![]() One Brexit encounter sticks in the memory. Over the years, I’ve encountered Johnson at various political, charity and social events. But Johnson doesn’t do apologies, just witness his embittered, graceless Number 10 resignation speech that omitted the ‘R’-word. I wonder if Hastings ever privately muses that if he had given his young Brussels staffer the sack, the course of British history may have been changed for the better.Ĭollier anticipated an apology. His then-editor Max Hastings took a dimmer view and disciplined him without giving Johnson the boot. But, when the tape emerged, Johnson sought to laugh it off, claiming he was only humouring his chum. In the end, the planned assault never happened. Far from being outraged, he expressed relief when Guppy told him that Collier would only get “a couple of black eyes and a cracked rib” and our future prime minister and disgraced star of the psychodrama known as ‘Partygate’ said, “Ok, Darry, I said I’ll do it. In an infamous but character-informing taped conversation which became known as ‘Guppygate’, Johnson agreed to help. Guppy turned to Johnson to see if he could use his journalistic contacts to get a home address for our reporter, Stuart Collier, so he could arrange for a couple of heavies to beat him up and shut down the investigation. One of my reporters was investigating Johnson’s Old Eton and Oxford chum Darius Guppy over a suspected fraud and Guppy, subsequently jailed in New York over a fake $1.8 million jewellery heist and fraud plot, had got wind of our investigation. Turning back the personal clock, my low opinion of Johnson began in 1990 when I was a young senior executive on the News of the World and he was a thrusting young Brussels Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. ![]() Johnson indeed fulfilled his ambition, taking Britain out of the EU on the back of a referendum victory that ranks as the biggest mis-selling operation in our history, winning a landslide general election on the all too predictably unfulfilled promise of ‘Get Brexit Done’, before achieving another historic feat by becoming the first prime minister to be fined for breaking the law in office.įinally, Johnson managed another milestone by becoming the prime minister humiliatingly ousted from office by a mass revolt of his own MPs and ministers, not on the honourable grounds of policy differences but by virtue of a sordid and shameful litany of lies, sleaze, law-breaking, cronyism, incompetence, hypocrisy, and a gargantuan sense of self-entitlement. Boris Johnson cast himself as the front of house showman for the official Brexit campaign group, Vote Leave, a role that at least one relative privately confides had far more to do with his transition from the boy who wanted to be ‘World King’ to the clownish man-child prepared to settle for Downing Street, than any great passion for Brexit itself.
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