Boris is a lying bullshitting piece of shit, I’m glad he’s had to go. Absolutely delighted.
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That resignation statement is fairly clearly pitched at the Brexit faithful to position himself as a leader in exile. He hasn’t gone away
Meh, I can’t seem him coming back. He just can’t stop lying.
Ever seen this clip? He just completely makes things up as he goes.
Trump remains a threat until as a stake is driven through his heart and he’s dead in the grave. The rules of the game are different for charlatans.
The same rules apply to Johnson. He will be back at some point.
Lads who fell for, adopted and defended johnson’s Ukraine and covid policies now denounce him as a liar and a fraud.
You can only laugh
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The world seems a wee bit complex for you.
Johnson who was PM of one of the last countries to bring in restrictions causing the unnecessary deaths of thousands and who used Ukraine in an attempt to distract from his behaviour during Covid?
The vast vast majority of U.K. Covid deaths came after they implemented lockdowns.
Has he been stitched up?
He’s a fucking cunt who jumped before he was pushed. Sunak has a chance to show strong leadership by rejecting Johnson’s list. However he won’t because he’s weak as fuck. It also means that the Tory’s are going to tear each other apart for the next few months
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Lockdowns? Sure the PM was partying all through Covid like it was 1999.
What was the Downing Street death rate?
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A good lot of them are gone.
INSIDE NO 10
Boris Johnson goes down swinging: ‘These people are only in parliament because of me’
Just how did a polite meeting with the PM over honours descend into chaos and lead to Boris Johnson’s dramatic resignation?
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Saturday June 10 2023, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times
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It was the meeting Downing Street said would not happen and this weekend they may wish it hadn’t. But when Boris Johnson met Rishi Sunak in the prime minister’s House of Commons office a week last Friday, he claimed to have come in peace.
Johnson urged Sunak to approve his resignation honours list. In return he would bury the hatchet and campaign hard for the Conservatives in the “red wall” seats at the next election.
What was said in the meeting and what was subsequently understood by both sides was very different and has this weekend unleashed civil war, not peace. It led directly to Johnson’s decision to resign as an MP yesterday evening, just hours after his close ally Nadine Dorries also jumped ship having learned she was not getting a peerage, leaving Sunak with the headache of by-elections the Tories might well now lose. The MP Nigel Adams, another Johnson loyalist, resigned on Saturday.
Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, and Boris Johnson met at the start of the month
GETTY IMAGES
Johnson’s allies this weekend directly accused the prime minister of “deceit” and of tacitly encouraging the privileges committee to find him in contempt of parliament for lying to MPs about lockdown parties — the immediate cause of his resignation. They claim Sunak removed several of Johnson’s nominees for honours. Both of these claims are “categorically untrue”, according to No 10, which instead claims Johnson misunderstood the process of awarding peerages and is master of his own demise.
This is more than just another episode in the post-Brexit Tory psychodrama. It is also a story of human ego and hurt, but one that has the heat to combust the Tories’ slender hopes of victory in 2024. What remains unclear is whether these are the last bellowings of a political mastodon whose time has passed, or the start of a campaign of attacks that will end up destroying Sunak as well.
Johnson had been pressing for an audience with the prime minister for some time, but two weeks ago Downing Street denied one would take place. It was only arranged on the morning of June 2. The two men met, with one of Sunak’s political aides watching, at 4.30pm that day.
The meeting lasted around 45 minutes. For the first 25 minutes it was cordial and productive. Sunak was keen to pick Johnson’s brain about political strategy and the two discussed the best ways of taking the fight to Keir Starmer and Labour. Those involved in planning the election campaign, such as Isaac Levido, mastermind of the 2019 landslide, were also keen that Johnson’s skills be harnessed. “Boris made some bridge-building efforts,” an ally said. “He wants to win the next election. He wants to beat Starmer. He basically offered to put the leadership question off the table.”
Then Johnson raised the issue of peerages and the atmosphere chilled. No 10 had made clear to Johnson in advance that Sunak did not want to discuss honours, a point also made publicly when news of a possible meeting first emerged. “I don’t want to talk about that,” Sunak said.
“We must talk about it,” Johnson replied. He proceeded to press for assurances that MPs who had been submitted for peerages — Nadine Dorries, Alok Sharma and Nigel Adams — could wait and join the Lords later, noting how undesirable by-elections would be now. The No 10 claim is that Sunak said it was “their decision” whether to go or not.
