leader’s group’ of senior Conservative donors

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disinformation. The shift to high-octane, 24/7 reporting has made it easier for those in power to manipulate journalistic conventions. Almost as soon as Boris Johnson became prime minister – bringing with him Vote Leave’s press operation – on-the-record interviews almost completely ceased. In their place, a rash of stories

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reporting. But as politics has become another form of entertainment, it is very easy for journalists to be manipulated by skilful, self-serving political disruptors. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump – all know how to frame narratives that will spread quickly through established media and onto partisan news sites. A good example

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from the people, but things are changing… I want to be part of an international front that includes Donald Trump, who will be re-elected, Boris Johnson, [Brazil’s] Jair Bolsonaro and [Israel’s] Benjamin Netanyahu. MATTEO SALVINI, December 20191 In April 2016, Matteo Salvini, leader of Italy’s secessionist Northern League

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to a wartime anti-Semite or something equally appalling, and everyone runs off to cover that,” said Lane Scheppele. “It’s the same tactics that Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings use in Britain.” Ahead of the 2018 general election, Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube was reportedly involved in a campaign to

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Orbán-friendly Danube Institute think tank in Budapest. 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

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abrogated. The Supreme Court may have ruled it unlawful, but many voters seem to have little problem with a prime minister misleading the Queen, as Boris Johnson did when proroguing Parliament in late 2019. The end, it seems, justifies the means. As the rise of nativist movements in Europe graphically shows, hard

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of thousands of Hungarian Jews who perished during the Holocaust. 11 DEMOCRACY GOING DARK On a wet morning in late November 2019, two weeks before Boris Johnson won his “stonking” majority in the British general election, I filed into an overcrowded room on the first floor of a cream-coloured 19th-century

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bitterly on social media but struggling, atomised, to find avenues to channel our anger productively? There are plenty of reasons to be gloomy. Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and many others have learned that waging war on truth pays political dividends. Established media outlets are easily manipulated. Falsehoods spread rapidly across hyper-partisan

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minister has ever seriously tried to rein in. Foreign magnates and British elites can funnel their money offshore with ease. Despite his ‘one nation’ rhetoric, Boris Johnson is particularly close to the oligarch set. The day after his landslide election win in December 2019, Johnson attended a champagne-and-caviar Christmas party

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2: Democracy on Leave? 1 ‘Investigation: Vote Leave Ltd, Mr Darren Grimes, BeLeave and Veterans for Britain’, The Electoral Commission, July 2018. 2 Alex Spence, ‘Boris Johnson Secretly Asked For A Massive Amount Of User Data To Be Tracked. Dominic Cummings Said It’s “TOP PRIORITY”’, Buzzfeed, September 2019. 3 William Norton

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. 31 Niall McCracken, ‘Brexit technology firm used by DUP in Northern Ireland elections’, thedetail, June 2017. 32 Laura Hughes and Jim Pickard, ‘Curious tale of Boris Johnson’s Irish flight with party backer’, Financial Times, January 2019. 33 ‘Ian Paisley: DUP MP “stunned” and “humbled” at keeping seat’, BBC, September 2018. 34

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-doubles-under-cameron; accessed 23 Jan. 2020. 69 David Hellier, ‘Why are hedge funds supporting Brexit?’, Guardian, November 2015. 70 Caroline Wheeler and Rosamund Urwin, ‘Boris Johnson’s donor Crispin Odey eyes Brexit jackpot with £300m bet against British firms’, The Times, August 2019. 71 Stefan Boscia, ‘Conservatives break election donations record

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Levido secured Tory triumph with skill and sharp slogan’, The Times, December 2019. 93 Jim Waterson, ‘Lynton Crosby’s firm in illegal lobbying inquiry over Boris Johnson link’, Guardian, October 2019. 94 Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) Annual Report 2017–2018. See also www.gov.uk/government/publications/advisory-committee-on

