Month: July 2019

Johnny Marr: “People should refer to Boris as That Wanker Boris Johnson”

Former Smiths man hits out at those who think the ex-foreign secretary is “some cuddly fun character”

The former foreign secretary is often called “Boris” by his fans and Tory Party members.

But the controversial Conservative Party leadership contender has been heavily criticised for his remarks in the past saying Muslim women wearing burkas “look like letter boxes” despite recently claiming that he was defending their right to wear burqas at a Tory hustings event in Nottingham.

Johnson was also recently heavily criticised by the husband of a British-Iranian woman imprisoned in Tehran after previously telling a Commons committee when he was foreign secretary that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was “teaching people journalism” in Iran.

Now, Marr has hit out at those for describing Johnson as a figure of fun in a post on Twitter in which he wrote: “I wish people would stop referring to ‘Boris’ like he’s some cuddly fun character. They should refer to him by his full name; ‘That Wanker Boris Johnson’.

Britain’s Populist Death Spiral

British news has been gripped by the rather bizarre process of the governing Conservative party choosing a new leader. It was always likely to be Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London, but to avoid the appearance of a coronation, the party gradually reduced a crowded field of candidates down to two people: Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, a former health minister.

It is a strange process. Technically it is democratic, because 160,000 Conservative Party members will decide between the two candidates, as is mandated. However, to many it seems wrong that the next prime minister is being appointed by a tiny group of people while the rest of the country just sits by and watches.

With Johnson’s rise, British politics is now defined by the emergence of a populist right-wing the likes of which this country has not really seen before. But the danger to the U.K. is that each step to the right will worsen the situation for the very people supporting the right-wing populists, driving them yet further to the extreme.

The Times view on the next prime minister: Boris Johnson at No 10

As the ballot papers hit the doormats of Conservative Party members this weekend, the choice that lies ahead of them is momentous. They are picking not just a party leader but a prime minister, and a prime minister who will take office at the head of a minority government at a moment of acute political crisis. Britain is due to leave the European Union on October 31, just 100 days after the new prime minister arrives in Downing Street. There will be no honeymoon. Decisions taken in those first days and weeks will set the course of the country for years if not decades to come. Get those decisions right and there is a chance to end the uncertainty that is suffocating the economy…

Sexism, vandalism and bullying: inside the Boris Johnson-era Bullingdon Club | Politics | The Guardian

It is notorious for champagne-swilling, restaurant-trashing, “pleb”-taunting elitism. Now new light has been shed on the outrageous antics of the Bullingdon Club – the Oxford University group that may be about to produce its second British prime minister – by someone intimately connected to it during Boris Johnson’s membership.

A woman who acted as a scout for potential members of the Bullingdon Club in the mid-1980s has said that female prostitutes performed sex acts at its lavish dinners, women were routinely belittled, and that intimidation and vandalism were its hallmarks.

The woman, who has asked not to be named, is now an academic and regards her involvement with the male-only Bullingdon Club more than 30 years ago with extreme regret and embarrassment.

In her first week at Oxford in 1983, she was approached by a member of the club to identify potential recruits – a role she performed throughout her time as an undergraduate. She also had an 18-month relationship with a man who became a president of the club. In her final year at Oxford, she shared a house with Bullingdon members.

Revealed: Boris, the Russian oligarch and the Page 3 model | openDemocracy

In October 2016, Boris Johnson, the recently-appointed foreign secretary, left Whitehall behind to fly to Italy for a private weekend break. He was invited to the luxurious Umbrian villa of his wealthy friend, Evgeny Lebedev – the Russian owner of London’s Evening Standard newspaper. It was not the first time Boris had been to the secluded Palazzo Terranova in the hills near Perugia.

During his stint as London’s mayor, Boris had been to the 17th-century villa four times as Lebedev’s guest, using his friend’s private jet to fly there and back to London. His now estranged wife, Marina Wheeler, sometimes accompanied him.

Boris’s host, the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch and former KGB agent, is regarded as a ringmaster of lavish, “outrageous” gatherings which attract the elite of Britain’s stage, screen, and politics. Some of those who have experienced what one guest called Lebedev’s “full Italian experience” have told openDemocracy that “nothing is off the menu from the moment you are greeted to the moment you leave. A quiet English country house retreat it is not.”

Friends also say that Evgeny enjoys throwing “social hand grenades into his gatherings” to spice up the party atmosphere.

Boris Johnson ‘denied’ full access to intelligence by Downing St while foreign secretary

The Conservative leadership frontrunner was reportedly refused full access to certain classified information when he joined the cabinet in 2016 amid fears he might reveal top-level secrets by accident.

