Boris johnson

Stephen Bush of the New Statesman asked a good question the other day. Why do people who hate what Boris Johnson and Liam Fox are doing to Britain go easy on David Davis? He’s right to be perplexed. It turns out all those trade deals the leave campaign promised can’t be done for years. Liam Fox has nothing to do except be a public nuisance, which now I come to think of it is the only post he’s qualified to fill. Johnson meanwhile is an embarrassment, even to an administration which seems beyond shame, and Theresa May does her best to keep him locked in an FCO cellar. Davis, on the other hand, is Britain’s chief negotiator, and as such is the most important politician in the country today. Yet he receives little of the abuse directed at his colleagues.

During the snap election, Boris Johnson was given reason to blush when his sister Rachel came out for the Liberal Democrats. Despite having always voted Conservative previously, the Mail on Sunday columnist said the party's Brexit stance had meant she had no choice but to defect. Since then, Johnson has written in The Spectator of the need for a new centrist party – ideally headed up by Gary Lineker, the people's snowflake. However, is Johnson actually considering another political defection? Mr S only asks after his mole reports a curious exchange between Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn at last night's GQ Men of the Year awards. At the champagne-fuelled bash at the Tate Modern, Johnson made a b-line for Corbyn – who was there to present an award to Stormzy, the grime artist.

Since Labour's surprise victory in the People's Republic of Kensington, new MP Emma Dent Coad has been quick to make her mark on Parliament. As well as saying her predecessors are not 'hard acts to follow' and calling for the monarchy (many of whom are her constituents) to be abolished, Dent Coad made the news after she said Sir Martin Moore-Bick should be replaced as head of the Grenfell Tower inquiry because he does not ‘understand human beings’. So, Mr S was curious to tune into Dent Coad's appearance on today's Pienaar's Politics where the backbencher was asked whether she has ever done anything illegal.

Boris Johnson is inspecting the guard of honour and we are doing our best not to giggle. The Foreign Secretary is walking down a line of soldiers from the Libyan National Army. The red carpets are blowing over in the breeze. One of the senior officers looks uncannily like Colonel Gaddafi. And the band is playing the worst version of the national anthem I have ever heard. Yet Mr Johnson manages to control his features. Just. For this is the headquarters of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, whose forces control large swaths of eastern Libya. A thought strikes me. Mr Johnson’s critics accuse him of upsetting allies, lacking foreign policy vision and speaking with forked tongue over Brexit.

Some of his friends will tell you that beneath all the bluster and fluster, beneath the posture and the persona, Boris Johnson is actually quite like the rest of us. He has doubts and fears, good days and bad days, times when he's up and times when he's down. 'Boris' in a sense, is a construct, a costume worn by a man whose given name is actually Alexander and is sometimes known as Al. Whatever his name, Boris or Al could be forgiven for feeling a bit down these days. Not too long ago, reaching his life's ambition of the premiership seemed a realistic possibility.

I can’t work up much indignation at the collapse of London’s Garden Bridge project, which has been strangled by the refusal of mayor Sadiq Khan to guarantee its continuing operational and maintenance costs — assuming its trustees, led by former banker and minister Lord Davies of Abersoch, would have succeeded in raising the £150 million of private capital required to build the bridge and plant its 270 trees in the first place. Promoted by Joanna Lumley and Sadiq’s predecessor Boris Johnson, this was a beautiful but whimsical idea, placed in an overcrowded stretch of the Thames and based on a ramshackle business plan.

The furore surrounding the Brexit divorce bill is hotting up. The weekend’s papers saw speculation that Britain would cough up £36bn as part of a settlement package for its departure from the EU. Nonsense, says Downing Street, with the Prime Minister’s spokesman saying this morning: ‘I don’t recognise the figure’. It’s not only the government hitting back; Tory eurosceptics are also turning up the volume. Yet while the government is eager to talk down the size of the bill, the criticism coming from the backbenches is less nuanced. Instead of quibbling over the amount, the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and John Redwood dismiss the bill out of hand. Rees-Mogg wrote on Twitter: ‘There is no logic to this figure. Legally we owe nothing’.

The great physicist Richard Feynman warned of the perpetual torment that lies in wait for people who try to understand quantum mechanics. Modern physics cannot be understood. It can only be observed. ‘I am going to tell you what nature behaves like,’ Feynman said. ‘Do not keep saying to yourself, "but how can it be like that?" because you will get down the drain, into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.’ Equally, nobody knows how the Conservative Party can be like that. It just is. Theresa May, to pick an example. Every morning I wake up and check if she is still prime minister. Every morning the answer comes back, ‘apparently so’.

On this week’s episode, we look at the runners and riders in the Tory leadership race, the latest development in the Trump/Russia brouhaha, and the British(ish) woman who might be about to win Wimbledon. Speculation has abounded in Westminster about the next Conservative leader, ever since Theresa May’s disastrous election showing last month. As her potential successors start to put feelers out, we are already seeing an attempt to block the route of a certain flaxen-haired former editor of this magazine. The ‘Stop Boris’ campaign is in full swing, says James Forsyth in the magazine this week, and he joins the podcast along with Harry Mount to discuss an increasingly bitter contest.

The Brexit divorce bill isn’t on the table yet but it’s already provoking plenty of debate - and quite a bit of anger. Figures bandied about have ranged from the tens of billions upwards, with some speculation the final demand could be as much as 100bn euros. Ministers have done their best to avoid being drawn on a figure which wouldn't be acceptable, with David Davis coming closest by saying Britain will not pay 100bn. Now, Boris Johnson has waded in. The Foreign Secretary told the House of Commons that: "I think that the sums that I have seen ... seem to me to be extortionate and I think go whistle is an entirely appropriate expression." What seems clear from Boris’s remarks is that there is no chance of the government agreeing to a 12-figure bill (i.e.

Although attributed to Milton Friedman, the assertion that 'there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch' had been around long before he took it for the title of an economics book in 1975. It has been used since by many who have never given monetarism a second’s thought. Physicists say the universe is a closed system. No magic source can give it free energy or indeed calories. Mathematicians and computer technicians are as adamant that something cannot come from nothing. Everyone agrees the lunch bill must be paid. Everyone, that is, except British politicians and the voters who endorse them in their millions.

To say that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove's relationship is a complex one would be an understatement. The Vote Leave comrades fell out spectacularly when the former education secretary turned on BoJo during the last Tory leadership campaign – opting to launch his own (doomed) bid for No 10 at the expense of his so-called friend's. But there is good news at last for fans of the Boris/Gove psycho drama: it looks like the band are back together. With Gove back in the Cabinet as Defra Secretary, his written statement today reveals that it's Johnson who he is trusting with withdrawing the UK from the London Fisheries Convention.