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Lynton Crosby could be called to give evidence to MPs’, Guardian, August 2019. 65 Jim Waterson, ‘Lynton Crosby’s firm in illegal lobbying inquiry over Boris Johnson link’, Guardian, October 2019. 66 Hadas Gold, ‘Facebook agrees to pay fine over Cambridge Analytica’, CNN, October 2019. 67 Patrick Howell O’Neill, ‘Mozilla Calls

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Times, May 2019. 9 George Monbiot, ‘How US billionaires are fuelling the hard-right cause in Britain’, Guardian, December 2018. 10 Caroline Wheeler, ‘Women behind Boris Johnson’s blueprint’, The Times, November 2019. 11 Paolo Gerbaudo, ‘Are digital parties more democratic than traditional parties? Evaluating Podemos and Movimento 5 Stelle’s online

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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

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‘The Guardian view on the rise of Christian-nativist populists: a troubling sign of things to come’, Guardian, December 2019. 98 Alex Wickham, ‘A Top Boris Johnson Aide Says The UK Will Have A “Special Relationship” With Viktor Orbán’s Hungary After Brexit’, Buzzfeed, January 2020. 99 Raphael Minder, ‘Franco’s Remains

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. Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi and Linday Nielson, ‘Do voter identification laws suppress minority voting? Yes. We did the research’, Washington Post, February 2017. 3 Adam Ramsay, ‘Boris Johnson made politics awful, then asked people to vote it away’, openDemocracy, December 2019. 4 Alastair Reid and Carlotta Dotto, ‘Thousands of misleading Conservative ads side

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

by Tim Shipman  · 30 Nov 2017  · 721pp  · 238,678 words

interviewed Theresa May three times and accompanied her on her visit to the White House. I also conducted on-the-record interviews with David Davis, Boris Johnson, Damian Green, Michael Gove, John McDonnell, Nigel Farage, Arron Banks and Michael Fallon. I have drawn on the unpublished transcripts of these conversations. As

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plans for May’s Florence speech 12 Sep – Philip Hammond tells Lords Economic Affairs Committee there must be a ‘status quo’ transition 15 Sep – Boris Johnson publishes 4,200-word article in the Daily Telegraph challenging May’s authority on Brexit 18 Sep – Oliver Robbins leaves DExEU to run Cabinet Office

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for secrecy the membership was not published until it leaked in mid-October. Every cabinet minister who had campaigned to leave the EU – David Davis, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox, Chris Grayling, Priti Patel and Andrea Leadsom – was included, half the committee, when they represented just a quarter of the full cabinet.

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. She gives that heavy sigh and there’s a rolling of the eyebrows.’ In the early meetings, each of which lasted around two hours, Boris Johnson and Philip Hammond emerged as the key antagonists at the head of the blocs of Remain- and Leave-supporting ministers. ‘Boris would make rousing speeches

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legislative rule-making system, which is the single market.’ Realising after the first cabinet committee meeting on Brexit that they needed to stick together, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and David Davis met in a waiting room in 10 Downing Street to confirm to each other that they accepted the logic that

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the economy or parts of the country inside the customs union – an idea soon dropped as impractical. This hedging created friction with the Brexiteers, particularly Boris Johnson, who wanted a clear statement that the UK was leaving. Johnson compared the customs union to the Zollverein, the nineteenth-century arrangement which broke down

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the Sun on Sunday that Theresa May herself had been advised to disrobe under the covers or risk being filmed naked – a leak for which Boris Johnson was blamed. The paranoia extended to Downing Street, where Fiona Hill was highly security conscious after living with a former spy for several years.

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to denounce the Home Office plan. That week, Nick Herbert, who had led the Conservative Party’s Remain campaign, also surfaced, telling the Guardian that Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox were ‘the three blind mice’ of Brexit, peddling ‘Brexit fundamentalism’.2 Crucially, though, both Morgan and Herbert said Tory

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course. By then two external Brexit groups had been set up. The businessmen Richard Tice and John Longworth led Leave Means Leave. Michael Gove and Boris Johnson lent their support to Change Britain, run by Gisela Stuart, the Labour MP they had worked with on the Vote Leave campaign. Baker brought

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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

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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

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He told the prime minister she would get a better hearing in Brussels if fellow leaders did not think she was simply trying to emulate Boris Johnson’s doctrine of having cake while simultaneously eating it. That meant moving on from claims of British exceptionalism inside the European institutions of which,

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and the power play was rebuffed. ‘If you have done the dark arts in Russia you know how to play the game,’ said an admirer. Boris Johnson phoned Steve Baker, the Eurosceptics’ shop steward, and briefed him on Barrow, asking for a public endorsement. The Eurosceptic MPs quickly offered their support.

