Boris johnson

Boris Johnson’s campaign to woo Tory MPs is continuing as the General Election approaches. I hear that he held another one of his suppers for colleagues at his home in the last fortnight, and that the MPs who did attend were seriously impressed. One says: ‘It was a really uplifting experience. I feel very conflicted between him and Theresa [May] as potential leaders.’ Another described the evening as ‘great fun, relaxed. He arrived with a rucksack clanking with booze and we had a takeaway curry and shot the breeze. No heavy canvassing.’ Number 10 is allowing these dinners, which involve a mix of MPs loyal to Cameron and rebels, to

While Boris Johnson may be pleased to learn that Ed Sheeran has been mistaken for him, the 23-year-old singer was dismayed when a member of the public mistook him for the 50-year-old Mayor of London. Someone just mistook me for Boris Johnson and I wish I was joking — Ed Sheeran (@edsheeran) January 26, 2015 Sheeran hasn’t always been so unhappy to be associated with a Conservative politician. He previously dedicated a song to the Prime Minister. ‘I was playing this gig at some guy’s house and it was a very, very intimate environment, and they stopped the gig and I only had one song left,’ Sheeran recalled. ‘He was like ‘I’m so

Something funny is happening in this country. Our comedians are becoming politicians and our politicians are becoming comedians — and public life is turning into an endless stream of jokes. Last week, the comedian Al Murray announced that he would be standing at the next general election in the constituency of South Thanet, the same seat that Nigel Farage is contesting. Al Murray performs in the persona of ‘The Pub Landlord’. A sexist reactionary, never pictured without a beer in his hand, forever declaiming ‘common-sense’ solutions to Britain’s problems, Nigel Farage has welcomed the additional competition. Murray has refused to say what, if any, serious intentions lie behind his announcement

Who are the latest contenders in the Tory leadership battle and how much support do they have? That’s the question that Tory MPs and pundits love to chew over, even though there is no contest. The latest fixation is whether George Osborne has rowed behind the Boris campaign. James looked at this yesterday, revealing that Boris might quite fancy taking over from David Cameron after an EU referendum in 2017. Of course, the funny thing is that there isn’t a leadership contest because David Cameron is currently secure as Prime Minister. And as I explain in today’s Evening Standard, he could be secure for a while longer – where Tory

For most of this parliament, Downing Street has been thoroughly paranoid about Boris Johnson and his intentions. Any attempt by the Mayor to reach out to Tory MPs was met with deep suspicion. But now, the Tory leadership is actively pushing Boris to see Tory MPs — he was even invited to join the Whips for a Whips Supper at Boisdale last week. This is all evidence of the unspoken deal between Boris and the Tory leadership. He will be loyal and campaign hard for Cameron. In exchange, it will allow him to cultivate Tory MPs; helping him to rectify his biggest weakness ahead of any Tory leadership contest. These

Has the Mayor of London fallen on tough times? Mr S only asks after this photo landed in his inbox. On further investigation it transpires that Boris Johnson and Evening Standard owner Evgeny Lebedev had a sleepover on the streets of London on Friday night as part of the paper’s pledge to support charities ABF The Soldiers’ Charity and Veterans Aid.

On 19 June 1815, after the battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington declared that ‘nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won’. Two hundred years later, David Cameron or Ed Miliband might feel the same way as they sit in Downing Street. Any elation over victory will be quickly overshadowed by the thought of troubles to come — in all likelihood insurmountable troubles for either man. Everyone has known for years when this election will take place, with the result that the campaign starting gun has been fired even earlier than usual. Cameron is busy prophesying economic chaos if Labour wins; Miliband is

We’ve just had two years of intensive constitutional politics. Time enough, you’d think, for even London-based politicians and commentators to work out how British politics actually works. But if you think that you’d be wrong. Very wrong. Consider our old friend the Barnett Formula. Antiquated and not entirely fit for purpose – it being a 1970s convenience that was itself an updated version of the 1880s Goschen Formula – but hardly a mystery or a terribly complicated piece of financial wizardry. And yet it seems that almost no-one in the Westminster village actually understands how Barnett works. Yesterday, you see, Jim Murphy promised that he would use Scotland’s share of

Coming in from the pouring rain, I make my way to the office on the eighth floor of City Hall. With its curving windows, many books and bust of Pericles tucked away in a corner, it reminds me both of a classroom and the cockpit of a spacecraft. Its occupant is waiting for me, looking a little crumpled but less dishevelled than I had expected. He greets me very pleasantly but this is what I’m thinking. Here is the most famous person I have ever interviewed. In his own way, he is almost as iconic as the Queen or Churchill, the nodding dog in those insurance commercials. He is Boris,

Boris Johnson is about the only politician in Britain to stand up for the rich, pointing out that while they may be annoying, they tend to create jobs and prosperity and having plenty of that is no bad thing. The Mayor was interviewed for the latest Freakonomics podcast, boasting that: “London is attracting huge amounts of international investment… London is to billionaires what the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan. It is their natural habitat.”   Here it is the podcast – Boris is at the start:- “I’m sure you like your poor people too,” replied the presenter – which is an odd question. Does welcoming wealth imply being sniffy

‘Apologies everyone and especially to our Leader’ tweets Rachel Johnson after a very rude word appeared on her Twitter feed about the Prime Minister: Apparently the columnist and famous sibling was ‘hacked’. Mr S knows how these things are: you go out of the room for five minutes and bam! your naughty sibling has seized your computer and written all sorts of cuss words under your name about some chap he doesn’t like…

When in doubt, blame wealthy foreigners for any political problems. That goes for pols in the US and the UK alike, and even the dual-national Mayor of London is not immune. Boris Johnson opposes blanket non-dom and mansion taxes, but wants councils to ‘whack up’ local levies on empty homes and advocates closing stamp-duty loopholes exploited by ‘mainly but not exclusively non-doms’.  Through these, he explained in one Telegraph column, and with ‘the agency of some clever lawyers, they avoid a tax that is paid by virtually everyone else’. So it is with great interest – and some sympathy, on the part of yours truly – that we expatriates in London learn of Johnson’s dispute with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Speaking

A sell-out crowd gathered at this evening’s Spectator event: Boris Johnson in discussion with Andrew Neil about his book on Winston Churchill. Here is my summary of BoJo’s main points:- listen to ‘The Churchill Factor with Boris Johnson’ on audioBoom

The Tories may have watched Douglas Carswell’s re-entry into the House of Commons in silence, but he seems to be getting a reasonably warm reception from his old colleagues behind the scenes. He has already exchanged jokes and arranged to dine and drink with a number of them. For a few weeks this will send the whips into a spin, as they try to work out whether it really is just lunch, or a brewing defection. But it wasn’t just Carswell who was nattering with Conservatives this afternoon. Nigel Farage, who watched his first elected MP re-join the Commons from a gallery, has also been talking to some of them.