Thread by @RussInCheshire

MEGA-THREAD (sorry)

Boris Johnson was born in USA, and lived there using the name "Al" until he went to Eton, at which point contemporaries said he invented "the eccentric English persona" we know now.

His family calls him Al in private. "Boris" is just a marketing brand.

His Eton tutors wrote: "He sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility ... He is, in fact, pretty idle ... I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception"

His ability to invent a phrase got him a career in journalism, but "invent" quickly became a problem: he was sacked by The Times for making up a quote, and lying about it. His colleagues said he was no great loss, as he'd been disorganised, chaotic, and lacking in basic skills.

Because he is essentially not employable, his dad, a former diplomat, wangled him a job writing about Brussels for The Telegraph. But he quickly became bored by reality, so stopped attending meetings, and instead would sit in his hotel, inventing stories about EU politics.

This isn't a secret, by the way. He openly admitted to doing this, in writing, to his own readers. It was blatant.

"Some of my most joyous hours have been spent in a state of semi-incoherence, composing foam-flecked hymns of hate", he wrote.

A diplomat appearing in Johnson's made-up articles described the experience.

"He was the paramount of exaggeration and distortion and lies. He was a clown – a successful clown"

The EU spokesman Willy Hélin - renowned for his politeness - called his column "A load of bullshit"

Around this time, Boris Johnson was recorded agreeing to help his former school friend, the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy, beat up a journalist who was investigating his activities.

The plan was to give him black eyes and break his ribs.

It's on record.

Johnson moved into politics, and became Shadow Arts Minister.

When reports said he was having an affair with Petronella Wyatt, Johnson called the story an "inverted pyramid of piffle".

But it was true. He'd lied to party leader Michael Howard, and was sacked for lying (again).

He became London Mayor, and claimed he'd end rough sleeping. It increased 130%.

He said he'd recruit 5,000 Met police. The Met lost 5,000 officers on his watch.

He said he'd "double special constables to 10,000". There were under 3,100 when he left office.

He said he'd create 100k affordable homes, then simply changed the definition of "affordable" to make it look like he had.

A report found "housing likely to be made available for London’s poorest citizens plummeted on Mr Johnson’s watch" from 7,500 a year to just 780.

He spent £320,000 of taxpayer money on water cannons that aren't even legal in the UK. To prove they were safe, he promised to be blasted by them live on TV.

That promise was a lie. It never happened, and the water cannons were sold off for scrap at a £310,000 loss.

He spent £60 million on a commuter cable-car, suggesting 63 million people a year would use it. At the end of its first year, it had 4 (four) regular commuters per week.

He spent £46 million on a garden bridge that never even got off the drawing board.

He promised he'd remain London Mayor until his term ran out. Then he quit as London Mayor 2 years early, just to land a safe seat in Uxbridge.

He won in Uxbridge by promising to "lie down in front of bulldozers" to stop a new Heathrow Runway, then abstained on the vote.

He's the most likely source of the 2015 "Cameron Fucked A Pig" rumour (which came from a "distinguished Oxford contemporary" of Cameron's, of whom only 3 people fit). It's almost certainly a complete fabrication.

In 2016 he admitted to The Times that he dyes his hair blond.

He was a Remainer.

He told the House of Commons in 2013 "I am a bit of a fan of the European Union. If we did not have one, we would invent something like it ... I do not know whether any honourable Members are foolish enough to oppose eventual Turkish membership of the EU"

In 2016 he said: "Britain’s geostrategic interests [are] pretty intimately engaged" with EU membership

He wrote articles including "Quitting the EU won’t solve our problems", which said "most of our problems are not caused by Brussels"

He said: "We are – and we will remain – a paid-up, valued, participating member of the Single Market. Under no circumstances, in my view, will a British government adjust that position".

And, of course, the whole £350 million thing, which ... well, you know.

There's not much point in repeating all of the well-known and documented lies of the Brexit campaign, but there were 1000s.

If you don't know now, you never will.

If you know but still think it's OK, you don't care about reality.

So let's move on.

His team admitted he never wanted to win the referendum. He hoped to lose, so he could succeed David Cameron and become Tory leader, without having to do any work. And he'd still have an enemy over the water he could blame everything on.

He never intend to win.

After accidentally winning the Leave campaign he tried to become PM.

His own running-mate, Michael Gove, told people not to vote for Johnson: "I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead"

He tried again after May, and during his *actual job interview* to become PM, the police turned up to his flat following reports of a violent argument, during which Carrie said "You just don’t care for anything because you’re spoilt. You have no care for money or anything"

During one campaign interview, he stole a journalist's phone, said "oh for fuck's sake" when others asked him about some of his lies, and then - and this is hard to believe, but true - he hid in a fridge until they all went away.