What seems to have transpired is Sunak signalled he would approve the list put in front of him by officials. To the prime minister, this meant he would leave the House of Lords Appointments Commission (Holac) to vet the list and then nod it through without intervention. Johnson’s camp say he took that to mean Sunak would sign off on his original list. The PM was, they claim, “Sphinx-like, not saying much, not giving much away.”
Nadine Dorries jumped ship hours before Johnson on Friday
DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES
After the meeting with Sunak, Johnson messaged Nadine Dorries to say: “Just finished the meeting with Rishi. List being published imminently. You’re on it.” When it finally dropped on Friday, it was shorn of peerages for Dorries, Adams and Sharma, as well as gongs for two Tory donors, David Ross and Stuart Marks.
A Johnson ally accused Sunak of “a sleight of hand we regard as deceitful”, accusing him of being “clever-clever” and misreading the politics. “He thinks he’s being very clever when he’s being very stupid. He’s like a shit batsman who completely misreads the delivery.” Another accused Sunak of sophistry and speaking in tongues.
The problem for Johnson is that the only person taking notes was the Sunak aide. In this account, Sunak said to Johnson: “I don’t want you to leave this room thinking I have made you a promise as that will be a problem in our relationship going forward.”
This weekend, a Downing Street source said: “The former prime minister raised the matter of peerages, to which the current prime minister made clear he would follow precedent and not interfere with the process. Any suggestions of promises made or guarantees given are categorically untrue.”
Another added: “If anyone is taken off the list by Downing Street, Holac has to declare that. They haven’t. There was no intervention by the PM at all.”
Dorries, Sharma and Adams were removed by Holac because, under the rules, for them to remain on Johnson’s list they would have had to have resigned as MPs within six months. None of them signalled to Holac they would do so. That left them with only one alternative: that Sunak would, at a later date and in his own name, formally nominate them for peerages. He was not prepared to do so.
Nigel Adams had been nominated in Johnson’s honours list
UWE DEFFNER/ALAMY
This technical process appears to have been lost on Johnson and his nominees, who were under the mistaken belief they could be automatically re-vetted every six months without needing to be renominated as long as they announced they were standing down before the election.
Both Dorries and Sharma sought to get clarification from No 10 and Holac. “That information was deliberately withheld,” said one of the would-be peers. “If anyone had said to us that we needed to stand down to be on the list, that is what we would have done. They withheld the process to stop by-elections and look what has happened. I think there was something much more devious and sinister about it. They want Boris and his allies out of Westminster.”
Dorries first got wind that there might be a problem around 7pm on Thursday, when a journalist contacted her having been tipped off by someone in No 10. In conversations with a senior minister on Friday morning, she is understood to have repeatedly stated that Johnson had been given personal assurances that she could be re-vetted and nominated at a later date. She was informed he was in no position to be giving her personal assurances, and that she would have needed to have either resigned already, or have notified Holac of her intention to do so.
Dorries then asked whether it was possible for her to be put back on the list if she resigned that day. The answer was no. She then asked whether Sunak would submit her name for a peerage at the next election in 2024. She was told he would not be making personal assurances to anyone. She resigned hours later.
In Boris World, Sunak misled Johnson and the peers were the sacrificial lambs.
What turned this episode from a major blow-up into a total meltdown in relations was the privileges committee, which has been investigating whether Johnson lied to MPs about partygate.
At noon on Thursday, Johnson was on a plane to Cairo to give a speech when he received an email from the committee that included a letter from chair Harriet Harman saying he had been found guilty of deliberate contempt of parliament.
Johnson erupted with rage as he and an aide read the email. The MPs’ conclusions were “absolutely extreme beyond any expectation”.
When a hard copy of the report was handed to Lord Pannick, Johnson’s lawyer, on Thursday afternoon, they could see it found that not only had he made recklessly inaccurate statements, he had deliberately lied to MPs. What’s more, the report concluded that in defending himself to the committee, Johnson had made further inaccurate claims under oath, themselves a contempt of parliament.
Johnson, believing the report to be “nakedly political and transparently biased”, turned to an aide and said: “This just confirms all our worst suspicions. It’s a total stitch-up and they’re not even bothering to hide it.”
