Day: 24 June 2019

What are the questions that could sink Boris Johnson?

This is what a senior member of the cabinet told me this morning about whether Boris Johnson’s prospects of becoming Tory leader and our PM have been seriously harmed by the disclosure that neighbours summoned police to his home after they heard his girlfriend Carrie Symonds shouting at him to “get off me”.

Minister: “It will take a really gross transgression for BJ to deflect the faithful, but it’s not beyond him.”

And another minister said: “I don’t think it [the leadership contest] has changed one inch.”

For the avoidance of doubt, neither minister is invested in a Johnson victory, and one of them would passionately prefer him to lose.

Are you surprised that all the broadcasts and splash headlines about whether Johnson has the “good character to be PM” are seen as just noise, by those at the heart of the country’s ruling party? Do you think they are wrong?

Steve Bannon: ‘We went back and forth’ on the themes of Johnson’s big speech

In a London hotel, the far-right activist told how he had exchanged texts with the former foreign secretary on his big resignation speech

On 16 July last year, days after his resignation as foreign secretary, the Daily Telegraph gave most of its front page to the man whose career it had done so much to nurture and promote: Boris Johnson. “He’s back,” roared the masthead. “Boris Johnson returns to his Telegraph column.”

It was a major coup for the paper. Johnson’s column – for which he was paid £275,000 a year – regularly made headlines and it had been missed during the year he had reluctantly given it up to be foreign secretary.

And now he was back. For the paper, it was already paying dividends. Beneath a photo of Johnson, the banner headline on the front page said: “It’s time to believe in our Great Britain.” And underneath, in smaller type: “Boris Johnson in rallying call for the nation to look to a brighter, post-Brexit future.”

In a hotel room in central London, someone was giving careful consideration to the text: the man who had guided Donald Trump’s path to power, Steve Bannon. He seemed to have no doubt: the headline, the framing of Johnson’s forthcoming resignation speech, the “rallying call”, these were the themes he said he and Johnson had “gone back and forth on text” about over the weekend.

He was “unequivocal” about it, says Alison Klayman, the film-maker who captured it while shooting her forthcoming documentary, The Brink.

There’s no doubt the video is terrible timing for Johnson. It’s not just that this link to Bannon, like so many things, is something he has denied. It was nothing more than “a lefty delusion”, he said last summer. And even up until last week, his team was keeping to the line that the contact was restricted to “one text – an invitation to meet that Johnson declined”.