Boris johnson

A few weeks ago, Boris Johnson made a point about the EU negotiations and the futility of the idea of punishing Britain for the sake of it. ‘If Monsieur Hollande wants to administer punishment beatings to anybody who chooses to escape’, he said, ‘rather in the manner of some World War II movie, then I don’t think that is the way forward, and actually it’s not in the interests of our friends and partners’. Cue howls of outrage. ‘Abhorrent and deeply unhelpful’, said Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s chief Brexit negotiator. But was Boris really so wide of the mark?

Spare a thought for Boris Johnson. Ever since the Brexit vote, the Foreign Secretary has struggled with the often hostile reception he now receives in London from angry remain-ers. Now it seems things have got so bad that he can't even enjoy a quiet night out at the theatre. Thandie Newton -- the Crash actress -- tells the Sunday Times that her teenage daughter, Ripley, spotted Johnson in the audience on a recent trip to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Palace Theatre. Alas Ripley doesn't hold such a high opinion of the Conservative politician and she proceeded to seek him out to alert him to this fact: 'She went over to say: “Hello, Mr Johnson, my name is Ripley Parker and I just wanted to tell you you’re a c---. I hope you enjoy the show.

What on earth does George Osborne know about journalism? How can someone with no journalistic experience go straight in as editor – editor! – of the London Evening Standard? What were its proprietors thinking? To have dinner with an MP is one thing, but to hire him as an editor? And what does this sacked politician know of the demands facing an editor in the digital era? How can he combine such a demanding job with his duties in parliament and towards his constituents in Tatton? If I wasn’t an editor, these might be a few of my reactions to the extraordinary news today. But much as I hate to admit it, this appointment might actually work. I was rather rude about George Osborne throughout his frontbench career, and regarded him as a deeply disappointing Chancellor.

For an exercise in popular sovereignty, which was meant to take decisions away from the hated 'elite', the Brexit referendum has, inevitably,  produced Britain’s greatest outbreak of political lying. Yesterday’s liars look pale and wan in comparison with the latest models. It is as if the long-awaited singularity has occurred. But rather than advances in technology creating a new species of artificial superintelligence , the advance of plebiscitary politics has created a new species of artificial superliar. The liars of the past were often furtive figures. Like the man who has staggered home at 3 a.m. and tried to explain away the beer on his breath and lipstick on his collar, you did not know whether to shout at them or laugh at them for insulting your intelligence.

It is many a Brexiteer’s fantasy: In 2019, shortly after the UK formally leaves the EU, Theresa May welcomes Donald Trump to Downing Street to ink a trade pact. Out with the old, in with the new, and the ‘special relationship’ standing tall. But how likely is that scenario? A trade deal would certainly be politically meaningful for both sides. For Trump, who is facing pressure over his protectionist rhetoric, it would be an opportunity to boost his pro-trade credentials. While Theresa May could use it to show that Britain has trade options beyond the EU. The prospect of a deal with the US could also boost her hand when it comes to bargaining with Brussels over Brexit.

Boris Johnson came to the House of Commons to answer questions on the Trump visa ban with the opposition benches in full outrage mode. The policy is wrong, ill-considered and a blunt instrument. But those in the Chamber who see it as a sign the US is on the road to fascism are getting things out of proportion. As Johnson said you can see it as ‘divisive and wrong’ without resorting to 1930s parallels or wanting to disinvite Trump from his State visit. There were a series of irate questions from the Labour benches. Yvette Cooper demanded that Johnson ‘for the sake of history, for Heaven’s sake have the guts to speak out', Dennis Skinner called Trump a 'fascist' and Mike Gapes labelled Theresa May an ‘appeaser’.

Thanks to the Home Office's crackdown on hate crime, the Home Secretary recently found her conference speech officially recorded as a ‘hate incident’, after an Oxford University physics professor complained to the police that she was ‘picking on foreigners’. However, Mr S can't help but wonder if Amber Rudd will soon be joined by her former colleague David Cameron on the 'hate incident' list. In a speech at Davos, Cameron told the global elite how he tends to spend his days now he is no longer prime minister. The Mail on Sunday reports that Cameron said he had taken up shooting again -- with a specific focus on taking down 'Borises and Michaels': 'I have used the extra time to take up shooting again.