A source close to him said: “They are effectively claiming to have gone back in time and put themselves inside his own brain and claimed with 100 per cent certainty that they know what he was thinking, when there was not one email or WhatsApp showing that he set out to lie.”
Johnson was particularly shocked because his team had, until around two weeks ago, been assured by Tory whips that MPs on the committee, which has a Conservative majority, were leaning towards a suspension of less than ten days — the threshold after which there can be a recall vote in an MP’s seat, which can force a by-election.
Aides say that back channels went quiet a fortnight ago as Johnson and No 10 fell out over whether to redact WhatsApp messages being sent to the Covid inquiry, and the belief in Team Boris that ministers were behind a decision to send details from Johnson’s prime ministerial appointments diary to the police amid claims that it might provide evidence of further lockdown breaches.
“It looks very much like No 10 tipped the Tories on the committee the wink that they could throw the book at Boris,” a Johnson ally said. “They think they can only trust him if they kill him — but he’s like Captain Scarlet: he just regenerates. They’ve made a serious mistake. He speaks and people listen — and he’ll be saying a lot in the weeks to come.”
In essence, Johnson’s team believe that Sunak could have saved him and chose not to, and that that was a deliberate choice.
Sunak’s allies say it would have been completely inappropriate to intervene, either to lean on the privileges committee to save him, or to intervene to make changes to the list of peerages. “Whatever the PM does, he follows the procedure,” a Sunak aide said.
What is clear is that the privileges committee changed its mind in the last fortnight — but not for the reason the Johnsonites think. Sources close to the inquiry say the evidence submitted to the police, which was also sent to the MPs, tipped the balance in favour of a suspension of more than ten days. It is understood the MPs are now contemplating 20 days, although Johnson was told only that it would “significantly exceed” ten.
The clincher — and the reason Johnson has been found guilty of the new contempt — was that the evidence implied potential rule-breaking had extended to Chequers. “He didn’t restrict himself to denying there were parties in Downing Street,” a source said. “He was emphatic about the fact there was nothing at any stage in any venue.”
The committee is also said to have become increasingly irritated by the “belligerence” of Johnson’s lawyers. “He did everything within his power to annoy [the committee],” a source said. “They were not necessarily training their sights on his head. They were up for some sort of compromise.”
Realising he was in deep trouble, Johnson’s woes were compounded when it was made clear to him in recent days that the government would not whip Tory MPs to vote down the committee’s recommended sanctions. Johnson is said to have responded: “I’m f***ed.”
Furious at his treatment by the privileges committee and angry about what had happened to Dorries, he decided to quit the Commons, denying MPs the opportunity to kick him out. He privately expressed his anger at the prospect of dozens of Tory MPs voting in favour of the suspension: “Don’t these people realise they are only in parliament because of me?”
Johnson’s resignation letter was blistering, condemning the privileges committee and Sunak’s drift away from what he regards as properly Conservative policies in equal measure. Dorries had quit a few hours earlier. One friend said: “They’ve done a Thelma and Louise.”
Johnson allies believe this is all part of a concerted plot to drive him and his closest allies out of public life. One Tory grandee said: “He even sent one of his henchmen to Priti Patel to urge her to stand as London mayor. She was told if she didn’t win, she would get a peerage. By all accounts she was furious and saw it as part of an effort to get rid of her — but she has no intention of going anywhere.”
Recent visitors to Johnson’s office, at Millbank Tower in London, have found the former prime minister to be lacking some of his usual ebullience, a man ground down by having to spend a large amount of his time with lawyers refighting battles already fought in Downing Street. While there was an element of fury to his decision, there was also weariness.
Johnson regularly voices to friends and visitors his belief that what he perceives as a political and civil service establishment “is truly out to stop Brexit and wants me out of the way”. He believes that Sunak, along with Dominic Cummings, former aide Dougie Smith and senior civil servants, all conspired to force him from Downing Street over the partygate claims, which he still regards privately as “complete bollocks”.
One close ally said: “When you feel like everyone is against you and you’re facing a kangaroo court, that is going to get you down. I think he has felt a bit helpless. It’s got him very down. That’s why he has thrown in the towel.”
In quieter moments, Johnson acknowledges mistakes about some of the handling of events in No 10, but not that he was to blame for the end of his premiership. When an MP recently put to him that the privileges committee had been created with his approval, Johnson claimed he was in India at the time and distracted. He also suggested that he had left Chris Heaton-Harris, his former chief whip, to handle the details.
