Sleaze Avalanche Snowballing For Boris Johnson; Ex-Girlfriend's Diary Documentation Making It Worse
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A golden rule of spin doctors, often attributed to Alastair Campbell (though he denies being the originator), is that if one particularly bad story is still plastered over the front pages nine days after it first broke, then the person at the centre of the storm will be in terminal trouble. Saturday was the 10th day since the Paterson fiasco, in which Johnson tried to save his friend’s career, despite the latter’s “egregious” breaches of Commons rules. And the sleaze stories were still coming from left and right, thick and fast.
The Guardian front page headline was “PM’s holiday villa linked to Goldsmith tax evasion case”, while the Daily Mail had a poll that was such bad news for the Conservatives that the paper splashed it across the front. “After a week of sleaze Labour race ahead of Tories by SIX points”, the Mail said. Embarrassingly for Johnson, this was all on the concluding weekend of the Cop26 climate summit – at which he had hoped to pose as a global saviour. Today, on it goes, with the Observer’s extraordinary revelations about Jennifer Arcuri’s diary of her affair with Johnson when he was London mayor. His ex-lover’s apparently contemporaneous notes show he overruled advice from his own officials in order to further her business interests, and their relationship. A poll for this newspaper by Opinium today also gives Labour a lead – for the first time since January – and shows Johnson’s personal ratings plumbing new depths. Now it is the mood inside the Tory party that is depressed, and very sour.
Much of the 2019 intake – including those who won former Labour seats in the north and Midlands because voters liked Johnson’s upbeat political celebrity brand much more than that of Jeremy Corbyn – are furious at being ordered to vote to save Paterson for no reason, only then to be blamed for doing so by their constituents. Frustration at the government’s antics extends right across the Conservative parliamentary party. A Tory MP who won his seat in 2010 said: “Our intake is also pretty pissed off with him because he recently promoted the 2019 intake to jobs ahead of us because they were from the ‘red wall’ seats, when we had been waiting for years. And now this. We are not a happy united team.”
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Another former minister described him as “a publicity phenomenon, which is how he got the 80-seat majority”. Now that people had begun to see through the act, he suggested, that could be that. “He’s squandering that,” the former minister added. “He looks dodgy. It’s like having a drift in the ceiling and you think, oh, I can live with that for a bit. And the whole fucking ceiling comes down and you think, I wish I’d dealt with that. “Voters don’t seem to care, then suddenly, it all catches up with you. The troubles with the economy are going to mount up. Levelling up is a slogan and not a policy. Global Britain is a slogan and not a policy. He just looks shallow.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/14/ten-days-that-turned-boris-johnson-from-election-winner-to-political-liability
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