A return of Johnson, Carrie & Old Corruption?
Following the overdue departure of Truss as Prime Minister the sycophant and idiot section of Tory MPs (a significant number of the Parliamentary Party) is said to be considering whether Boris Johnson should return as PM.
Johnson has spent the last few crisis ridden weeks not in Parliament doing his job as an MP but on holiday in the Caribbean. He broke off only to trouser £135,000 for a 30 minute speech to insurance brokers in Colorado.
Johnson is synonymous with a politics of Old Corruption, of sinecures, favours for mates and so on. Below is one of the last instances of this before he was booted out by Tory MPs in early July 2022
If you follow social media you may have seen a story about Boris Johnson trying to appoint Carrie Symonds as his Chief of Staff when he was briefly Foreign Secretary in Theresa May’s Government. It didn’t happen and the story, though apparently not denied, was pulled from early editions of the Times (19th June 2022).
A recent biography of Johnson by Tom Bowker notes that Johnson was already fed up because Symonds had been fired by Brandon Lewis as Head of Tory Comms and assumed this was May’s work
Why is this story of any interest? Because it plays to what we know of how Johnson goes on in Government. Jobs are given not on merit but as sinecures and favours to those who back Johnson. It’s the world of pre-1832 Old Corruption where democratic oversight and accountability had little influence
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