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was evident to cabinet ministers in meetings of the Brexit subcommittee. ‘They would snigger together,’ a minister said, at some of the contributions from Boris Johnson and Liam Fox. This created suspicion among some Leave-voting ministers, who wondered if DD was backing away from his belief that the UK could

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businesses, among regulators, among thoughtful politicians, as well as a universal view among civil servants’. It was not, at that stage, a view shared by Boris Johnson, Liam Fox or Steve Baker’s Eurosceptics. On 29 November the prime minister had hinted to the CBI’s annual conference that she would consider

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smaller groups. ‘It leaked like a sieve,’ a cabinet minister said. ‘We started having bilaterals, trilaterals and quadrilaterals with Theresa.’ For the crunch meeting Boris Johnson was not invited. ‘The civil service worked out that the only way that they could get any decisions on anything was with DD, Hammond and

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Remain camps were healing because ministers from both sides of the campaign were very happy with that speech and thought it was the right concept.’ Boris Johnson could be seen nodding vigorously while May spoke. At the cabinet that followed he declared it ‘a great day’. Even Hammond seemed happy, pronouncing

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Trump. The Australian premier Malcolm Turnbull jumped the queue by getting the new president’s mobile number from Greg Norman, the golfer. In recompense, Boris Johnson was the first foreign politician on vice president Mike Pence’s call list. The media wondered if Britain’s lowly place in the queue was

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immigration and her disdain for dancing to the tune of twenty-four-hour news combined to create a public relations disaster. It was left to Boris Johnson to sort out the mess and ensure British citizens were exempted from the ban. Downing Street arranged a conference call between May, Johnson and

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the Obama administration to spy on Trump Tower. In a break from the tradition that the government does not comment on intelligence matters, GCHQ – with Boris Johnson’s backing – issued a furious response calling the allegations ‘nonsense – they are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored’. General H. R. McMaster, Trump’s

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autumn of 2016 had led May to create a new, much smaller, EU Exit and Trade (Negotiations) cabinet subcommittee, consisting of just herself, Davis, Boris Johnson, Philip Hammond, Amber Rudd and Damian Green. Liam Fox, who had been suspected of leaking by May’s aides, was not included. But Downing Street

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on EU fears that British withdrawal would leave Europe more vulnerable to ‘increased Russian aggression’ under Vladimir Putin. Leaked minutes of the meeting showed that Boris Johnson argued Britain had a ‘strong hand’ while Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, said the government had ‘high cards’ to play because ‘the EU needs

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stop him briefing things and work in a collegiate fashion’. The chancellor urged colleagues and Number 10 staff to keep records of messages they received. Boris Johnson also showed aggressive texts to colleagues. Timothy denies that he ever sent abusive texts: ‘I was quite often testy with Philip but I certainly

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Stephen Parkinson and the campaign professionals led by Sir Lynton Crosby, the Australian who had masterminded David Cameron’s surprise 2015 election victory, both of Boris Johnson’s wins in the London mayoral elections of 2008 and 2012, and numerous other wins for centre-right candidates around the world. He was accompanied

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disrupt planning for a trade trip to China. As the holders of the other great offices of state, the home secretary, Amber Rudd, and Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, were summoned to May’s office to receive the news shortly before cabinet, while Gavin Williamson was deputed to tell Damian Green

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Ryley, the head of Sky News. Perhaps incautiously, Boulton read out the text on air. When Boulton’s colleague Beth Rigby wrote a blog suggesting Boris Johnson was to be sidelined during the campaign, a highly sensitive subject, ‘Fiona decided Sky just weren’t going to get anything,’ a colleague recalled.

