Boris Johnson, from parliament, is a columnist again
The image of Boris Johnson made the front pages of London newspapers on Friday, a day after a parliamentary committee found him guilty of misleading lawmakers about partying during the coronavirus pandemic. But it was conspicuously absent from The Daily Mail, Britain’s largest and most influential tabloid.
That is—until, overhead of Mr. Johnson’s latest misery, one looked over at a curiously familiar silhouette of a figure with a generous head of hair. Next to it was a headline that read: “Starting tomorrow: our erudite new columnist, who will be required reading in Westminster – and around the world!”
A spokesman for The Mail, Sean Walsh, confirmed that mysterious new writer Mr. Johnson was the former Prime Minister. His first weekly column would be posted on The Mail’s website around 5 p.m. local time (noon Eastern time) on Friday, Mr Walsh said, and would appear as a full page in print on Saturday.
The column will give Mr Johnson a powerful platform to weigh in on the political debates of the day and, if he is inclined, throw proverbial hand grenades at Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, his former cabinet minister-turned-rival.
For Mr. Sunak, who has struggled to shake off Mr. Johnson’s turbulent legacy, that is not an attractive prospect. Government officials clearly hoped that the parliamentary report on Mr Johnson would draw a curtain on his political career, allowing Mr Sunak to focus on his efforts to turn the UK economy around before the general election, likely in autumn 2024.
Mr Johnson abruptly left parliament last week after receiving a prescription of the report from the House of Commons Privileges Committee recommending that he be suspended for 90 days for deliberately misleading lawmakers about Downing Street social gatherings that went against with the constraints of the pandemic. .
In a vitriolic statement, Mr Johnson said he had been the victim of a political vendetta, calling the commission’s report a “charade”, a “full load of tripe” and “the latest knife thrust in a long-running political assassination”.
Clearly, Mr. Johnson is determined not to go quietly. The Financial Times reported that he was even considering running for mayor of London as an independent candidate, a position he held from 2008 to 2016. pair of Union Jacks.
Mr Johnson first rose to prominence as a Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph. His articles fueled British Euroscepticism by mocking European Union regulations, often in comically exaggerated terms.
He once reported that the European Commission was planning to blow up Berlaymont, the colossal, asbestos-riddled headquarters in Brussels. “Sappers will lay explosive charges at key points,” he wrote in The Telegraph.
Mr. Johnson later wrote columns for The Telegraph and The Spectator, a weekly which he also edited from 1999 to 2005. During those years he was criticized for using racial swear words. And in 2016, he angered aides to President Barack Obama by referring to “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral aversion to the British Empire.”
For Mr. Johnson, The Mail is probably his most comfortable home right now. Britain’s other right-wing newspapers, which once staunchly supported him and his Brexit cause, reported less sympathetically on his latest trials. For example, Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London declared “End of the road for Johnson” in a front-page headline.
Even The Telegraph, the former employer of Mr. Johnson, headlined fairly straightforwardly: “Johnson allies vow to expel MPs who vote in his censure,” and skipped a photo of him in favor of one of Glenda Jackson, the award-winning English actress and Labor Party politician who died on Thursday dead.
On Monday, members of parliament will be asked to vote on whether or not to accept the findings of the commission’s report. Some people close to Mr Johnson have threatened political repercussions against any Conservative lawmakers who endorse it, leading analysts to predict that many of them will abstain from voting.
The Mail has long supported Brexit and the Conservative Party. But under the newspaper’s previous editor, Geordie Greig, it had developed a reputation for challenging Mr Johnson’s government. Mr Greig was sacked in November 2021 and the paper has since returned to being a reliable supporter of Mr Johnson.
On Friday, The Mail left no doubt about it. “Tory revolts against ‘vengeful’ bid to ban Boris,” headlined the front page, under the latest columnist’s teasing announcement.