A senior government source added: “Three courts decide the fate of a politician. There is the House, there is the privileges committee and there is the electorate — and Boris has decided that he doesn’t want to face any of them.”
Sunak was chairing a cabinet committee meeting on small boats when Johnson resigned. Aides did not interrupt proceedings, but told him as he left the cabinet room. “He was disappointed in one way, sanguine in another,” one source said.
Johnson’s Tory rivals rejoiced. George Osborne tweeted: “What a lovely evening.” David Cameron joked with friends: “Who knew my recall law was so powerful, everyone called it feeble at the time.”
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was at a dinner in Derby celebrating Dame Margaret Beckett’s 40 years as an MP when it was announced from the stage Johnson had resigned. “There was a lot of cheering,” a source said. “Keir just smiled.”
Labour is now expected to prioritise fighting the by-election in Johnson’s seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, which has never been held by any other party other than the Tories, over Dorries’ former berth, Mid Bedfordshire, which has been Tory since 1931. A Whitehall source said: “A big problem for Sunak is that these are precisely the Cameron coalition seats he promised he would win. One is a heartland rural Tory seat, the other is a suburban one. Both heavily Leave-voting.”
It is understood that the by-elections are likely to be held as soon as possible, with the writs moved as soon as Monday. An emergency meeting attended by senior party figures was held in Downing Street on Friday night to discuss the vacancies. Another is imminent.
The privileges committee, which says Johnson has “impugned the integrity” of the Commons, will now meet on Monday to complete its inquiry. It is then expected to publish its findings, although it is unclear, given Johnson’s resignation, whether it will now recommend any sanction. Having lost the power to suspend Johnson, the committee could recommend the only other meaningful sanction left open to it: denying him privileged access to parliament, as is normally afforded to ex-MPs. That would mean stripping him of his pass.
Johnson’s allies, who have also called the committee a “kangaroo court” and a “witch-hunt”, could also face censure. The report will warn explicitly that any further attempts to impugn the committee could see the offending MPs face contempt proceedings of their own. Members of the committee have been given extra security because of Johnson’s attacks.
Enemies of Johnson will see a parallel morality play in the conjunction of events on both sides of the Atlantic, with Johnson announcing his departure from parliament on the same day as Donald Trump was indicted for hoarding classified documents. The difference is that Trump could still win election from jail, whereas Johnson cannot be prime minister without a seat.
Johnson’s team have left open his running again, but one ally said: “He won’t be standing for election any time soon.” Johnson and Dorries had a conversation on Thursday about whether he should seek to stand in her seat and she said: “Don’t put yourself through it.” Johnson replied: “F***ing hell, I won’t.”
What is certain is that he won’t go quietly. Plans for more journalism and a TV show are in the works and he will continue to make millions from paid speeches. A memoir is already well advanced. Those who have seen what he has written say it will be a blockbuster book. “The man can turn a phrase,” a publishing source said.
Some still hope that a rapprochement can be found between Johnson and Sunak. A cabinet minister close to Johnson said: “He will cause Labour as much trouble as the Tories. If he says that Labour is going to betray Brexit voters at the general election, a lot of them will listen to him.”
What is clear, from the briefing and counter-briefing, is that the two most prominent people in the Tory party are daggers drawn. “He’ll be back — but from the sidelines,” a close friend of Johnson said. “He is making lots of money. He needs money. He likes money. I think he’ll use the money to try to buy back all the people he lost in his life.”
Whether Rishi Sunak likes it or not, Boris Johnson is still a factor in his life.
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Is that the same lad defending Man City?
Yes
Pannick in the courts of London.
I see to my horror that Johnson has thrown out a raft of honours to some apparently undeserving cunts including Rees Mogg and that horrible bitch Priti Patel. A list of complete and utter cunts.
Pursuant to this archaic scutter are we to expect another listing of nominees following on the resignation of that lugubrious hatchet Liz Truss in the light of her resignation as PM…….
To think that these people’s ancestors ruled most of the civilised world in their time…… Spoofers….
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One of the greatest posts ever on TFK.
And a completely wonderful use, semantically and tonally, of ‘pursuant’.
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You have me all embarrassed here now. The opinions remain unaltered nonetheless. Gimps all……
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