Boris johnson

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Carrie Symonds and the First Girlfriend problem

One of the least attractive aspects of American politics is epitomised in the ‘Office of the First Lady’. The office in the East Wing of the White House has grown under consecutive presidents and, depending on the incumbent’s ambitions, can include policy and legislative initiatives. All emanate from a person solely in place because some years earlier they were lucky enough — or otherwise — to marry a person who became president. It all makes America less like a democracy, more like a court, with the inevitable overspill of ‘First Children’ and more. By convention this country has been spared that problem.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Boris Johnson’s Krakatoa moment

He blew his stack. His mop almost came loose from his scalp. He wasn’t just jabbing his forefinger and tossing his arms around, he was throwing combinations and swinging at punch-bags. He almost did the Ali shuffle. At PMQs Boris delivered an amazingly combative performance. Last week he smouldered like Etna. This week the summit exploded. This was Krakatoa. Sir Keir arrived, with his starched quiff and his icy smirk, hoping to undo the Prime Minister by stealth. He raised the notorious October quote when Boris is alleged to have said that ‘bodies piled high’ would be preferable to a renewed lockdown. Did he say that? ‘No,’ Boris replied. ‘Lockdowns are miserable, appalling things to have to do.

Isabel Hardman

Boris was rattled at PMQs

Boris Johnson did not have a good Prime Minister's Questions. It was never going to be a comfortable session, given the multiple rows about the funding of the Downing Street flat revamp and his reported comments about letting bodies 'pile up'. But the way the Prime Minister approached it ensured both that the story will keep running and that he betrayed quite how annoyed he is by it. It is little use trying, as Johnson repeatedly did, to argue that the British people are not interested in the line of questioning that Sir Keir Starmer was pursuing. For one thing, there is nothing like a politician claiming that something is 'boring' or a 'non-story' to make the media want to cover it all the more.

Katy Balls

Electoral Commission launches probe into Boris’s flat refurbishment

The row over the refurbishment of Boris Johnson's Downing Street flat has stepped up a gear this morning after the Electoral Commission launched a formal investigation. Following initial enquiries to determine who originally paid £58,000 towards the cost of the lavish refurbishment of the Prime Minister and his fiancée Carrie Symonds's flat, the commission has concluded there are 'reasonable grounds to suspect that an offence or offences may have occurred'. As a result, a formal investigation is now underway to establish whether this is the case. So what are they looking for?

Steerpike

Cameroons clash over Downing Street ‘skip’

As Flatgate rumbles on, it appears the government has adopted a new communications approach to a controversy involving the Prime Minister's spouse: send for Michael Gove's wife. The Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine popped up on Radio 4's Today programme this morning to firefight the situation – an interesting choice given her love of incendiary quotes in her weekly columns. Presenter Nick Robinson asked Vine what she made of the row over whether £58,000 of Tory party money was spent on renovating part of No. 10 to which the latter responded with gusto: The thing about the whole No 10. refurbishment thing is that the Prime Minister can't be expected to live in a skip.

Tuesday

Stephen Daisley

Why the Cummings row won’t harm Boris

It's hard not to agree with those who believe that Boris Johnson, forced into the second Covid-19 lockdown, did say the words: ‘No more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands.’  The allegation seems particularly convincing because it was reported in the Daily Mail, whose political team is one of the most plugged in to goings-on at the top of government, the civil service and the Conservative party. Westminster, the media, the infinite outrage-generator that is Twitter — all have been going into overdrive about the Prime Minister’s remarks I am convinced, too, because it sounds all too plausible.

Andrew Willshire

Joe Biden’s skewed climate change priorities

It's not hard to see why politicians like Joe Biden and Boris Johnson want to talk about climate change.  First of all, it looks good to the electorate. Caring about the planet (or at least being seen to care about the planet) is one of the things that marks you out as 'a good person'. It also allows leaders to compare themselves to other leaders and take pride in being more hardline than others. It tends to result in massive government-sponsored infrastructure programmes, requiring the Prime Minister and various cabinet ministers to keep their hi-vis jackets and hard hats within easy reach. Most importantly of all, the results won’t be seen until well after their term of office has finished.