Sources with “direct knowledge of events” told the BBC that Mr Johnson was cut out at Theresa May’s request, attributing the decision, in part, to “control freakery” at No 10.

The move is said to have caused concern among intelligence officials due to the foreign secretary’s role in authorising sensitive operations.

Traditionally, the prime minister has overall control over the intelligence services but the foreign secretary oversees MI6 and GCHQ on a day-to-day basis.

Mr Johnson was said to have been aware of the decision at the time and “very unhappy” about it.

Euan McColm: No lie is too low for Boris Johnson’s dark purposes

We’ll see how much of a One Nation Tory Johnson is when he shirks responsibility for the chaos of a No Deal Brexit, writes Euan McColm.

Among the many fanciful notions peddled by the grubby little men and women who’ve gone out to bat for Boris Johnson on TV and radio while he maintains the lowest possible profile during the race to become the next prime minister, perhaps the most difficult to believe is the idea that he is – and would govern as – a benevolent, One Nation conservative.

He is not a progressive liberal prepared to make concessions to the right in the name of unity, he is our very own Donald Trump

We are invited to ignore the evidence – the speeches he has given, the articles he has written – and accept that in his heart he is liberal and open. He might have led the Leave campaign, that exercise in insular Little Englander nostalgia, but once he has seen off rival Jeremy Hunt, we should look forward to a premiership that will bring the people of the United Kingdom together.

In spinning this yarn of Johnson as a One Nation Tory, his supporters attempt to make a virtue of their candidate’s dishonesty. Sure, he might have said and done things, recently, that suggest he is interested only in harnessing the support of hard Brexiteer wing-nuts but he was only saying and doing those things because he had to, you see?

All of the times Boris Johnson has broken his promises

LONDON — Boris Johnson is the overwhelming favourite to replace Theresa May as prime minister after promising Conservative Party members that he will take Britain out of the EU on October 31 “deal or no deal.”

Launching his bid for the job on Wednesday, Johnson said that his party should look at his record as mayor of London as proof that he will deliver on such pledges.

“We said we would do X, and we did X plus 10,” Johnson said.

However, analysis of Johnson’s time at City Hall, and his subsequent actions since returning to parliament, suggests that Conservative MPs have good reason to be sceptical about such pledges.

Donald Trump Too Tame for You? Meet Britain’s Boris Johnson

The front-runner to become Britain’s next prime minister is a portly white man with unkempt blond hair, an adoring base of supporters, disdain for Europe, a dodgy private life and a loose relationship with truth and principle. There are also differences between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, but the similarities have been much noted in some European circles, with no small misgivings.

The biggest difference is that Mr. Johnson, who is 55, has been around politics all his life, as a journalist, member of Parliament, mayor of London and foreign secretary. His forte has not been conservative conviction, major achievement or great vision, but one of the sharpest tongues in British politics.

Like Mr. Trump with his tweets and rants, Mr. Johnson delights his followers with outrageous statements that they take as straight talk — even when he has gone so far as to describe Africans as “piccaninnies” or to ascribe President Barack Obama’s opposition to Brexit to an “ancestral dislike” of Britain as the son of a Kenyan.

His most commonly quoted quip these days is the one summing up his position on Brexit as having one’s cake and eating it. Curiously, Mr. Johnson was initially unsure of his position on leaving or remaining in the European Union — an unpublished article he wrote days before he came out in favor of leaving made a strong argument in favor of staying. Mr. Johnson says he was simply sorting out his thoughts.

The dishonourable Boris Johnson has brought us to the brink of catastrophe

The resignation of Alexander (“Boris”) Johnson from the prestigious post of foreign secretary in Her Majesty’s government came on the very same day that his illustrious predecessor Lord Carrington died at the wonderful old age of 99.

Johnson becomes the fourth foreign secretary to have resigned since the war – all of them since the arrival of Margaret Thatcher’s revolutionary government on the British political scene in 1979, and three of them Tories – after all, Conservative foreign secretaries have had more chance to resign, since their party has been in office during 26 of those 39 years.

Unfortunately, the cat was put among the pigeons when, before becoming the worst foreign secretary in living memory, Johnson put his crazed ambition to be leader of the Conservative party and prime minister above the national interest. Taking advantage of his charismatic appeal to the nation – which has always amazed me: he is basically what we used to call a twerp – he opted, against what we are told was his better judgment (always assuming he has any), to be the most prominent leader of the Leave campaign, during which, characteristically, he lied continually.