Although George Osborne was passed over for the role of Foreign Secretary in Theresa May’s Cabinet reshuffle, the MP for Tatton is still keen to show that he can fly the flag for Brexit Britain. It follows that the former Chancellor of the Exchequer is set to be guest of honour at Tina Brown’s Brexit bash in New York this week.
According to Page Six, Osborne will join the top hack — and one time Remain-er — for a dinner which aims to show that the ‘special relationship’ can survive Brexit. With New York journalists perceiving this as Osborne’s attempt to ‘drum up trade with the US in the wake of his country’s shock exit from the European bloc’, Mr S can’t help but wonder if George has run his plans past Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary.
However, although Osborne could no doubt do with some pointers when it comes to talking about Brexit without mentioning Project Fear, Mr S suspects it’s for the best that Johnson sits this one out. Following the Brexit result, Brown penned a piece for the Daily Beast in which she recalled a run-in with Boris when he was a student at Oxford and she was covering the death of Olivia Channon, the Guinness heiress. Brown recruited the help of Johnson’s girlfriend Allegra Mostyn-Owen to round up students she could interview for her piece:
‘I recruited and paid a student named Allegra Mostyn-Owen, who knew Olivia, to help me interview her upper-class friends. She rounded up a group of them, though she herself could not join us, at Oxford’s Sorbonne restaurant. One of them was her boyfriend (whom she later briefly married), Boris Johnson—then as now a witty, shambolic figure with a shaggy blond mop.’
Given that Mostyn-Owen was absent at the gathering, Brown was surprised to later read a ‘fallacious account’ in the Telegraph under Allegra’s byline detailing what she had allegedly said. Brown later discovered that Boris had filed the piece under his girlfriend’s name:
‘I eventually discovered that it was Boris who had written the piece (and made up the quotes) under Allegra’s name—a piece of baffling treachery that caused his girlfriend, when it was pointed out to the editor that she wasn’t actually present, to never again be offered a byline in the Sunday Telegraph.’
Steerpike suspects Johnson ought to add Brown to the growing list of people he had best avoid on diplomatic visits.
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