Boris johnson

As much as conference planners would wish it otherwise, one of the biggest stories from the Tory conference will be Boris Johnson’s speech and fringe appearance. It would be a surprise if he didn’t take at least one opportunity while in Birmingham to flag up his ongoing campaign against a government U-turn on Heathrow expansion, even if it were an apparently spontaneous answer to a question from a member of the fringe audience. As I reported last week, he has been looking for a Conservative MP to lead that campaign, and the Standard’s Peter Dominiczak then revealed that the Mayor has also approached MPs from other parties. Today the Mayor

If Boris Johnson was leader of the Conservative Party, would his presence reverse the party’s declining fortunes? This is the million dollar question on the mind of many Tories after the Mayor’s summer of success. YouGov have attempted to provide an answer by putting two scenarios to the public for the next general election — one with David Cameron leading the Conservatives and the other with Boris. In a theoretical election with Boris as leader, more people stated they would vote Conservative, significantly reducing Labour’s lead, which is at seven points under a Cameron-led election. However, the increased voting share would not be enough to take the Tories back into

Boris Johnson has already denied that the work he is carrying out on airport capacity in London is a rival commission to the one set up by the Government and led by Sir Howard Davies. ‘I was a bit flummoxed by that,’ he told LBC this morning. ‘What we’re doing is we are going ahead with our contribution to the Howard Davies commission.’ It doesn’t actually matter whether the Mayor is holding an inquiry called the Johnson Inquiry Into Airports, with its own logo and press launch, or whether he’s actually just calling experts together to develop a detailed submission to the Davies Commission as he suggests he is. The

The stock Cameroon line on Boris has always been that he might be a rival to George Osborne, Michael Gove, Phillip Hammond, Grant Shapps and other future leadership contenders, but he isn’t one to David Cameron. This line, though, is becoming rather tenuous. For it is becoming clear that the London Mayor isn’t thinking about a Tory leadership election as some far-off, distant event. Certainly, the assiduousness with which he and those around him are reaching out to those left feeling bruised by Cameron’s reshuffle suggests a desire to build a support base for a rather more imminent contest. There have been attempts today to laugh off Zac Goldsmith’s offer

Has David Cameron’s reshuffle been a move to the right, a rearrangement of chairs on a sinking ship or will it make no difference at all? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Fraser Nelson provides his take on what the reshuffle says about the future direction of Cameron’s premiership: ‘I think we’ve seen David Cameron stamp his authority on the government. This is a very unusual government, because it’s very close at the top and very loose at the bottom. You did have a situation where the coalition had started to become more warring groups than joint partners. David Cameron has sent in strategically placed shock troops to try to

As James remarked earlier, the Cameron vs Boris subtext of the row over expanding Heathrow is going to run and run. Boris managed to fulfil that prediction almost immediately by announcing on the World at One that he will lead a campaign against a third runway. ‘You bet, you bet I will, yes,’ he said. As well as using a new Borisism, ‘fudgerama’, to describe the way the Prime Minister was handling the issue, Boris did not rule out the possibility that he might resign to trigger a by-election if the government U-turned. Shaun Ley asked: ‘If the opportunity arose, would you be prepared to fight a parliamentary by-election on

Reshuffles always leave a pile of bruised, vulnerable ex-ministers waiting for someone to come along, pick them up and make them feel loved again. This year, that person is Boris Johnson, who can make good use of those leaving the government as allies within Parliament. This is why he popped up so quickly today to attack the decision to move Justine Greening. He said: ‘There can be only one reason to move her – and that is to expand Heathrow Airport. It is simply mad to build a new runway in the middle of west London. Nearly a third of the victims of aircraft noise in the whole of Europe

Alex Salmond has gone rather quiet this summer. Before Britain’s season of fun, the SNP leader appeared unstoppable in his quest for Scottish independence, but the Diamond Jubilee and Olympics have halted Salmond’s momentum. The Mayor of London crystallised this feeling yesterday during one of his #askboris sessions on Twitter: ‘The Scots are never going to vote for independence…these games have done for Salmond…vote Hoy’ The SNP retaliated today, with Kenneth Gibson MSP lambasting one ‘Boris Johnston’: Commenting on Boris Johnston’s claims that the Olympics will have an effect on how Scotland votes at the referendum for independence, SNP MSP Kenneth Gibson, said: “The more Boris speaks out against independence, the better it

Julian Assange is one of my best enemies.  For my part it was hatred at first sight.  He was only slightly slower on the uptake.  Our relationship was consummated last year when we debated in London, and he fluttered those strange dead eyes at me, and threatened to sue me, and then didn’t, and I wrote about it afterwards and revealed to the world (or Spectator diary readers at least) that his backstage chat is like aural rohypnol. Anyhow – in recent months I have not had the time to keep my hatred active.  Partly because Julian has now even discredited himself with the left.  Indeed, even the poor man

Last week Boris Johnson was in jellyfish mode, drifting along and delivering the occasional sly sting to the coalition. Now that the Olympics are over, the Mayor has launched something of a shark attack on his Westminster colleagues. In an interview with the Evening Standard, Boris accuses ministers of ‘pussyfooting’ and calls for the government to ‘make a very powerful statement of ambition for London’ involving new infrastructure and even a new airport: ‘The government needs to stop pussyfooting around. I don’t think you can rely on Heathrow. Even if the government was so mad and wrong to try to do the third runway or mixed-mode, those solutions would rapidly

Boris Johnson has just reminded us how potent he can be at undermining the government right here, right now. At a press conference today on the Olympic legacy, the Mayor of London said: ‘The government totally understands people’s appetite for this: they can see the benefits of sport and what it does for young people. They understand very, very clearly the social and economic advantages. I would like to see, frankly, the kind of regime I used to enjoy – compulsory two hours’ sport every day.’ And there we have it. Boris deploys his old trick of appearing to flatter the government while also managing to brief against it. It

Boris Johnson is the Spectator’s diarist this week, and as you’d expect, his piece in tomorrow’s magazine is full of wonderful Borisisms including cyclists who ‘wave their bottoms at each other like courting pigeons’ and ‘luscious gold doubloon’. But the Mayor of London also launches an attack on America and the way ‘some New York regulator’ has set upon Standard Chartered. He writes: I mean, what is all this stuff about Standard Chartered? This British bank has generally enjoyed a high reputation for probity (as these places go) until yesterday, when some New York regulator apparently denounced Standard as a ‘rogue institution’. Well, if people have broken the law of

What really excites Tory donors and MPs about Boris isn’t the antics on a zip wire but his ability to make Conservative arguments in an appealing and commonsensical way. The latter is the quality that Boris himself values most in politicians: it was the reason he gave for backing Ken Clarke for the leadership in 2001 despite their differences on Europe. On the Today programme this morning, Boris managed to make Conservative political hay out of the Olympics without sounding like a crass partisan. In a jolly manner, he argued that the Olympics were profoundly Conservative in that you saw that competition drives up standards and that there’s a ‘direct