Of course we all know that Boris, in his time as the
Telegraph’s Europe correspondent, made his reputation by inventing Euromyths
about straight bananas and one size fits all condoms etc.; in effect creating
the Big Euromyth which he has now used to pull the UK out of the EU; but when I
saw this interview with Chris Patten I was surprised that he was able to call Boris Johnson a liar so directly and without any risk of legal proceedings for
slander.
I investigated further and discovered that Boris was sacked from the Times in 1987 following a story in which he fabricated a quote from
his godfather, an Oxford academic, who was ridiculed for Boris' inaccuracies.
He has also
been sacked from Michael Howard’s shadow ministerial team in 2004 for lying to Guy
Black, (Howard’s press secretary), David MacLean (the Tory Chief Whip) and the
Press about an affair that he was having with Petronella Wyatt that resulted in
her having an abortion.
But the most revealing episode of his character so far has been in a recorded telephone conversation with Darius Guppy, one of his Old Etonian chums, in which he agreed to get the address of a News of the World journalist, Stuart Collier, so that Guppy could arrange an assault intended to scare him off investigating a fraud case in which Guppy was involved. This took place in 1990 when Johnson was the Daily Telegraph's Europe correspondent. In an interview with Eddie Mair, Johnson subsequently denied that he had done anything wrong and said that he was just humouring his friend.
Judge for yourself whether he was asking Guppy questions about how much he was going to hurt Stuart Collier in order to humour him.
Government
ministers have had to resign for far less than any single one of these
escapades and yet Boris is still being considered as a potential Prime
Minister. We are now in a period of
post-truth politics in which skilled individuals, who are good at saying what
people want to hear, whether it is true or not, can rise above reasonable and
sensible discussion and get away with it.
Do we really
want a proven liar leading the country?
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