All things Boris: has it really come to this?

[Scot Dutchy]

Boris Johnson furious as inquiry launched into ‘cash for curtains’

Electoral Commission believes there are ‘reasonable grounds’ to suspect offences around renovation of 11 Downing Street

The Electoral Commission has launched an inquiry that has the potential to imperil Boris Johnson’s premiership as the “cash for curtains” row increasingly engulfed the prime minister.

With sweeping powers to call witnesses and refer matters to the police, the watchdog said its probe was necessary because it already believed there were “reasonable grounds” to suspect that payments for expensive renovations to Johnson’s Downing Street flat could constitute several offences.

Though Johnson has insisted he has done nothing wrong, he was goaded into a fury at prime minister’s questions as Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, interrogated him by asking pointed questions that Johnson mostly sidestepped or ignored.

He stuck to claiming that he had paid the costs “personally” – but did not deny receiving a donation or loan of £58,000 from a Conservative peer and party donor, David Brownlow, to foot the bills, despite no record of such a transaction being published.

Starmer labelled Johnson “Major Sleaze” and accused the government of being “mired in sleaze, cronyism and scandal”. He also criticised the prime minister for taking time out from dealing with the coronavirus pandemic to reportedly “moan” about his former adviser, Dominic Cummings, to newspaper editors and spend time choosing wallpaper that costs more than £800 a roll.

Chumocracy

[Scot Dutchy]

How much trouble is Boris Johnson in? Maybe quite a lot

Analysis: A ‘Kevin Keegan’ moment, long inquiries and ill-advised comments about furnishings could be a dangerous cocktail

Inside Keir Starmer’s office, jubilant aides described Boris Johnson’s rant at prime minister’s questions as his “Kevin Keegan moment” – when the drip-drip of sleaze stories seemed to have finally rattled him.

The timing could not have been better for the Labour leader. The Electoral Commission opened its formal investigation, into whether the Conservative party broke electoral law over plans for donations to refurbish Johnson’s flat, just an hour before the pair faced off in the House of Commons.

No 10 so far seems to have little to offer by way of distraction. Aides – and Johnson himself – will only repeat the tired line that the prime minister has paid for the redecoration himself and that all the proper declarations have been made. The fact that they will not reveal who initially paid for the lavish works – or whether Johnson is paying back a loan – has baffled MPs and cabinet ministers.

“I don’t know myself what happened, but I am not sure it wouldn’t be better to be upfront now,” one cabinet minister said.

[Svartalf]

wrong, the real answer is : 'not enough'.

[Scot Dutchy]

Brazen, destructive, aggressive: how does Boris Johnson get away with it?

While Thatcher had to face down the unions, northern England and a confident BBC, this prime minister has few constraints

Since the beginning, one of the most striking aspects of Boris Johnson’s government has been its brazenness. The Downing Street press briefing room redecorated in Tory blue, regeneration funds crudely funnelled towards Tory towns, the troublesome Brexit parliament illegally shut down, the pandemic as a business opportunity for Conservative cronies – in these and many other ways the government has exercised power with a cartoonish lack of subtlety.

The response to this, especially from the many people who believe that British governments should be more consensual and diplomatic, has been to wonder privately or out loud, in liberal publications and on social media: how do they get away with it? The unwritten rules of British public life are supposed to make such blatantly self-serving government impossible. And our political system is supposed to punish prime ministers whose divisiveness becomes too obvious, as even the formidable Margaret Thatcher found out.

Yet expressions of incredulity and outrage at the Johnson government have done limited damage so far – and sometimes have actually helped it, by highlighting its unorthodoxy to voters who have had enough of politics as usual. In 2019, shortly before Johnson became Tory leader, the Hansard Society found that 54% of the electorate believed Britain needed “a strong leader who is willing to break the rules”. All the current scandals about corporate lobbying, callousness towards Covid victims and possible corruption have, so far, barely affected the Tories’ strong position in the polls. If Britain’s political culture used to resist overly partisan, extremist governments, what has changed in that culture to enable Johnson’s to thrive until now?

The British love corruption? Apparently.

