Tag: Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson

Full name: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson
Tory MP for: Uxbridge & South Ruislip (NW London)
First elected to this seat: 2015
2015 majority over Labour: 10,695 (23.9%)
2017 majority over Labour: 5,034 (10.8%)
Seat at-risk ranking: 74th (out of 317 Tory MPs)
Former Government post: Foreign Secretary (July 2016-July 2018)
Previously MP for: Henley (2001-2008)

[Wikipedia article on Boris Johnson]
[Wikipedia article on Uxbridge & South Ruislip constituency]

Boris Johnson’s links to soft drinks and tobacco lobbyists revealed after he announces review of ‘sin taxes’

From Business Insider: Boris Johnson is under pressure to reveal his campaign’s links to the soft drinks and tobacco industries after he announced plans to cut “sin taxes” if he becomes prime minister. Following the announcement, The Times revealed links between Johnson’s campaign and the soft drinks industry. One of Johnson’s advisers and former spokesman, Will Walden, is employed by the lobbyists Edelman, which has worked for Coca-Cola.

[Read full article on Business Insider…]

Boris Johnson refuses to appear on Sky Tory leadership debate

From The Guardian: Boris Johnson’s refusal to face public scrutiny as he runs for the Conservative party leadership has prompted Sky News to cancel a televised debate this week.

The broadcaster said that unless Johnson agreed to take part in the debate on Tuesday it would not go ahead. Instead it offered an alternative date of 1 July in an effort to get him and his fellow contender, Jeremy Hunt, to appear.
 
Hunt had agreed to take part in Tuesday’s debate and urged Johnson to join him. But Johnson’s team has repeatedly refused to say whether he plans to take part as it continues to restrict his media appearances.

Boris Johnson does speak to Steve Bannon, says Nigel Farage

From The Guardian: Boris Johnson does speak to Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage has said, increasing the pressure on the Conservative leadership frontrunner to explain his links to Donald Trump’s controversial former campaign manager.

“Steve likes to be seen at the centre of the action. He knows Boris, he speaks to Boris. Steve speaks to virtually everybody,” Farage told a press conference when asked what he knew of Johnson’s links to Bannon. “I’ve known Steve Bannon since 2012. There’s no great secret about that. Boris, of course, got to know Bannon when he was foreign secretary, when he was visiting Washington and going into the West Wing, and that’s how those two got to know each other.”

Farage’s comments follow the emergence of video footage in which Bannon speaks about his relationship and contacts with Johnson, and says he helped him put together his first speech after his resignation as foreign secretary, in which Johnson condemned Theresa May’s Brexit strategy. One clip shows Bannon reading a story about Johnson’s speech, before he says: “I’ve been talking to him all weekend about this speech. We went back and forth over the text.”

When reports emerged last year of links between Johnson and the far-right activist, who has tried to build up a network of populist movements across Europe, Johnson called them “a lefty delusion whose spores continue to breed in the Twittersphere”.

[Read full article on Guardian website…]

More Boris Johnson neighbours confirm ‘tear-up’ with partner

From The Guardian: Neighbours of the man who overheard a row between Boris Johnson and his partner Carrie Symonds, prompting a late-night police callout, have corroborated his account of the incident with one saying the “tear-up” led him to believe that someone was being murdered.

Another neighbour who heard the row, Earl McDermott, was reported as saying: “It was a proper tear-up. Glasses being smashed, screaming and a lot of arguing. I thought someone was being murdered.”
 
Nursery worker Fatimah, also a neighbour, backed up Penn’s account. “There was a lot of shouting, a lady was screaming and I could hear glasses or plates being thrown quite a few times,” she said. “The man was shouting back. I could hear it through my walls. It was obvious the lady was angry. She was screaming hysterically.”
 
Fatimah had earlier told another newspaper she had considered calling the police herself before officers arrived at the scene. Her husband, Imran, added that his wife had been frightened by the incident.

Boris Johnson: police called to loud altercation at potential PM’s home

From The Guardian: Police were called to the home of Boris Johnson and his partner, Carrie Symonds, in the early hours of Friday morning after neighbours heard a loud altercation involving screaming, shouting and banging.

The argument could be heard outside the property where the potential future prime minister is living with Symonds, a former Conservative Party head of press.

The neighbour said they recorded the altercation from inside their flat out of concern for Symonds. On the recording, heard by the Guardian, Johnson can be heard refusing to leave the flat and telling Symonds to “get off my fucking laptop” before there is a loud crashing noise.

Symonds is heard saying Johnson had ruined a sofa with red wine: “You just don’t care for anything because you’re spoilt. You have no care for money or anything.”

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UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia unlawful, court of appeal declares

From The Guardian: British arms sales to Saudi Arabia have been ruled unlawful by the court of appeal in a critical judgment that also accused ministers of ignoring whether airstrikes that killed civilians in Yemen broke humanitarian law.

Three judges said that a decision made in secret in 2016 had led them to decide that Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt and Liam Fox and other key ministers had illegally signed off on arms exports without properly assessing the risk to civilians.

Sir Terence Etherton, the master of the rolls, said on Tuesday that ministers had “made no concluded assessments of whether the Saudi-led coalition had committed violations of international humanitarian law in the past, during the Yemen conflict, and made no attempt to do so”.

[Read full article on Guardian website…]

Boris Johnson published a poem joking about the ‘extermination’ of the ‘verminous’ Scottish people

From Business Insider: Boris Johnson launched his campaign to become prime minister stating that he was best-placed to “unite” the United Kingdom, following the divisions over Brexit.

