Boris johnson

What do you need to do to get sacked in this place? Quite a lot, according to the response from Downing Street to the two rows in Westminster today. First, there’s Boris Johnson, refusing to apologise in the Commons for his blunder last week about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. When asked about why Johnson hadn’t said sorry for the distress his mistake had caused, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman argued that the important thing was that ‘the clarity that the Foreign Secretary provided today was clearly helpful, it has been welcomed and the Iranians are in no doubt as to what our view is’. He repeated the point about clarity being the

The latest competition called for a safe poem that Boris Johnson could have on hand to quote from when out in the field. The kerfuffle caused by the Foreign Secretary’s murmured quotation of a few lines from Kipling’s poem ‘Mandalay’ during a recent visit to Shwedagon Pagoda in Myanmar led me to wonder whether it might be wise, given an ever-increasing number of no-go areas subject matter-wise, to challenge you to fashion an all-purpose poem unlikely to offend. Barbara Jones’s Blakean-flavoured entry — ‘And did my feet in foreign clime/ Trample on sensitivities?’ — caught my attention, as did Tim Raikes’s patter song. But they were outflanked by the winners

If proof was needed that deference is dead in Parliament, look no further than the interview Tom Tugendhat has given to The House magazine. The new chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee uses his first interview since winning the coveted position to make clear he’s ready and willing to be Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary should his services be required. However, the part that caught Mr S’s eye relates to the current occupant of the Foreign Office. Tugendhat – who was elected to Parliament in 2015 – appears to launch an attack on Boris Johnson’s modus operandi: ‘He’s certainly got a lot of passion for the United

I used to long for mid-October when I could say goodbye to the hot rooms, cold buffets, and warm white wine of party conference season. But ever since I swapped politics for the world of museums, I have happily rediscovered those autumnal weeks of blackberries, spider webs and London returning to life after summer. At the V&A, we opened our new opera exhibition, tracing the art form’s development from Monteverdi’s Venice to Shostakovich’s Moscow. At the British Museum, the Scythians have been reviving the art of ancient Siberia. And around the capital, Frieze Art Fair has been drawing the world’s aesthetes to London. What we don’t yet know is how

Good news in Downing Street: Theresa May has survived the weekend. After the Shapps plot failed to take off, the new consensus is that the beleaguered Prime Minister should re-assert her authority on an increasingly unruly Tory party by reshuffling her Cabinet. Had the speech gone better, there was talk that she could have done this last week. The Sunday Times reports that a shuffle is now likely to occur after the European Council meeting in two weeks’ time. If May does oblige, there are calls from within the party for her to use a reshuffle to promote younger talent – and to sack the Foreign Secretary. The latter still

By the simple expedients of being cheerful and attacking Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson scored a deserved hit at the Tory conference on Tuesday. It is right not to be shy about questioning Mr Corbyn’s record. But while it is true that Mr Corbyn has never wavered, over 40 years, in his extreme socialist views, it is also worth noting that he has recently changed his tone a lot. It reminds me of how Ian Paisley, without ever recanting his anti-Popery, dropped his noisy and lurid 1970s expressions of it, and adopted a more modern political voice. In his speech in Brighton last week, Mr Corbyn almost completely left out one

It’s safe to say that Theresa May’s conference speech has not gone to plan after the Prime Minister came down with a bad cough – and a heckler presented her with a P45. Happily she has her Cabinet on her side. Or one Cabinet minister at least. Amber Rudd was caught on camera jumping to her feet to give May a standing ovation to help her during an awkward moment in the speech. The Home Secretary then appeared to order Boris Johnson to do the same: Amber Rudd telling Boris Johnson to stand for May pic.twitter.com/VGYeb5CroR — Mollie Goodfellow (@hansmollman) October 4, 2017 1-0 to Rudd…

Boris Johnson’s speech to Conservative Party conference was disloyal to the Prime Minister in the sense that unlike Theresa May, the Foreign Secretary finds it easy to be upbeat and persuasive about the benefits of Conservatism. As this morning’s round of interviews showed, the Prime Minister’s definition of ‘upbeat’ is talking faster. Johnson, meanwhile, uses his command of the English language and confidence in public speaking to cheer up party members who were so desperate for something to take their minds off their current general misery that they were queuing in long lines to get into the conference hall. But members already love Johnson. They know that even when he

Will Tory MPs unite behind Theresa May? That’s the big question at this year’s party conference – but for Boris Johnson, there is also another pressing issue: can Cyprus reunite? The Foreign Secretary arrived in Manchester – and immediately joined a welcome reception for the Conservative friends of Cyprus. He revealed to the audience the talks he has been privy to over the past year: We have not in the last 12 months achieved quite what I wanted to do. And there was a meeting in the Swiss resort called Crans Montana where we all tried to get together to resolve the Cyprus problem and we all went up to

Boris Johnson and Ruth Davidson are two of my favourite Tory politicians: both energetic, eloquent, optimistic, pro-immigration and – in general – liberal conservatives. Both have proven track records of winnng voters in parts of the country that had been inhospitable to Tories. Both are advocates of conservatism for explicitly progressive reasons: but because it’s the best way of helping those who need help most.  So I’ve never worked out why there seems to be a firth of bad blood between them. We saw it in the Brexit campaign: it seemed, as times, that the main reason Ruth joined the Wembley Brexit debate was the joy of giving Boris a

Oh dear. As the speeches get underway on day two of Labour conference, Emily Thornberry has kicked off proceedings with a low blow aimed at the Foreign Secretary. Rather than attack her opposite number for his policies alone, the shadow foreign secretary appeared to try and make a jibe about Boris Johnson’s personal life as she went on the offensive over Brexit: ‘Let’s all take a second to sympathise with poor old Boris. Come on, just a second. He’s not been happy lately. Apparently he’s sick of being blamed for the way that Brexit is going, and all the broken promises of the leave campaign. I’m sorry, what? Like, what?