Johnson’s critics will be confounded by the new PM’s liberalism
There’s a good chance that things will go badly for Boris.
He barely has a majority, his party is divided and MPs from across the house are priming their parliamentary grenades to thwart and disrupt him.
On the other hand, it is at least possible that he gets a Brexit deal passed and triggers what even Philip Hammond used to call an economic “deal dividend” – where dormant investment decisions are unlocked and the end of uncertainty allows businesses to breathe a sigh of relief.
In such circumstances, the smart money will be on Johnson to beat Jeremy Corbyn in an election. While all this is unknown, his political opponents are currently road-testing their attack lines and Labour is desperate to paint Johnson as an extreme right-winger.
Johnson may be many things, but hard-right isn’t one of them. He’s a liberal, and it’s his liberalism that helped him win London (a Labour city) twice.
His first act appears to have been dropping David Cameron and Theresa May’s obsession with cutting migration to the tens of thousands – a thoroughly welcome move and early evidence of a proper ‘global Britain’ strategy.
He was the first senior Tory to back equal marriage (back in 2004) and has championed an amnesty for illegal immigrants in the UK. His opponents are going to have to try harder if they want to land a blow.
It’s all coming up Gove
A good week for former advisers to Michael Gove. Dom Cummings, the eccentric yet brilliant brains behind Gove’s education reforms and the successful Vote Leave campaign, is notoriously contemptuous of civil servants – and most politicians. Expect things to kick off.
Meanwhile, another former member of Gove’s Praetorian guard, Henry de Zoete, has just sold his energy bills switching service (of Dragons’ Den fame) to the group behind Go Compare – for around £10m.
Speaking of Gove, I bumped into him on Tuesday. He’d opted for a nice lunch over witnessing the result of the Tory leadership election in Westminster. He suggested (rightly) that we’ll miss our political reporter Owen Bennett when he leaves for the Telegraph. Owen broke the story of Gove’s past cocaine use. The new de facto deputy prime minister had the good grace to chuckle when I suggested Owen was “leaving on a high”. He’s been brilliant, and we wish him well.
A lesson in how not to approach corporate Twitter
I know times are tough in investment banking but there’s no need for the comms teams to start tweeting like Donald Trump. Swiss giant UBS picked up on an honest mistake in an earnings story by an FT journalist and lashed out on Twitter, accusing the author of “embarrassing reporting” and of pushing an “agenda”. The online error was quickly edited. Michael Steen, head of media relations at the ECB, joined the online row and said the UBS response was “not a good look for criticism”.
A worthy cause
It isn’t easy to pivot this page from jovial to somber, but I must share some desperately sad news. You will, I hope, be familiar with Rob Colvile’s columns in this paper and with his wider work as one of Westminster’s brightest thinkers. His wife, Andrea, died earlier this month after a six-month battle with auto-immune disease.
She leaves two little boys, Edward and Alexander, both of whom will one day be proud of the way their father has responded to this tragedy by launching a fundraising campaign to better understand this complex and relatively neglected disease. Within a very short space of time, Rob and his family have raised nearly £50,000 to start an annual prize in Andrea’s name for research into the condition.
Few of us can imagine the distress or heartache that descends at a time like this, and few would match Rob’s dignity and determination to find something positive in the darkness. Please support the appeal. Search: Just Giving and Andrea Colvile.
Main image credit: Getty