In the rest of the country, Boris Johnson was informally thrown out of office for being a habitual liar, but he himself sees that as nothing more than an “unexpected gap”.
The choice of words of the disgraced former Prime Minister in a strange article the audience Last week was certainly illusory, but I can reveal that it is all part of a carefully thought-out comeback effort. In Johnson’s recent meeting with Rupert Murdoch at his ranch in Montana, Johnson begged the nonagenarian tycoon to get his newspapers behind him in May, when Johnson believed local election results Rishi will make Sunak’s position unstable.
Johnson is conscious of Murdoch’s power: it was then that he heard that Sunday She decided to throw in the towel after a front page run telling her to withdraw from the Tory leadership contest in October.
Murdoch heard them at their meeting and there was already a sense of fear among his editors that he might soon receive orders to withdraw Johnson. Murdoch’s wall street journal The latter ran a piece by Johnson about the need for more international support for Ukraine which attempted to invest him with the statesman’s aura.
Meanwhile, Johnson has delivered more than a million speeches since leaving office, including one in Singapore extolling the virtues of cryptocurrency and blockchain, as did Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX. was accused of. The biggest financial fraud in US history,” its 50 biggest creditors were relieved of £2.5bn.
Mandrake has heard interesting rumors that Elon Musk is considering a bid for it. Wire group, which includes daily and Sunday titles, in addition to the audience, The group was officially put up for sale more than three years ago, but embarrassingly there have been no takers until now.
“After paying £35bn for Twitter, Musk could buy Wire out of small change,” says my man in Wire Newsroom. “It sounds like he wants respect more than anything else, and probably more of it in the old media than in the new. Much of what he’s gotten out of Twitter is abuse.
WireCo-owner Sir David Barclay was adamant that the family should make a profit on the £665 million they paid for the titles in 2004, but following his death last year, the younger members of the family did whatever they could were eager to receive him. The title is now open to realistic offers. Wire Musk has been obscure about, but recently it has become much more explicit in its coverage. Recent headlines include “Work-shy Britain will only recover if it learns from Elon Musk” and, in a story about its acquisition of Twitter, “Elon Musk is proving its pessimistic doubters wrong”. .
Brexiteer businessman Christopher Harborne celebrated his 60th birthday last weekend at the Kamalaya “wellness” resort in Thailand, a country where he has lived for the past 20 years and obtained citizenship under his new Thai name Chakrit Sankurit. Although he is no longer a UK resident, he donated £12m to the Brexit Party in 2019, which undoubtedly explains why its founder, Nigel Farage, was among those who came to pay him.
Harborne was recently in the news for spending £2,000 so Tory MP Steve Baker – who leads the anti-Net Zero group in parliament – could attend the Conservative Party’s summer ball. Harborne owns AML Global, an aviation fuel supplier operating in 1,200 locations globally, and has a history of supporting opponents of climate action.
Another Harborne company, Sheriff Global, deals in private jets and is registered in the British Virgin Islands. It was mentioned in the Panama Papers as an intermediary for offshore entities.
They live in the same north London constituency and are likely to fight each other to become its MPs in the next election. Jeremy Corbyn has represented Islington North since 1983 – most of the time for Labour, but for the last two years as an independent, after losing the whip. He plans to stand as an independent once again in a constituency where he is still regarded as a good local MP.
Against him will almost certainly be Mary Craig, a former Labor shadow minister who lost her Wakefield seat to the Tories in 2019. She used to be an Islington councillor, and Sir Keir Starmer wants her to take on Corbyn.
The irony is that the two get along very well, despite their different leftist views. Both are keen walkers – Corbin does not drive, while Craig is now chief executive of Living Streets, a charity fighting for pedestrians’ rights. They also occasionally meet at a local food hub, where Craig is a regular volunteer and Corbin occasionally comes by to help. Says a local, “There is a smile when they meet, but I wonder if that will change if they fight for the same seat.”
Rishi Sunak has often spoken about how protective he is of his young daughters, Krishna and Anushka, but has chosen to include the two on his official Christmas card, which is sent out to thousands of party supporters. Taken by his taxpayer-funded chief photographer Simon Walker – who trails him everywhere – it shows Sunak, his wife, Akshata Murthy, and their daughters preparing pudding in their kitchen. Newspapers, more conscious of their children’s right to privacy, have chosen not to reproduce the image.
Boris Johnson’s children were always a touchy subject for him – the question was how many he had – so his last Christmas card as prime minister featured only his dog Dillin.
Although Theresa May is a keen theatre-goer and is still a regular at the Theater Royal Windsor close to her constituency home, I have not seen any of her successors in the stalls. So, it was gratifying to see a former party leader in the seat next to me on the first night of a production of Josie Rourke as you like It At the new Soho Place Theater in London.
I hardly need to add that it was not a Philistine currently in office, but a former Labor leader in the form of Ed Miliband, who was attending with his wife, Justine Thornton. Miliband is a true lover of the theatre, but he is also a friend and indebted to Rourke. In 2014, when he was leading Labor and Rourke the Donmar at Covent Garden, I revealed how he was engaged in a valiant struggle to be more compatible with the cameras.
A close aide to the director told me at the time, “Obviously, it’s been a bit of an uphill struggle, but Josie feels like she’s making some progress and come the election, she should be much better.”
“They’re keeping it top secret because people have opinions about these kinds of things, but most senior politicians have had expert guidance somewhere.”