However, when Johnson was editor of the Spectator magazine in 2004, he sparked outrage in one part of the UK, when he authorised the publication of an apparently satirical poem describing Scottish people as “a verminous race” who should be exterminated.

The poem, which has since been removed from the magazine’s archive, was written by its then staffer James Michie.

It described Scots as “tartan dwarves” who were “polluting our stock” and suggested that the country should be turned into a “ghetto” with the inhabitants submitted for “extermination.”

Reacting to the poem at the time, Maureen Fraser, director of the Commission for Racial Equality in Scotland, described it as “very offensive and the language is deeply inflammatory… Some of the language, such as ‘comprehensive extermination’ and ‘polluting our stock’, is completely and utterly unacceptable. It cannot be tolerated.”

[Read full article on Business Insider…]

FactCheck: Boris Johnson’s broken promises as London mayor

From Channel 4 News: In 2009, Boris Johnson promised to end rough sleeping within three years. He said: “It’s scandalous that, in 21st century London, people have to resort to sleeping on the streets, which is why I have pledged to end rough sleeping in the capital by 2012.”

But by his final autumn in office (2015), there were an estimated 940 people sleeping rough in the capital.

Over his tenure, rough sleeping rose by 130 per cent.

Mr Johnson made a number of opaque and downright misleading claims about the strength of the Metropolitan Police while he was mayor of London, which we FactChecked at the time.

At one point he announced: “We are recruiting 5,000 constables over the next three years”, which sounded like a welcome boost to Met police numbers.

He failed to mention that the Met expected to lose 5,000 PCs over three years through natural wastage – all he was promising to do was replace the ones who left.

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Bumboys, hot totty and piccaninnies: Boris Johnson’s long record of sexist, homophobic and racist comments

From Business Insider: In 1996, while a journalist for the Telegraph, Boris Johnson went to the Labour conference and wrote a piece reviewing the quality of “the hot totty” who were present.

“The unanimous opinion is that what has been called the ‘Tottymeter’ reading is higher than at any Labour Party conference in living memory,” he wrote.

He added that: “Time and again the ‘Tottymeter’ has gone off as a young woman delegate mounts the rostrum.”

He concluded that the real reason women are turning to Labour is because of their natural “fickleness.”

[Read full article on Business Insider…]

Boris Johnson’s £10bn tax cut for the rich would conveniently hand MPs an extra £6,000/year

From Evolve Politics: The clear favourite to be the next leader of the Conservative Party, Boris Johnson, has risked the wrath of ordinary working people by pledging to spend a staggering £10bn cutting taxes for the rich by raising the 40% income tax threshold from £50,000 to £80,000 – plans that, conveniently, could see MPs like himself pocket an extra £6,000 a year.

[Read article on Evolve Politics…]

Boris Johnson apologises to MPs for failing to declare income in time

From The Guardian: Boris Johnson has offered MPs a “full and unreserved apology” over the late declaration of more than £52,000 in income.

He made the apology to the House of Commons having been told to do so after he repeatedly failed to register payments from his newspaper column and books within the set time limit.

In a report, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, said that the former foreign secretary admitted he had failed to register payments in time on nine occasions in the previous 12 months.

The report recommended that Johnson make an apology to the Commons on a point of order.

Stone said that while the Conservative MP had fully cooperated and promised to address the issue, the amount of money registered late – almost £53,000, or about 70% of his MP’s’ salary – and the number of times it had happened “suggested a lack of attention to the house’s requirements, rather than inadvertent error”.

Under parliamentary rules, MPs are allowed to earn money beyond their official duties but authorities must be notified within 28 days so it can be entered into the register of MPs’ financial interests.

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Boris Johnson’s unused water cannon sold for scrap at £300,000 loss

From The Guardian: Three unusable water cannon bought by Boris Johnson when he was mayor of London have been sold for scrap, at a net loss of more than £300,000.

Johnson bought the crowd-control vehicles from the German police in 2014, in anticipation of social unrest, without checking whether they could be used on London’s streets. In one of his most humiliating episodes as mayor the then home secretary Theresa May banned them from use anywhere in England and Wales. It left the capital’s taxpayers with three expensive white elephants.

The current mayor, Sadiq Khan, pledged to claw back as much money as possible on the redundant vehicles by selling them. But after almost two years the mayor’s office admitted defeat in its attempt to find a reputable buyer.

It announced on Monday that it has agreed to sell the vehicles for just £11,025. The fee recoups 3.4% of the £322,834.71 spent on the vehicles since 2014.

The 25-year-old vehicles cost £85,022 in 2014, but they were found to be riddled with faults and required expensive modification to make them road worthy. This included £32,000 to comply with the city’s low emission zone, and almost £1,000 on new stereos.

Boris Johnson accepted £14k worth of hospitality from the Saudis days before Khashoggi’s death

From the Morning Star: Former foreign secretary Boris Johnson accepted £14,000 worth of hospitality from the Saudi regime, only days before Jamal Khashoggi’s death, it was revealed this week.

Andrew Smith, media co-ordinator of Campaign Against Arms Trade, said: “Politicians should not be taking money from authoritarian regimes or dictatorships like the one in Saudi Arabia, which has an appalling human rights record and has inflicted a humanitarian crisis on Yemen.

“The Saudi regime is not spending money on hospitality for Boris Johnson because it cares about his views on education. It is doing it because it knows that he’s got ambitions for Downing Street and it wants to buy influence.”

Labour’s shadow cabinet office minister Jon Trickett said it was another reminder of how far the Tories’ “cosy relationship” with the “murderous” Saudi regime extends.

[Read full article on Morning Star website…]

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