[Scot Dutchy]

Scandal upon scandal: the charge sheet that should have felled Johnson years ago

This is about so much more than wallpaper. A pattern of lying, betrayal and callousness is ruining lives

Yes, it’s a real scandal. Despite the apparent absurdity of a Westminster village obsessing over soft furnishings and the precise class connotations of the John Lewis brand, there is a hard offence underneath all those cushions and throws. By refusing to tell us who first paid for the refurbishment of his Downing Street flat, Boris Johnson is denying us – his boss – the right to know who he owes and what hold they might have on him.

Offence is the right word because, even before the Electoral Commission determines whether the law on political funding was broken, Johnson’s failure to come clean may well be, by itself, a breach of the ministerial code. That bars not only actual conflicts of interest between ministers’ “public duties and their private interests” but even the perception of such conflicts. In refusing to tell us who first paid that bill for overpriced wallpaper, or to give full details of who paid for his December 2019 holiday in Mustique, Johnson has offended the public trust.

So yes, this is a scandal. But do you know what else is a scandal? That while Johnson was racking up an estimated £200,000 on home decor, his government was pushing through a post-Grenfell fire safety bill that threatens ordinary leaseholders with financial ruin, saddling them with the cost of ridding their homes of potentially lethal cladding and other hazards: one woman is facing a bill of £70,000 to make her one-bedroom flat in Bristol safe. That is a scandal.

[Scot Dutchy]

[Scot Dutchy]

Tory poll lead slashed as key elections loom across Britain

Stories of Conservative sleaze appear to be having an impact as Keir Starmer faces his first electoral test as Labour leader on 6 May

Labour has slashed the Tories’ poll lead in half as more voters conclude that Boris Johnson is corrupt and dishonest ahead of this week’s bumper set of local and devolved elections.

The latest Opinium poll for the Observer shows the Conservative lead has fallen from 11 points to five points after a week in which the prime minister was at the centre of allegations over the refurbishment of his Downing Street flat, and criticised for reportedly saying he would rather see “bodies pile high” than order another Covid-19 lockdown.

[Scot Dutchy]

Britain’s overgrown Eton schoolboys have turned the country into their playground

The reckless disdain of Boris Johnson and David Cameron is evidence of the institutional elitism blighting our politics

Over the past fortnight, the news from Westminster has rather resembled a weird play about pre-revolutionary France, or Tsarist Russia circa 1916.

In some parts of the country, the rate of unemployment runs at 15%. Six million people are now reckoned to be on universal credit. I was in Birmingham this week, where I heard lots of talk about the impossibility of finding work, and local businesses hanging on by their fingernails. But every time I switched on the radio, I heard a twisted soap opera about money, taste (or the lack of it) and a prime minister who is reportedly having difficulty getting by on £150,000 a year. Boris Johnson’s alleged insistence that he was minded to “let the bodies pile high in their thousands” rather than impose another lockdown suggests a Bourbon or Romanov driven to exasperation by the necessity of difficult choices. There is something similarly monarchical about the swift binning of the £2.6m Downing Street briefing room – further proof, it seems, that austerity need only worry the plebs.

As with David Cameron’s lobbying efforts on behalf of the financier Lex Greensill in apparent pursuit of a multimillion-pound payday, this is essentially a story about privilege, and the shamelessness and insensitivities that come with it. More specifically, it centres on the renaissance of an archetype that has been nothing but trouble: the ambitious, dizzyingly confident public schoolboy, convinced of his destiny but devoid of any coherent purpose – and, once gifted with power, always on the brink of letting loose chaos and mishap.

Brexit was an Etonian game.

[aufbahrung]

Gotta be a alien. Nothing human could survive intact all these barrages on character. Even Eton has its limits and its not as if Boris is old money even.

[Brian Peacock]

Being a self-serving, dim-witted cosplay politician is all part of Boris' brand. People expect little else from him, and so they're neither surprised nor disppointed when he lives up to his image.

[Scot Dutchy]

Boris Johnson being investigated over Caribbean holiday

Parliamentary standards watchdog says it is looking into a possible breach of MPs’ code of conduct

Boris Johnson is under investigation over who paid for his Caribbean holiday with Carrie Symonds during Christmas 2019.

The parliamentary standards commissioner, Kathryn Stone, confirmed on Monday morning that she was investigating a possible breach of the MPs’ code of conduct.

