Boris johnson

It’s day four of the Boris and the burka row over the former foreign secretary’s decision to compare women wearing full face veils to a ‘letterboxes’ in a Telegraph column. And it doesn’t look as though things will die down any time soon. The Conservatives are planning to launch a party probe into Johnson over his comments. Spearheaded by party chairman Brandon Lewis, complaints against the Tory MP will be referred to an internal disciplinary panel. A Conservative Party spokesman said: ‘The code of conduct process is strictly confidential’. To say this will go down badly with Johnson’s supporters is an understatement. Given that the whole point of Johnson’s article was a liberal

News comes this morning, after much speculation, of an organised attempt to create a new British political party, called United for Change, funded by LoveFilm entrepreneur Simon Franks. It doesn’t have any MPs yet, apparently, and may not have any when it launches this autumn. Is there a hole in the market for a new political party? Yes, but not a party of what the Metropolitan Left likes to call the ‘centre’. The gaping hole, as has become clear from the saga of Boris and burqas, is for a non-woke conservative party – one which unashamedly espouses conservative values without hoovering up every metropolitan liberal cause which passes beneath its

It is August, so perhaps it is inevitable that parts of the left are getting somewhat over-heated. But it can’t just be the weather. Take this segment from the bottom of a story in Sunday’s ‘Observer’ which was about something else (comments by Labour’s Deputy Leader on that party’s Leader): ‘[Tom] Watson’s intervention came as Corbyn was forced to “entirely disassociate” himself from an organisation whose website lists him as a member of its international advisory panel and which openly supported a prominent writer convicted of Holocaust denial. In 1996, the Just World Trust, an international NGO that has been a trenchant critic of Israel, wrote a letter defending the

Boris Johnson caused a stir this morning with an article in the Daily Telegraph. The former foreign secretary used his weekly column to argue that the Danish government were wrong to bring in a burka ban. Johnson said that although he thought that it was frankly ‘absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes’, he was uncomfortable with the idea of the state telling a ‘free-born adult woman what she may or may not wear, in a public place, when she is simply minding her own business’. Critics were quick to go on the offensive over his decision to compare Muslim women dressed in full

A few months before he died in 2007, Bill Deedes asked if I would come to see him at his home in Kent and bring Boris Johnson along with me. I was writing a biography of Bill at the time, and I knew he was miserable because he had broken his hip and could no longer come up to London. Boris jumped at the idea and I remember our lunch as the last time I saw Bill exuberantly happy. Boris knew instinctively what a 93-year-old journalist who was struggling to write his weekly column needed, and filled him in hilariously on the London political and media gossip. The only slight

As Theresa May and her ministers spend their summer holiday trying to convince European leaders of the merits of her widely-panned Chequers Brexit blueprint, one of her departed ministers has cause for celebration. According to the latest ConservativeHome poll of Tory members, since resigning as Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has become the favourite among party members to be the next leader. Supported by nearly a third of members, this is an impressive turnaround given that a month ago – when he was still in government – he was backed by only 8 per cent of members.   However, it’s also not that surprising. As I said in the i paper last week, Johnson

Surely there is a bit of humbug in this outrage about the two remaining jihadi Beatles, Kotey and Elsheikh, and Sajid Javid’s difficult but correct decision to send them for trial in America. Suppose the grisly pair had been located a couple of years ago in Raqqa. And let’s suppose there was a Reaper drone overhead, and that British intelligence could help send a missile neatly through their windscreen. Would we provide the details — knowing that they would be killed without a chance for their lawyers to offer pleas in mitigation on account of their tough childhoods in west London? Would the British state, in these circumstances, have connived

Boris Johnson – an apology. His speech today was a very fine one and correct in each and every aspect. A week back, I took a shot at Johnson for what seemed to me the self-serving nature of his political manoeuvrings. They may still be intrinsically self-serving, I suppose. But it is nonetheless laudable that the hive of dead bees, the Conservative Party in Parliament, should hear a few home truths. Boris’s best speech of his career, by some margin. Hats off to him.