Boris johnson

Well, that didn’t take long. Just one week into the new parliamentary term and a case of civil war has broke out in the Conservative party over Boris Johnson. The former foreign secretary makes the front of most Sunday papers – with some running more than one P1 story about him. Following the news that Johnson is divorcing his wife Marina Wheeler, his ‘close friendship’ with a female former Tory aide makes three papers. The Sunday Times reports that a sleaze dossier – linked to No 10 – on weaponising Johnson’s private has been doing the rounds over the past week. However, the author of the document points out that

Am I the last person in the metropolitan elite bubble who likes Boris Johnson? You’d certainly think so, going on the reaction to the sad news of his divorce from his wife, Marina Wheeler, after 25 years of marriage. Every divorce is a whirlpool of misery for all those involved: parents, children, family and close friends. And yet the coverage of Boris’s sad news bubbles on a seething undercurrent of gloating and delight. ’Twas ever thus with Boris. For all his huge fan club, there have always been MPs who are jealous of his popularity; who were angry with him, when he edited The Spectator, that he didn’t accept their stultifyingly dull

Ever since Boris Johnson resigned, Tories have wondered what he’ll do at conference. We now have an answer: he’ll address a thousand-person rally on the Tuesday, inside the secure zone. The event will be hosted by Conservative Home, the influential Tory website. This is a headache for Tory conference planners. Boris Johnson’s appearance on Tuesday, where he will reiterate his call to ‘chuck Chequers’, will overshadow everything else that is on that day. Given that Johnson’s Telegraph column comes out on Monday, there’s a good chance that he’ll be the big story of the conference for two days out of the four. This is, to put it mildly, not ideal

Boris Johnson’s criticism of Theresa May’s Brexit plan has been somewhat one-sided, with the PM largely staying quiet on what she makes of the former foreign secretary’s interjections. Until now, that is. After Boris used his Daily Telegraph column this morning to say the Chequers blueprint will leave Britain with ‘diddly squat’, May has hit back at Boris. This morning, Downing Street said this about Boris: “There’s no new ideas in his article to respond to. What we need now is serious leadership and a serious plan.” Mr S isn’t convinced this will help to calm matters in the run-up to Tory party conference…

It may seem odd that a cabal of politicians, celebrities and millionaires can successfully present themselves as a great democratic force and seek to overturn Brexit. But the people behind the People’s Vote have one big advantage: their opponents are in disarray. Vote Leave ceased campaigning after the referendum. Its organisers felt they had accomplished their mission, and the Conservative government could be trusted to execute Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. Boris Johnson now describes that decision as an ‘absolutely fatal’ mistake. As foreign secretary, Johnson admitted to dinner guests earlier this summer that ‘some of us were seduced by high office in government’. He and other key Brexiteers,

The Spectator‘s editorial ‘Bravo Boris’ (11 August) suggests that the treatment meted out to Boris Johnson by the Prime Minister and the party chairman makes a leadership challenge more likely. That is correct. This duo have demonstrated a breathtaking lack of political sophistication. Not only have they promoted Boris Johnson’s chances of the leadership, but they have also diverted the media spotlight from the Labour party’s very real anti-Semitism to a fictitious Tory party Islamophobia. Mr Johnson plainly argues a position that is more liberal than those of many European governments, including those of Denmark, France, Belgium and Germany. Despite this, the Prime Minister and the party chairman have allowed the

Oh dear. As many politicians have discovered, trial by Twitter rarely ends well. And neither does poll by Twitter. Where in a normal poll, factors such as sample size and demographic can be controlled, these thing are taken out of control when you ask the Twitterati to decide. Despite this, many campaigners see this set-up as actually beneficial to their aims – starting polls on issues they believe to know their own followers’ opinions on already in order to prove a point. So, spare a thought for the pro-Corbyn grassroots organisation Momentum. They asked their followers whether Boris Johnson ought to have the Conservative whip withdrawn for comparing women wearing

The Muslim Council of Britain wants Theresa May to subject Boris to a ‘full disciplinary inquiry’ over his comments on the niqab and burqa. Let’s call this by its true name: an inquisition. This inquiry would be a 21st-century inquisition of a man simply for speaking ill of a religious practice. May must resist this borderline medieval demand that she punish a member of her party for expressing a ‘blasphemous’ thought. She must put aside her Borisphobia and stand up for freedom of conscience against the inquisitorial hysteria that has greeted Boris’s remarks. Burqagate has been mad from the get-go. Reading some of the coverage of Boris’s Daily Telegraph column

On January 11 2015, I was one of two million people who marched slowly and silently through Paris to honour the memory of the people slaughtered days earlier for being blasphemers and Jewish. It was an extraordinary day, an emotional one, too, soured only a little by the sight of presidents and prime ministers at the head of the march. These were the people who for years had been pretending there wasn’t a problem with the rise throughout the West of political Islam. Now, following the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and the shoppers in the Kosher supermarket, they had muscled their way to the front to claim they

Home Brandon Lewis, the chairman of the Conservative party, demanded that Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary, should apologise for saying, in an article defending the right of women in Britain to wear the burka or the niqab, that it was at the same time ‘absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes’. Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said: ‘The language that Boris used has offended people.’ Jennie Formby, the general secretary of the Labour party, wrote to Dame Margaret Hodge saying that no further action would be taken against her. Dame Margaret was said to have called Jeremy Corbyn, the party leader, an ‘anti-Semite’.