He said he had an "Oven-ready deal" to resolve Brexit. He didn't. It began to fall apart less than 2 weeks after it was implemented, and Sunak had to scrap most of it and do a different deal.

Johnson promised he'd vote against the Sunak deal, and then didn't.

On the day Johnson's "Oven-ready deal" went into effect, a journalist asked a senior member of the Vote Leave team, now a core member of the Johnson administration, what he thought of it.

"It’s crap. It’s basically the same as May’s deal".

"There will be no checks on goods from GB to Northern Ireland or Northern Ireland to GB", Johnson promised.

"There will be checks as goods head into Northern Ireland", said the Treasury in a public correction. But he still repeated his lie throughout the 2019 election campaign.

On the day he became PM he said: "I am announcing now – on the steps of Downing Street – that we will fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have prepared".

No such plan existed. Still doesn't. Entirely made up.

He said, "Protecting vulnerable children will remain our priority after Brexit", and then later the same week he dropped legal protections for vulnerable and unaccompanied children.

And then Covid came.

Johnson had already closed the govt's anti-pandemic Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingency Committee months earlier. He'd ignored the findings of Exercise Cygnus, which highlighted "gaping holes" in our preparedness. He hadn't even looked at the pandemic response plan.

Johnson missed 5 COBRA meetings about Covid, and between 31 Jan and 30 Mar 2020, his govt missed 8 intergovernmental calls or conferences to discuss a unified approach to tackling the pandemic.

What was Johnson doing instead of tackling Covid?

In Feb 2020 he asked Dominic Cummings, "Do you think it’s OK if I spend a lot of time writing my Shakespeare book?" because "this divorce is very expensive".

Cummings wrote: "he wanted to get back to what he loves while shaking down the publishers for some extra cash.

In late Feb 2020, as tens of thousands were dying overseas from Covid, Dominic Cummings told Johnson that unless he sacked the useless Matt Hancock: "we are going to kill people and it’s going to be a catastrophe".

Johnson did not sack Hancock.

But he did try to take credit for Hancock quitting, claiming that as soon as the video footage of Hancock breaking distancing rules emerged, he had acted. In reality, Hancock resigned 48 hours later, while Johnson had a long weekend at Chequers

March. In the morning SAGE issued advice to stop shaking hands. The same afternoon, Johnson visited a hospital and said he "shook hands with everybody, you will be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands".

He also shook hands with everybody on This Morning later that week, where he outlined his plan to "allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population" rather than taking measures to stop a quarter of a million deaths.

"Let the bodies pile high", he later said.

A senior advisor said of his Covid approach: "What you learn about Boris was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends. There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be".

As, under Johnson's idle leadership, Britain became one of the only countries in the world to keep schools, ports and airports open, a Harvard prof of epidemiology said: "I could not believe it. My colleagues here in the US assumed that reports of the UK policy were satire".

Rather than do the boring, non-flashy, but useful things, such as isolating and closing ports, Johnson spent £66m on a headline-grabbing Nightingale Hospital in Birmingham that treated exactly zero patients during the entire pandemic. Zero. Not one.

The Tories spent approx £400m a month buying up the entire bed capacity of the nation's private hospitals to deal with Covid.

In the year to Mar 2021, those private contractors treated no Covid patients AT ALL on 39% of days, and only 1 patient on another 20% of days.

He appeared to place Brexit posturing above healthcare, as he refused to accept an invitation from the EU to join a scheme to share PPE and ventilators. Instead his spokesman said we are "no longer a member" so would "be making our own efforts".

So we had no PPE or ventilators

He made a secret, probably illegal deal with James Dyson to adjust tax regimes in Dyson's favour, in return for ventilators that Dyson couldn't even make.

"I am First Lord of the Treasury," wrote Johnson, "and you can take it that we are backing you to do what you need".

He opened an illegal VIP lane for bids to provide PPE coming in from "government officials, ministers' offices, MPs, members of the House of Lords".

Only Tory members, MPs etc were told about this. Civils servants reported "drowning" in hopelessly implausible bids from VIPs

This meant they didn't have time to deal with real bids from actual suppliers. Hundreds and hundreds of millions - billions in fact - vanished into VIP lanes, going to well-connected Tory insiders who often didn't deliver anything usable, and sometimes delivered nothing at all.