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new trade commissioners to boost international business after Brexit, which reflected ‘intellectual rigour and a really coherent plan’. However, May’s team were unimpressed by Boris Johnson’s Foreign Office submission, which was ‘basically a speech’ from the foreign secretary on Global Britain and the need to spend the aid budget more

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policies’ were added by special-interest groups at the last moment. ‘It was like looking at the results of a raffle,’ one spad shuddered. Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley, had had more input than some cabinet ministers, persuading the Cameroons to include support for a ban on ivory sales. The secrecy

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source said. For his part, Ben Gummer felt sick, knowing the whole world was about to mark his homework. Light relief was provided by Boris Johnson, who returned from the restaurant car with sandwiches for his colleagues, bacon butties wedged under his chin and a vat of coffee swinging from his

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. ‘There was genuine anger that someone would say that,’ a special adviser recalled. Crosby deployed the cabinet’s heaviest hitters to respond, including bringing Boris Johnson out of cold storage. The foreign secretary’s main contribution to the campaign up to that point had been to refer to Corbyn as a

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as the frontrunner to succeed Philip Hammond at the Treasury. She also had debate experience, having led the Remain campaign’s effort to duff up Boris Johnson during one EU referendum debate the year before. The debate, in Cambridge University’s Senate House, was scheduled for the evening of Wednesday, 31

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veteran said, ‘Ultimately a leader decides the tenor of the campaign. She never expressed a view. She never amped up her performance like Cameron. What Boris Johnson calls “giving it a bit of welly”. She doesn’t express much emotion.’ As one special adviser put it, ‘Lynton was – unfortunate turn of

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campaigns past. The Tories accused Corbyn of plotting a ‘triple tax whammy’ that would cost home-owners £5,000 a year, and sent out Boris Johnson to deliver the attack lines. The briefing combined fears that Labour’s extra borrowing would drive up interest rates and mortgages, with Sheridan Westlake’s

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but her loss of authority was palpable as every single minister spoke, a trend that would be repeated in the weeks ahead. On this occasion Boris Johnson was muted and Patrick McLoughlin, who had defied all logic to remain as party chairman, made an upbeat intervention, hailing the seats where the

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the tiny majority should not terminate her hopes. There was even the suggestion that Lynton Crosby might be prepared to abandon his longstanding support for Boris Johnson to help Rudd. One of Rudd’s former parliamentary staff had gone to work for CTF Partners, Crosby’s firm, and the home secretary

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of May those letters might have been filed in the nearest waste paper basket.’ The plotters were determined to run a professional operation. They remembered Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign the year before, where campaign chiefs belatedly discovered that some MPs thought to be committed to Johnson had not been properly nailed

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.’ Hammond was under pressure from Justine Greening, Jeremy Hunt, Karen Bradley, James Brokenshire and Michael Fallon to ease controls on austerity. Michael Gove and Boris Johnson also voiced support for an end to seven years of pay restraint. When the full details of his double gaffe – which left him looking callous

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and the chief whip Gavin Williamson were all there with Gove. There were two notable absentees. Amber Rudd was in Turkey and the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, was in the British sovereign territory of Anguilla, inspecting the damage caused by Hurricane Irma, which had ripped a trail of destruction through the

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they got up to leave, officials politely but firmly asked them to hand back the document and confiscated their notes. After the meeting, Gove phoned Boris Johnson and said, ‘There’s something you need to know …’ Halfway round the world, the foreign secretary was furious that such an important meeting had

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a Conservative adviser said. ‘Make the UK pay as fucking much money as possible for as fucking long as possible.’ The week before the talks, Boris Johnson told MPs the sums demanded were ‘extortionate’ and suggested Brussels could ‘go whistle’ for the money, an intervention which did little to endear him to

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we can never leave.’ Dominic Cummings, who still had contacts across Whitehall – and a longstanding belief that Heywood should be removed – had several conversations with Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to express his concerns. Cummings believed the victory they had all won the year before was being thrown away. He told them