From the start of the European Union referendum campaign, competing visions of Brexit have been advocated. To Nigel Farage, the case for leaving the European Union was all about what we did not like (the diktats, the immigration, etc). This played into the caricature cleverly presented by the Remain campaign: the shaking fist of Little England, a country that had had enough of foreigners and the tolerance that the European project represented. Then came the vision put to Britain by the Vote Leave campaign, articulated by Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. It was of a globally minded Britain, fed up with the EU’s parochialism. A country itching to go out and into the world. Theresa May has now firmly endorsed the Boris Johnson vision.

Although Theresa May used her Brexit speech on Tuesday to emphasise to European leaders that she hoped for a close and mutually beneficial relationship between the UK and the EU, not everyone appears to have got the memo. Today Boris Johnson found himself in hot water after he warned Francois Hollande against trying to 'administer punishment beatings' in the manner of some 'world war two movie'. While Downing Street insist that the Foreign Secretary wasn't comparing the French President to a Nazi, several EU officials have since let their outrage over the WW2 jibe be known. While Labour's Wes Streeting has accused the Foreign Secretary of being crass, Johnson is also facing criticism from his own party. Step forward Sajid Javid.

Boris Johnson returned from the US this week boasting that the UK was now ‘first in line’ for a trade deal with the US. He said that the Trump team and the new Congress ‘want to do it fast’. But as I write in The Sun this morning, the situation is even more advanced than this. I understand that the Trump team is already working on the outlines of a US / UK trade deal. Interestingly, they want the deal to be pencilled in before the UK leaves the EU, though the UK could not formally sign it until it has left the bloc. The US’s keenness for a trade deal with the UK strengthens the case for the UK leaving the customs union. Inside the customs union, Britain is not able to do its own comprehensive trade deals.

'Populism' is a useless word. By definition, anyone who wins an election is more popular than his or her opponents are. According to this logic, John Major and Barack Obama must have once been 'populists', which does not sound right at all. When we use 'populist' today, we should mean something more than popular. The label covers movements of the nationalist right, which claim to speak on behalf of 'the people' against immigrants, cosmopolitans, and multinational institutions. Their most distinctive feature is their contempt for the checks and balances of complicated democracies. From Law and Justice’s Poland to Trump’s America, they attack judges, journalists, opposition politicians and parties as 'enemies of the people' – a 'people,' of course, only they represent.

It's a shame that protocol, being protocol, prevents Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson from meeting President-elect Donald Trump during his trip to Washington. Boris can't even meet Rex Tillerson, the man Trump has chosen as his Secretary of State, until Tillerson is confirmed by the senate. A Trump-Johnson encounter would be a meeting of considerable media and public interest: the Donald and the Boris have become aligned in people's minds ever since the EU referendum, when Nick Clegg and others called Johnson 'Trump with a thesaurus' and so on. It's true that Boris is, in a tabloid sense, a thinking man's Trump. The two men are born New Yorkers. They share an enthusiasm for women (in a dangerous male predator sense), as well as for entertainment and jingoism.

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 4, in which the future foreign secretary Boris Johnson was named as the winner of Douglas Murray's 'President Erdogan Offensive Poetry' competition I’m pleased to announce that we have a winner of The Spectator’s President Erdogan Offensive Poetry competition, and here it is: There was a young fellow from Ankara Who was a terrific wankerer Till he sowed his wild oats With the help of a goat But he didn’t even stop to thankera. The author of this winning entry is former Mayor of London and chief Brexiteer, Boris Johnson MP.

PMQs began with the Labour MP Peter Dowd asking Theresa May if she didn’t wish that she had told Boris Johnson to FO rather than sending him to the FO. To which, May replied that he was a fine Foreign Secretary -- an FFS. At this point, it seemed that the session, the last PMQs before Christmas, might descend into festive silliness. But that didn’t happen. Jeremy Corbyn urged people to buy the Jo Cox charity single, a call May echoed, before moving onto social care. Over the next five questions, Corbyn turned in his best PMQs performance -- admittedly not a particularly high a bar to clear. Corbyn kept pressing May to abandon the corporation tax cut and spend the money on social care instead.

It would be ‘wrong’ to dwell on the subject of Theresa May’s £1,000 leather trousers, says the Times in its editorial this morning. But equally it’s a mistake to pretend those trousers don’t exist when Tory backbenchers think the cost of them brings the PM’s judgement into question, the paper argues. The Times criticises Theresa May’s adviser, Fiona Hill, for the manner in which she hit out at the PM’s trouser critic, Nicky Morgan. The Mail on Sunday revealed yesterday that Hill sent a text to Morgan's colleague, Alistair Burt, saying: ‘Don’t bring that woman to Downing Street again’, after the former education secretary criticised May's sartorial choice. So what does this all tell us?