Boris johnson

Interviewing Boris Johnson is like staring long and hard into an expressionist painting: there are pyrotechnics, the shape of commitments and policies, but it might all be mirage. After I spoke with him on Wednesday for my show, my abiding sense was that he would dearly love a root-and-branch renegotiation of Theresa May’s Brexit deal, but that his famous optimism is not the same as naïveté. He knows replacing the Withdrawal Agreement at this late juncture is a million-to-one chance – and so leaving without a deal may be the only way to meet his deadline of Brexit by 31 October. That is why, for example, he was so gung-ho

Tonight’s Sun debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt was far more relaxed than last week’s head-to-head clash. But it was also stuffed with news lines, as both men prepared for the final few days of voting in the Tory leadership contest. Both declared the Northern Irish backstop dead, Johnson ruled out an election before Brexit happens, and they both attacked Donald Trump for telling black and minority ethnic congresswomen to ‘go back’. On Brexit, the answer that Johnson gave about the backstop showed how likely it is that he might pursue a no-deal Brexit: he rejected a time limit or unilateral exit clause. This makes a confrontation with Conservative

Germany’s Die Welt asked me to tell its readers how on earth someone like Boris Johnson could become prime minister. I gave it my best shot. Whatever else happens to Germany, I cannot imagine a German Boris Johnson coming to power. To assemble such a creature, you would have to create conservative German whose parents bought him the best education money could buy – Johnson went to Eton, one of Britain’s most expensive private schools, and Oxford, an elite university that dominates the upper reaches of English culture with a thoroughness no German university can match. Imagine then that he gets a job on a respected German newspaper through his

Boris Johnson had been refusing to engage with the question of Cabinet appointments and the like until he was through his Andrew Neil interview. But with that done, his focus is now shifting from the campaign to the transition as I say in The Sun this morning. One source explains the move by saying that ‘from next week, decisions have to be taken for the success of a Johnson administration’. I understand that Johnson will settle on who he wants as Chief Whip, Chancellor and Party Chairman before moving on to the other appointments. One long time Johnson confidant tells me that Boris has learnt lessons from what happened to

Boris Johnson just faced by far his toughest interview of the campaign. He was pressed hard on Brexit, Kim Darroch’s resignation, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and his economic policy by Andrew Neil. At the end of the interview, Boris Johnson looked at his watch—I suspect it seemed to him much longer than the half an hour it was. On Brexit, Boris Johnson made his usual case. But his attempt to sound like a details man by citing Gatt 24 Article 5B came rather a cropper when Andrew Neil asked him what was in Article 5C. Boris Johnson had no answer. When Andrew Neil pressed him on whether he would really walk away

Jeremy Hunt managed to sum up the Tory leadership contest very aptly this evening when he accused Boris Johnson of ‘peddling optimism’. The line, delivered in ITV’s leaders’ debate, did the Foreign Secretary no favours, though. He was pitching himself as the truthful realist, who wouldn’t make promises he couldn’t deliver on. Johnson ridiculed this as ‘defeatist’, telling the audience in his summation that Britain needed to get off ‘the hamster wheel of doom’. Had Hunt suggested Johnson was ‘peddling myths’ or ‘peddling nonsense’, then his line would have had better force for his cause. Instead, it underlined why the former Mayor of London is doing so well in the