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for Leavers and which for Remainers without making clear where he stood. Gove said, ‘I’m not really sure about this.’ When he called Boris Johnson in the Caribbean to tell him about the meeting, the foreign secretary ‘went ballistic’. When the foreign secretary returned home they met for crisis talks

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that Barnier and the others were assiduous readers of the English newspapers. They were intimately familiar with her conference disaster and the soap opera surrounding Boris Johnson. Had they not seen how her enemies hovered in case she stumbled? Juncker pushed back, saying the UK still needed to pay up. British

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and the prime minister’s team came to regret his appointment and his inability to use the powerhouse of the Treasury for imaginative political policymaking. Boris Johnson played a lesser role in the Brexit policymaking than Davis or Hammond. Nonetheless when it looked, in the autumn of 2017, as if he

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Jeremy Corbyn’ began (Visionhaus#GP/Corbis via Getty Images) Corbyn speaking to Emma Barnett on R4’s Women’s Hour (© BBC Motion Gallery/Getty Images) Boris Johnson arguing with Ian Lavery (© BBC Motion Gallery/Getty Images) Ruth Davidson on the campaign trail, in Giffnock, south of Glasgow (Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty Images

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Images) Andrew Mitchell in Westminster (Jack Hill/The Times) Theresa and Philip May on The One Show (Photo by The Conservative Party via Getty Images) Boris Johnson arguing with Andrew Gwynne (Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/PA Images) May choking with coughs during the Tory conference (Lindsey Parnaby/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) May

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but his calm persona meant he could ride out the campaign bumps. (© BBC Motion Gallery/Getty Images) Ian Lavery, Labour’s campaign coordinator, clashes with Boris Johnson. His attempts to ‘muscle in’ after the Manchester terror attack were seen off by local officials. (© BBC Motion Gallery/Getty Images) Ruth Davidson, leader

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. May revealed that she and her husband have ‘boy jobs and girl jobs’ around the house. (Photo by The Conservative Party via Getty Images) Boris Johnson with Andrew Gwynne. The main parties’ most ebullient media spokesmen clashed frequently in spin rooms. (Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/PA Images) Theresa May’s 2017

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World

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

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

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times

by Lionel Barber  · 5 Nov 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain

by Robert Verkaik  · 14 Apr 2018  · 419pp  · 119,476 words

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

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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

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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

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minister, said: ‘There’s a dangerous myth abroad in some right-wing circles that Putin has been a bit hard done by. That other Etonian Boris Johnson seems to think we should press the reset button with Russia. But let’s not forget the Russian state had one man killed on British

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O-levels before achieving three As at A-level, in History, History of Art and Economics with Politics. Unlike his brother Alex and older pupil Boris Johnson, he was not invited into the Pop society, who were worshipped by the junior boys and wore a very distinctive uniform of black tailcoat with

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windows in Peckwater Quad of Christ Church, along with the blinds and doors of the building. This was repeated in 1927. In 1987 Cameron and Boris Johnson were part of a group of ‘Bullers’ who broke off their dinner in an Oxford restaurant to throw a pot through one of its windows

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to run Google’s communications unit. But it was Cameron’s Eton friend Ed Llewellyn, two years above him and in the same year as Boris Johnson, whom the future prime minister relied on as his closest confidant and subsequently made his chief of staff. Osborne also opted for an OE as

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from Cameron’s executive decision-making club, which she described as an ‘Etonian clique’. There were plenty of promoted OEs to support Ghosh’s claim. Boris Johnson’s brother Jo Johnson was appointed head of Cameron’s Downing Street Policy Unit, while Oliver Letwin was put in charge of developing cabinet policy

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it was to alter the course of British history. Its most immediate impact was to make Cameron vulnerable to a leadership challenge from an emboldened Boris Johnson. It kick-started a fourteen-month Tory leadership race which turned the Referendum campaign into a beauty contest to choose his successor. Cameron had gambled

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-on intended or believed they were doing. Nevertheless, this was the widely held perception, one which was predicated on some uncomfortable truths. In late 2015, Boris Johnson, then London mayor, drew up proposals that would have helped the city’s black-cab drivers fight back against the growing number of private-hire