Francis Elliott

Can Boris finally ‘fix’ social care?

It's been almost a year since Boris Johnson said he would not wait to 'fix the problem of social care that every government has flunked for the last 30 years'. With a green paper detailing the government's plan finally due, we'll soon learn whether the Prime Minister is as good as his word. We'll also see whether Johnson succeeds in avoiding the pitfalls encountered by his predecessors. Might he tumble into the same trap that blew up Theresa May's bungled snap election? The wrecks of those previous attempts – sent out with such high hopes – are plentiful. Talking to the politicians in charge of those efforts from three different parties and five administrations for Engage Britain common themes emerge.

Monday

Alex Massie

Does anyone doubt Boris’s leaked ‘bodies’ comment?

Of course Boris Johnson raged, King Lear-like, that he was prepared to 'let the bodies pile high in their thousands' if the alternative was subjecting the country to a third lockdown more dispiriting than either of its dreary, even grim, predecessors. I say ‘of course he said it’ not just because at least three different sources have confirmed to at least three different reporters that the Prime Minister did say it but also, and significantly, because it would be so wholly in character for the Prime Minister to have said it. If it sounds like the sort of thing he would say, that is largely because it is the sort of thing he would say. Nor have his denials been convincing.

Robert Peston

Revealed: How Boris paid for the Downing Street refurbishment

I understand that CCHQ (Conservative Campaign Headquarters) made a payment to the Cabinet Office to cover the initial costs of refurbishing the Prime Minister’s home in Downing Street, and the PM is now repaying CCHQ.  There is an audit trail and Cabinet Secretary Simon Case knows about it. This is presumably why he told MPs today that he would do a report on the propriety of how the decoration and furnishing was funded. Downing Street says to me that the PM has now paid for the costs of the refurbishment. But there was a loan to him from the Tory party. And I assume that loan will now have to be declared by him.  Readers can decide whether it was appropriate for his party to give him this kind of financial help.

Isabel Hardman

Gove’s ‘bodies pile high’ non-denial

This afternoon's urgent question on allegations of Tory sleaze could have been a rather explosive affair. Instead, it was used by members of all parties to produce a series of rather rubbish slogans for the local and devolved assembly elections next month. The Conservatives wanted to deflect attention from their problems by complaining about a series of things: that the other parties were bad too, that voters didn't care about this stuff anyway, and that the government was being criticised for trying too hard in the pandemic. Labour and the SNP wanted to nail the Tories and produce similar clips for their campaigns, and the Lib Dems had a number of targets, including the SNP.

Nick Tyrone

The Remainer dilemma of Boris vs Dom

There is something deeply dissatisfying about the latest No. 10 psychodrama. Given this is a crisis that could end Boris Johnson’s political career, it should feel like more of a pivotal moment than it does. Part of the problem is that if you’re a Remainer or a Labour supporter, whose side of the story do you trust here? Do you believe Boris Johnson, the man who fronted the Leave campaign and whose support probably swung the referendum? Or do you believe Dominic Cummings, the evil genius who supposedly manipulated the masses via technical trickery to vote to leave the EU? Of course, ‘neither’ is an option, but not one that seems to be getting a lot of pick up in Remain-land or Labour circles.

Robert Peston

The truth about Boris’s ‘bodies pile high in their thousands’ comment

There is an incredible amount of hysteria and noise being generated by the conflict between Boris Johnson and his former chief aide, Dominic Cummings. So maybe it is useful for me to share what I know about three big claims: 1) The charge that Prime Minister did say he would rather see 'bodies pile high in their thousands' than order a third lockdown (as reported in the Daily Mail); 2) The cabinet secretary Simon Case still believes Cummings may be the 'Chatty Rat' who leaked details about November's lockdown; 3) the refurbishment of the Prime Minister's flat was originally to be funded by Tory party donors, even though on Friday the Prime Minister said he had been paying for it.