It is the latest allegation of impropriety faced by the prime minister, as the Electoral Commission continues its inquiry into the Conservative party over claims that a loan to cover works to Johnson and Symonds’ Downing Street flat were not properly declared.

The “sleaze” attacks deployed against the prime minister in the run-up to last week’s local elections seem not to have substantially damaged his reputation among voters, given the gains made by the Tories in the Hartlepool byelection and councils across England.

But some Conservatives are privately dismayed the party is being more opaque than they think it should be on issues of funding and declarations.

The investigation into Johnson’s holiday comes after he took a trip to Mustique to celebrate new year at the start of 2020. The Daily Mail reported Johnson spent 10 days on a luxury villa break worth £15,000 – provided courtesy of the Carphone Warehouse founder and Conservative donor David Ross.

Chumocracy.

[laklak]

Jeez. What's the point in being PM if you can't get a free vacay every now and again? Curtains just don't cut it on their own.

[Brian Peacock]

I'd love to have free rein of a Russian oligarch's country estate in the home counties for a week. Imagine never having to poo on the same toilet twice.

[Scot Dutchy]

Tories made a Faustian bargain when they gave us this lord of misrule

Dominic Cummings may be out for revenge, but his account of Boris Johnson’s fatal character flaws was tragically believable

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world in which Boris Johnson can be prime minister. Plenty of people have been saying that, and for a long time, but it was fresh to hear it from the man who played such an instrumental role in installing Mr Johnson at Number 10 in the first place and then keeping him in Downing Street. “It’s just completely crackers… that Boris Johnson is in there,” remarked Dominic Cummings in the course of his marathon testimony in parliament. He also declared it “crazy” that someone like himself could have acquired such a powerful position in government, one point on which everyone can agree.

The fault lies not in the stars, but with the Conservative party. Coming up to two years ago, when the Tories were looking for a new leader, they decided that the only thing that mattered to them was improving their chances of winning an election. The potential popularity and campaign skills of leadership candidates are always significant factors when parties choose a new chief, but it is usual for some other criteria to be included in the assessment. Criteria such as competence, professionalism, grip, integrity and trustworthiness. Knowing that Mr Johnson was a terrible fail on all those scores, Tories chose him anyway. Many of them knew that he was extremely ill-qualified to be prime minister, but they held their noses and crossed the Johnson box nevertheless. That was the Faustian bargain they struck. They got themselves someone who was good for winning an election and bad at every aspect of governing.

The Johnsonian method of government was revealed in a confrontation between the two men in the summer of last year when Mr Cummings says he complained to the prime minister: “This whole system is chaos, this building is chaos.” Mr Johnson laughed and replied: “Chaos isn’t that bad, chaos means that everyone has to look to me to see who’s in charge.” We have it from the mouth of the man who was his chief lieutenant that Britain is presided over by a Lord of Misrule. He deliberately cultivates anarchy in the belief that a constant state of confusion at Number 10 and in Whitehall enhances his authority. An unfortunate side-effect of this chaos theory of government is that it kills people.

The trouble is the UK is stuck with him. He is building a ship for himself at the public's expense.

[Scot Dutchy]

Even his bloody marriage was a case of chumocracy.

Catholics question why Boris Johnson was able to marry in church

Clergy and worshippers raise query as faith’s law does not recognise divorce

Catholics, including members of the congregation at Westminster Cathedral, have questioned why the prime minister was able to be married in a Catholic church following his two previous divorces.

Boris Johnson married Carrie Symonds at the cathedral in a ceremony with 30 friends and family on Saturday, planned in strict secrecy and reportedly carried out by Father Daniel Humphreys, who baptised their son Wilfred last year.

Symonds, who will be taking Johnson’s name, has spoken publicly of her Catholic faith, while Johnson was baptised into Catholicism but renounced it for Anglicism during his Eton schooldays, according to biographers.

Catholic law, which does not recognise divorce, usually does not permit the remarriage of those whose former spouse, or spouses, are still alive. Johnson was divorced from his first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, in 1993, and finalised his divorce from his second wife, Marina Wheeler, in November last year.

He could not care a fuck does Emperor Johnson.