An investigation found at least £1.6 billion had been handed to companies directly connected to the Tory Party. Transparency International found 1/5 of all govt contracts related to the pandemic "raised a red flag" for corruption.

An independent report by the Centre for the Study of Corruption found Johnson's administration was "more corrupt than any UK government since the Second World War", and that there was an "absolute failure of integrity at Number 10"

Govt guidance said patients should be moved from highly infected hospitals into care homes without getting a Covid test. At least 38,000 died as a result.

Over the same period in S Korea, not a single care home patient died of Covid. Not one. At all.

In the middle of the first wave in June, experts prepared an official report on the likelihood of a second wave, predicted it could kill a further 100,000 people, and outlined what we should do to prepare.

On 13 July Johnson indicated to parliament that he hadn't even read it.

Meanwhile, parties were going on constantly in Downing St. He attended some, started at least one, and wandered into one, stayed 25 minutes, left without telling anybody to stop, and later pretended he hadn't known it was a party. The drinks, dancing and DJ didn't tip him off.

He ennobled his own brother, and Claire Fox, an supporter of IRA terrorism who has never apologised. He also ennobled a Brexiteer cricketer he liked.

But he shoved 21 of his own MPs out of the party because they insisted he stick to one of his Brexit promises.

He suspended parliament illegally, lied about it to The Queen, and pretended he was getting IT lessons from Jennifer Arcuri, when in reality he was thrashing away on top of her like a stranded beluga whenever his cancer-stricken wife wasn't looking. When the news broke, he lied.

He lied about parties to the public. He lied about parties to parliament. He lied about parties to The Queen, and even had the balls to sympathise over Prince Philip's spartan, socially distanced funeral, when there had been 2 parties in Downing St the night before.

Reports say that during the ABBA-themed party in his own Downing St flat on his birthday, top secret documents were left lying around on the desk for anybody to see, and somebody got so pissed they accidentally set off the alarm, bringing police running to save everyone.

Two years running, Johnson ignored expert advice about not relaxing the lockdown at Xmas.

For the first time in their 100 year history the top 2 medical journals did a joint plea not to do it.

Both years saw massive rise in Covid deaths 3 weeks later, killing around 33,000.

He cancelled school meals for hungry kids, then abused people who complained. Then he lied about discussing it with Marcus Rashford.

And then, when Rashford got an honour for his work, Johnson congratulated Rashford on his success in overturning his own policies.

When Owen Paterson was done for iffy lobbying, Johnson tried to change the rules so Paterson wouldn't have to face punishment.

When Chris Pincher was done for groping, Johnson tried to change the rules so Pincher could keep his job.

He'd been warned about Pincher groping many, many people, but had said "Pincher by name, Pincher by nature" and gave him a job anyway.

Pincher was thought so bad, had to have "minders" to prevent him getting "incredibly drunk" and groping people again. Johnson knew this.

Johnson wrote the introduction to the ministerial code, but when Partygate happened he attempted to re-write the code to remove the bit about him having to resign for lying.

He then tried to get the scandal investigated by somebody who had been at one of the parties.

When that didn't work, he gave the job to Sue Gray, who found "failures of leadership and judgement", so Johnson attempted to cajole her into dropping the entire inquiry.

Under Johnson, 10 Downing St became the most law-breaking address in Britain: 126 fines.

Eventually things became so bad that over a 36 hour period, 62 of the government’s 172 ministers, private secretaries and trade envoys resigned in disgust.

Previous record: 11.

Even so, Johnson wanted to make a comeback.

He claimed over 100 MPs had affirmed they would support him in his bid to replace Liz Truss. But he refused to release a list of backers, and journalists could find only 61 people who could possibly back him - all the rest were backing somebody else.

He claimed he should come back because he was "uniquely popular". In fact, by this time he was the least popular prime minister since modern polls began after WW2, and had even lower approval rates than Jeremy Corbyn - the least popular opposition leader EVER

He said "I take my responsibilities seriously" as defence against the PartyGate inquiry.

In his 7 years as MP for Uxbridge, Hansard lists him mentioning the place 4 times. And two of those were on the same day.

He's missed 187 Commons votes since leaving as PM.

He lied to parliament over PartyGate. He lied to the inquiry into those lies. He committed contempt of parliament by leaking the report and denigrating the offices of parliament.

Parliament has existed for 750 years.

He is the first PM ever to be castigated for lying.

Although this thread is WAAAY long (sorry), it barely scratches the surface. I've spent 4 solid years digging into this, and it's mind-blowing how much corruption, incompetence, hypocrisy and bullshit surrounds the man - and the party.

unbound.com/books/four-cha…