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the soul of Conservatism, and for four months the British people were treated to the most dishonest campaign in British electoral history. At the start, Boris Johnson wrote an article comparing the EU to the Nazis while David Cameron claimed that leaving the EU would lead to war. Looking back, the Financial

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of bashing Europe. Figures like Nigel Farage have made it their lifelong mission to extricate Britain from the EU, while more opportunistic star-seekers, like Boris Johnson, and even David Cameron once upon a time, demonised Brussels in order to advance their own standing within the Tory Party. In the absence of

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putting a boy’s name down for one of the school houses as soon as he was born.5 The names of David Cameron and Boris Johnson were added to the Eton list in this way. Today competition for places means admissions are not so straightforward. All entrants must pass a bespoke

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about the harm boarding schools does to children.13 He was the victim of sexual abuse at Ashdown House prep school, whose former pupils include Boris Johnson. But although he has vowed not to make the same mistakes with his own children, he does not disavow private education, only boarding schools. All

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of inaction may no longer be an option. 17 THE ENTITLEMENT COMPLEX Is there such a thing as a public school personality which encapsulates both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn? Or one which links Philip Green to Richard Branson? What about Nigel Farage and Tony Benn? On the face of it these

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calls the condition the ‘entitlement illusion’. Duffell argues that public schoolboys making their way in the real world are already damaged. He describes David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Andrew Mitchell, Oliver Letwin all as boarding school survivors.1 ‘Paradoxically, they then struggle to properly mature, since the child who was not

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of an all-male environment the public schoolboy can end up regarding women as trophies or exploiting them to achieve their greater goals. In 1988 Boris Johnson wrote a guide for aspiring Oxford University politicians in which he explained the best way to utilise female students. In The Oxford Myth, edited by

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unconscious entitlement that explains why ex-boarder leaders are brittle and defensive while still projecting confidence.’ Duffell says this is very noticeable in someone like Boris Johnson who is so supremely confident that he ‘needs neither surname nor adult haircut’ and who uses his ‘buffoonery to distract the public from what the

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only out of step with a modern democracy but, in the wrong hands, it can also damage the national interest. Such was the case when Boris Johnson, now foreign secretary, arrived on a diplomatic mission to Myanmar. He recited the opening verse to Kipling’s colonial poem ‘The Road to Mandalay’ while

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that these ‘public schools remain extraordinarily powerful, and any decline in their power has stalled completely over the past sixteen years’.8 * In 1990, when Boris Johnson’s Etonian friend Darius Guppy took a dislike to a reporter from the News of the World who had been investigating his business dealings he

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, among its members are the disgraced former MP Brooks Newmark (also a member of White’s; Bedford School) and the Tory minister Rory Stewart (Eton). Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley Johnson (Sherborne), was a member and blocked Michael Gove from joining after Gove stabbed his son in the back during the Tory

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high as their luck, their ability and their sheer hard graft can actually take them. And it isn’t going to happen magically.’19 Even Boris Johnson, when he was London mayor, concluded in 2013 that one way of reversing the decline in social mobility was to open up public schools by

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Trust and the great-nephew of Conservative MP Dennis Boles. Boles was a scholar at Winchester before studying PPE at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 2008 Boris Johnson made him his chief of staff when he became London mayor. Others now part of Cameron’s tightknit group were George Bridges (Eton) and Kate

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George Young (chief whip), also Oliver Letwin, Henry Bellingham (under secretary of state at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office until 5 September 2012), Jo Johnson, Boris Johnson, Rupert Harrison, Jesse Norman and Zac Goldsmith, whose billionaire father James did so much to sow the seeds for Brexit. All were Old Etonians. 43

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11 http://bigthink.com/experts-corner/decisions-are-emotional-not-logical-the-neuroscience-behind-decision-making 12 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/30/boris-johnson-caught-on-camera-reciting-kipling-in-myanmar-temple 13 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3668972/If-charlatan-sexual-adventurer-Prime-Minister-d-emigrated

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21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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Greater: Britain After the Storm

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Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader

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QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

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Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now

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Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again

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