Boris johnson

Has Boris Johnson launched a military coup? Based on ‘some of the chatter coming out of the Westminster Bubble’, you’d be forgiven for thinking his Brexit intervention was just that, says the Sun. It’s time for everybody to ‘calm down’, the paper urges. Yes, some of those who have questioned the timing of the article – published in the run-up to Theresa May’s major speech on Brexit this Friday – may have a point. But Boris is nonetheless ‘entitled to a view on what Britain might look like after we leave the EU’. The Tories need to quit the fighting amongst themselves and realise that the only ones to benefit from

Okay, it’s a rainy Sunday, but surely the new chief of the UK Statistics Authority has better things to do than send angry tweets to the Foreign Secretary? Alas not. Today Sir David Norgrove, the newish chairman of the UK Statistics Agency, tweeted out a letter declaring himself ‘surprised and disappointed’ that BoJo has ‘chosen to repeat the figure of £350 million per week, in connection with the amount that might be available for extra public spending when we leave the European Union’. He says that this ‘confuses gross and net contributions…. It is a clear misuse of official statistics’. Sir David Norgrove writes to Foreign Secretary about use of

I used to have a lot of time for Boris Johnson. Sometimes whole days, in fact: from 8am until 8pm, I’d ring and text and email him, politely urging him to tell me what he planned to write his exquisitely expensive Telegraph column about, and when he’d deign to send it to me. It was, as others who’ve had the joy of calling him a colleague can attest, maddening. But he always filed, in the end. I don’t claim that working acquaintance with Boris gives me any unique insight into his soul. In fact, familiarity only makes his real character more obscure. My overall impression of a man famous for being talkative

Stephen Bush of the New Statesman asked a good question the other day. Why do people who hate what Boris Johnson and Liam Fox are doing to Britain go easy on David Davis? He’s right to be perplexed. It turns out all those trade deals the leave campaign promised can’t be done for years. Liam Fox has nothing to do except be a public nuisance, which now I come to think of it is the only post he’s qualified to fill. Johnson meanwhile is an embarrassment, even to an administration which seems beyond shame, and Theresa May does her best to keep him locked in an FCO cellar. Davis, on the

During the snap election, Boris Johnson was given reason to blush when his sister Rachel came out for the Liberal Democrats. Despite having always voted Conservative previously, the Mail on Sunday columnist said the party’s Brexit stance had meant she had no choice but to defect. Since then, Johnson has written in The Spectator of the need for a new centrist party – ideally headed up by Gary Lineker, the people’s snowflake. However, is Johnson actually considering another political defection? Mr S only asks after his mole reports a curious exchange between Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn at last night’s GQ Men of the Year awards. At the champagne-fuelled bash at

Since Labour’s surprise victory in the People’s Republic of Kensington, new MP Emma Dent Coad has been quick to make her mark on Parliament. As well as saying her predecessors are not ‘hard acts to follow’ and calling for the monarchy (many of whom are her constituents) to be abolished, Dent Coad made the news after she said Sir Martin Moore-Bick should be replaced as head of the Grenfell Tower inquiry because he does not ‘understand human beings’. So, Mr S was curious to tune into Dent Coad’s appearance on today’s Pienaar’s Politics where the backbencher was asked whether she has ever done anything illegal. After admitting to experimenting with cannabis, Jon Pienaar asked

Boris Johnson is inspecting the guard of honour and we are doing our best not to giggle. The Foreign Secretary is walking down a line of soldiers from the Libyan National Army. The red carpets are blowing over in the breeze. One of the senior officers looks uncannily like Colonel Gaddafi. And the band is playing the worst version of the national anthem I have ever heard. Yet Mr Johnson manages to control his features. Just. For this is the headquarters of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, whose forces control large swaths of eastern Libya. A thought strikes me. Mr Johnson’s critics accuse him of upsetting allies, lacking foreign policy vision

Some of his friends will tell you that beneath all the bluster and fluster, beneath the posture and the persona, Boris Johnson is actually quite like the rest of us. He has doubts and fears, good days and bad days, times when he’s up and times when he’s down. ‘Boris’ in a sense, is a construct, a costume worn by a man whose given name is actually Alexander and is sometimes known as Al. Whatever his name, Boris or Al could be forgiven for feeling a bit down these days. Not too long ago, reaching his life’s ambition of the premiership seemed a realistic possibility. In a story that still

I can’t work up much indignation at the collapse of London’s Garden Bridge project, which has been strangled by the refusal of mayor Sadiq Khan to guarantee its continuing operational and maintenance costs — assuming its trustees, led by former banker and minister Lord Davies of Abersoch, would have succeeded in raising the £150 million of private capital required to build the bridge and plant its 270 trees in the first place. Promoted by Joanna Lumley and Sadiq’s predecessor Boris Johnson, this was a beautiful but whimsical idea, placed in an overcrowded stretch of the Thames and based on a ramshackle business plan. In a more confident economic climate it

The furore surrounding the Brexit divorce bill is hotting up. The weekend’s papers saw speculation that Britain would cough up £36bn as part of a settlement package for its departure from the EU. Nonsense, says Downing Street, with the Prime Minister’s spokesman saying this morning: ‘I don’t recognise the figure’. It’s not only the government hitting back; Tory eurosceptics are also turning up the volume. Yet while the government is eager to talk down the size of the bill, the criticism coming from the backbenches is less nuanced. Instead of quibbling over the amount, the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and John Redwood dismiss the bill out of hand. Rees-Mogg wrote on

The great physicist Richard Feynman warned of the perpetual torment that lies in wait for people who try to understand quantum mechanics. Modern physics cannot be understood. It can only be observed. ‘I am going to tell you what nature behaves like,’ Feynman said. ‘Do not keep saying to yourself, “but how can it be like that?” because you will get down the drain, into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.’ Equally, nobody knows how the Conservative Party can be like that. It just is. Theresa May, to pick an example. Every morning I wake up and check if she