Boris johnson

The current Westminster consensus that Boris Johnson is the next Tory leader and prime minister raises all sorts of thoughts. Among them is to speculate about the sheer terror this consensus should strike in the man himself, given that Westminster consensus has been wrong about basically everything in the last three years.  For what it’s worth, I also think Johnson is the favourite to replace Theresa May, but I also thought Remain would win the referendum, that May could never be PM, and that she would win her general election with an increased majority. I suspect most of the people now sagely tipping Johnson as a dead cert made similar

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Is that man Boris? And if it is, what still stands in his way? In this week’s cover article, James Forsyth writes that Boris is the only one who can save the Tories from Jeremy Corbyn and, more pressingly, Nigel Farage (he’s backed up by the latest polling from Friday). But the biggest thing standing in his way is himself. In the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, Boris Johnson found himself unorganised, undisciplined, and crushed by public opinion, unable to recover from the vitriol that went his way following the Leave result, and panicked by Michael Gove’s last minute backstabbing. But the 2019 Boris

The worse things are for the Tories, the better for Boris Johnson. If the Tories were ahead in the polls, he’d have little hope of becoming leader. MPs would choose someone more clubbable, less divisive, and more interested in them personally: who didn’t annoy so many of them so much. But Tory MPs are now contemplating an existential crisis. Tory voters are defecting en masse to Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. The Conservative party’s survival may well turn on winning these voters back, and the former foreign secretary — the tribune of Leave, the buccaneering Brexiteer, the darling of the grassroots — is the most obvious person to do that. Suddenly,

With widespread dissatisfaction across the country with the Tory party’s handling of Brexit, a key concern for CCHQ ahead of the local elections last night was turnout, and the risk that their supporters would simply stay at home. So it makes sense that at 8pm yesterday, with only two hours until the polls closed, a full-scale effort was being made to get reluctant voters to head to their polling stations. Joining the effort was Uxbridge and South Ruislip MP and former London Mayor Boris Johnson, who helpfully tweeted out that: ‘I just voted Conservative in the local elections. Make sure you do too! You’ve got two hours left to get

One of the oddities of this parliament has been that, despite everything, the government has remained ahead in the polls up to now. But the political price of failing to pass a deal and leave the EU is now becoming apparent. Labour is ahead, Nigel Farage is back, and the right is split again. In the past month, Tory support among Leave voters has fallen by 20 per cent. In normal circumstances, such numbers would extinguish any hopes of a fourth term for the Tories. But Labour’s own divisions over Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn’s political weaknesses mean that this isn’t necessarily the case. A big argument is taking place within

With Theresa May’s premiership on the ropes, there’s an expectation of a Tory leadership contest later this year. It follows that Conservative heavyweights are currently working their hardest to lay the groundwork for a future campaign. In that vein, the latest register of interests shows that rivals Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab, Amber Rudd and Michael Gove are among the Tories to get recent donations which could prove helpful in the months to come. However, there is one donation that Mr S suspects could come back to haunt its recipient. Boris Johnson has been given a donation of £16,000 by Johan Christofferson. Christofferson is a hedge fund manager with a history

Boris Johnson was given an angry lecture by a minister in the voting lobbies about his comments that money had been ‘spaffed up a wall’ for investigating child sex abuse, I understand. The former Foreign Secretary upset survivors of the crime by using the term during radio interview last week. He told LBC that ‘you, know £60 million I saw was being spaffed up a wall on some investigation into historic child abuse’. On Thursday night, as MPs were voting on the latest round of Brexit amendments, he was confronted in the lobby by Victims’ Minister Victoria Atkins who, according to several MPs present, ‘read him the riot act’. She

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. That was the message of Boris Johnson’s speech this morning at a JCB factory in Staffordshire. He admitted this week that he regretted bottling his leadership bid in 2016. This time is his last chance to have a go at swiping the ultimate prize – the keys to Downing Street – a prize he’s coveted since he was a boy. Boris’s earliest known quotation is when, asked by his sister Rachel as a child what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, “World King.” He’s thinner and more smartly dressed than he’s been for years. That might have been influenced by the

When intelligent, informed and rational people make a choice that onlookers can see confounds their own declared interests, we are wise to look to psychiatry for an explanation. This is where my thoughts turn, now that Tory Brexiteers have conspired to block Theresa May’s road from Chequers to the deal the Commons so spectacularly rejected this week. Until the last minute, I hesitated to accept the Tories’ European Research Group would join this rebellion. Cautiously I inserted ‘probably’, ‘by all accounts’ and ‘apparently’ into every column I drafted. That hardline Brexiteers would in the end want to kill the Prime Minister’s deal didn’t make sense. We Remainers have been unable

On Friday evening, Philip Hammond headed to DUP conference in a bid to win over Arlene Foster’s party after they went on strike over the Irish backstop. With Foster telling the BBC that the DUP’s confidence and supply agreement could be over permanently if Theresa May’s deal is voted through, the future does not look bright when it comes to Tory/DUP relations. But could a new leader change all that? In recent weeks DUP politicians have been keen to stress that their agreement is not with Theresa May specifically – but with the Conservative party as a whole. So, it was an interesting move by Boris Johnson to speak at

‘Away with the cant of “measures not men”! — the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.’ George Canning said this in 1801 and recent events remind us that he was right. In the end the only way to change the policy is to change the person, as the individual determines the direction and is rarely willing to try a different route. As I have known this quotation for decades, it was naïve of me to expect the Prime Minister to

After Jo Johnson resigned on Friday over the government’s Brexit position, his brother Boris was quick to take to social media to commend Jo for taking a brave stand – by calling out the flaws with the proposed Brexit deal. However, the former foreign secretary stopped short of backing his brother’s call for a second referendum – also known as a so-called ‘People’s Vote’. Still, Jo need not worry – there are plenty of other Johnsons willing to fill that void. With Jo and Boris’s sister Rachel a vocal Remain campaigner already, their brother Leo has now joined the fold. Leo Johnson took to Twitter to praise his brother Jo

There are, one must admit, things to be said against Boris Johnson, but his leading critics do not understand that their attacks assist him. On Tuesday in Birmingham, Mrs May tried to upstage his arrival by claiming she had a new policy about post-Brexit immigration. She didn’t. The only person she upstaged was her Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, who should have been left alone to speak about a subject which, both by his job and his background, is his. Boris was boosted by her hostility, and people listened to his wide-ranging speech. His opponents must understand his subversive power instead of being pompous about it. He is clever. A classic

Boris Johnson’s Brexit rally was everything that No 10 had been dreading. Queues for the event began three hours in advance and saw activists block stairways and corridors across the conference hall in a bid to see the former foreign secretary’s moment in the spotlight. Some members in the audience even dressed up for the occasion – with Boris Johnson t-shirts. The front row was filled with Johnson’s Parliamentary supporters – including David Davis, Zac Goldsmith and Iain Duncan Smith. His siblings – Jo and Rachel – were notably absent despite both attending this year’s conference. Proving he is still a star attraction, Johnson received a standing ovation as soon

Mr S was intrigued by reports that the former foreign secretary had been photographed running through a field of wheat this morning. Was it trolling Theresa May for her infamous “fields of wheat” comments during the snap election? But on closer inspection, Boris isn’t running through a field of wheat. Indeed, the harvest has been gathered. This looks like either scrubland or a fallow field, on the basis of the plants surrounding him as he trundles along. There are the seedheads of umbellifers such as hogweed, the leaves of what looks like Field bindweed, and the seedheads of grasses, not wheat.  What can all this mean? Either Boris Johnson isn’t