Saturday

Kate Andrews

Boris’s vaccine propaganda film jumps the gun

Westminster’s much anticipated summer blockbuster dropped last night: ‘A Beacon of Hope: The UK Vaccine Story’ was released on 10 Downing Street’s Twitter and YouTube accounts just after 6pm. The video was teased on Twitter on 10 March, featuring a dramatic score and a tagline ‘coming soon’, raising questions as to how ‘soon’ it would appear, what its contents might be, and whether releasing a victory video in the middle of the UK’s vaccine rollout was slightly premature. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiCq-SkiYAY Now we have some of those answers.

Patrick O’Flynn

Can Cummings really hurt Teflon Boris?

Seldom have so many keyboard warriors and political activists professed so much dissatisfaction towards the government of the day. For some left-wing bloggers and tweeters, the number one cause of outrage of the moment is so-called 'Tory sleaze', a subject to be added to an already formidably long list of gripes towards Boris Johnson that includes Brexit, the claim that Britain is not very racist and his alleged unforgivable bungling of the Covid crisis. On the right, there is now, if anything, an even wider array of issues igniting fury towards the Prime Minister.

Friday

Robert Peston

Cummings’s attack spells big trouble for Boris

When No. 10 briefed newspapers on Thursday that Dominic Cummings was the source of leaks of the Prime Minister's text conversations with Sir James Dyson and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and pointed to Cummings as the 'chatty rat' who leaked news of the November lockdown, I said this looked like an exercise in mutually assured destruction. And so it has turned out. The PM's former chief aide — who was closer to Boris Johnson than anyone till he was forced out at the end of last year — has issued a statement that explicitly brands Johnson as 'unethical' and implicitly calls him a liar.

Isabel Hardman

Boris hits back in his war of words with Cummings

Downing Street has hit back in its war with Dominic Cummings, after the former aide published an explosive blog post about leaks and ‘possibly illegal’ plans to renovate the Prime Minister’s flat using donations. A No. 10 spokesperson this evening said: ‘This government is entirely focused on fighting coronavirus, delivering vaccines and building back better.’ And then on the allegations Cummings made about the renovation of the flat: The kindest interpretation is that this is the Prime Minister’s preferred way of working ‘At all times, the Government and Ministers have acted in accordance with the appropriate codes of conduct and electoral law.

Katy Balls

Why is No. 10 turning on Dominic Cummings over ‘leaks’?

After yet another week of government leaks of private correspondence sent by the Prime Minister, Downing Street has hit back. But it's not to deny the contents of any of the messages – which range from WhatsApps with Saudi Arabia's crown prince over football to discussions with UK entrepreneur James Dyson about ventilators – it's to blame Dominic Cummings for the messages being made public in the first place. Late last night multiple papers (though notably not the Boris-sceptic Daily Mail) published briefings by a Downing Street source that Johnson's former senior aide was likely behind the stories.

Thursday

Katy Balls

Can Boris Johnson’s green makeover woo red wall voters?

COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference due to be held in Glasgow, isn't until November, but work is already underway in Downing Street to put the government's green agenda front and centre. After confirming earlier this week that the government will seek to cut carbon emissions by 78 per cent by 2035, Boris Johnson has this afternoon spoken at Joe Biden's Leader's Summit on Climate.  The Prime Minister praised the US president's commitment to cut greenhouse gases by 50 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030 as a 'game changing announcement'. He also said it is 'vital for all of us to show that this is not all about some expensive politically correct, green act of bunny hugging'.

Mihir Bose

Boris’s football socialism

It was once my job to brief Boris on football. Then he was very much a free marketeer, now it is amazing to see that he wants to play the socialist sports lord, a task that defeated Tony Blair. The briefing took place on a Sunday afternoon in September 1998 when news emerged that Manchester United’s directors were planning to sell the club to Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB. Boris had decided to devote his column to it. His problem was he did not know anything about the deal, or for that matter much about English football, and as the chief sports news correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, he rang me to be sure of his facts. He was intrigued as to why the Manchester United fans were so hostile to the bid. Would it not, he asked me, bring in a lot of money for the club?