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Boris Johnson: the New Conservative Party Leader

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Boris Johnson: the New Conservative Party Leader Boris Johnson: the new Conservative Party Leader 23 July 2019 Background and personal life Boris Johnson was born in New York in 1964, the son of Stanley and Charlotte Johnson; his parents’ academic and professional commitments resulted in a nomadic childhood spent variously in the USA, the UK and Belgium. After attending Eton College, he studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford. Following his graduation, he worked for The Times as a journalist, being sacked after making up a quote, and moving to The Daily Telegraph, where he held a number of different roles, including European correspondent, culminating as assistant editor. In 1995, recordings of a conversation in which he offered to provide the fraudster Darius Guppy with the address of a journalist who had been investigating his activities so he could be attacked were made public. During the 1990s he gained further media exposure, as a columnist for The Spectator and GQ, and through appearances on Have I Got News For You. This culminated in his appointment as Editor of The Spectator in 1999, a role he retained even after his election as an MP, despite promises to the contrary, finally leaving the post in 2005. Johnson is also known for his colourful personal life. In addition to his high-profile father, he has two prominent siblings, the Conservative MP Jo Johnson and the journalist Rachel Johnson. He has been married twice, first to Allegra Mostyn-Owen, and second to Marina Wheeler, with whom he had four children. Wheeler and Johnson separated in 2018 after 25 years together. Johnson is currently in a relationship with Carrie Symonds, former Director of Communications for the Conservatives. In addition, he is known to have had affairs with Petronella Wyatt, one of his columnists at The Spectator, and the art consultant Helen Macintyre, with whom he had a child. MP for Henley Johnson’s political ambitions had been apparent during his journalistic career. He stood as the Conservative candidate for Clwyd South in 1997 and finished second, 13,810 votes behind the Labour candidate. Ahead of the 2001 general election he was selected for the safe Conservative seat of Henley and was successfully elected. In 2003 he was made Vice- Chair of the Conservative Party, and in 2004 he was appointed as Shadow Arts Minister by Michael Howard. In October of that year he had to apologise after The Spectator published an anonymous article attacking the people of Liverpool (although he wasn’t the author); the month after that he resigned from both his party roles after his affair with Wyatt was revealed. After David Cameron became Conservative leader in 2005, Johnson was appointed as Shadow Higher Education Minister, stepping down in 2007 to contest the London mayoral elections. Mayor of London Johnson was selected as the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London after a public primary in September 2007, and went on to defeat the Labour incumbent Ken Livingstone by 53% to 47% in the May 2008 election, once second-preference votes were counted; he subsequently resigned as Henley’s MP. Facing-off against Livingstone again, he was re- elected in 2012. During his time as Mayor of London, Johnson oversaw the launch of the cycle hire scheme, the New Routemaster buses, the cablecar and the 2012 Olympics, as well as banning drinking alcohol on the underground. However, he was also criticised for failed projects, such as buying water cannon which the police were banned from using and the garden bridge, plans for which were axed by his successor Sadiq Khan, and for closing tube ticket offices. In 2014 Johnson was selected as the Conservative candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip and was elected as the MP at the general election in the following year with a majority of 10,695. He did not stand for Mayor of London at the 2016 elections, which Zac Goldsmith, his successor as Conservative candidate, lost to Labour’s Sadiq Khan. EU Referendum In the run-up to the 2016 European Union membership referendum, Johnson took a prominent pro-Brexit stance, becoming one of the highest-profile campaigners associated with the official Vote Leave campaign, alongside Michael Gove. On the eve of the referendum, Johnson was one of the three advocates for leaving the EU at the largest debate in the campaign. He claimed that the day after the referendum would be ‘independence day’, attacked the remain campaign over what he called ‘project fear’, and accused the EU of being ‘a job-destroying machine’. However, he was criticised over claims made about the cost of EU membership, including the infamous £350m figure on the campaign’s battle bus, and potential Turkish membership of the bloc. Foreign Secretary After the referendum and David Cameron’s resignation, Johnson was expected to run for the Conservative leadership, and thus for Prime Minister. However, following the decision of Michael Gove to stand as a candidate, he announced that he wouldn’t be running and instead endorsed Andrea Leadsom’s candidacy. Theresa May, the contest’s eventual victor, appointed Johnson to serve as her Foreign Secretary. During his time in this post he was criticised after he told MPs that the British citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe being held prisoner by Iran had been training journalists, rather than that she had been on holiday in the country. Her husband, Richard, has called on Johnson to apologise for this, saying that his failure to do so had ‘clearly made things worse’. He was also responsible for overseeing the UK’s response to Russia after the Salisbury poisonings, saying that the country’s President Vladimir Putin was ‘overwhelmingly likely’ to have ordered the attack. Resignation In July 2018, Johnson resigned from the Cabinet following a meeting at Chequers to agree the Government’s Brexit stance. During his resignation speech in the House of Commons, he claimed it wasn’t ‘too late to save Brexit’ and that the Government hadn’t ‘even tried’ to follow the lead of Theresa May’s speech at Lancaster House and ‘make the case for a free trade agreement’. He particularly attacked proposals for what he called ‘a fantastical, Heath Robinson customs arrangement’ and said that May’s approach was ‘volunteering for economic vassalage’. Returning to the backbenches, Johnson reprised his role as a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, using it to attack the Government’s Brexit approach and to set out his thoughts on a range of policy issues, although a column in which he compared burka-wearers to letter boxes and bank robbers drew criticism. In Parliament, he voted against May’s Brexit deal twice, but backed it at the third attempt, having reached ‘the sad conclusion that neither this government nor this parliament is willing to leave with no deal’, and thus that there was a risk of accepting either ‘an even worse version of Brexit or losing Brexit’. Following the decision of Theresa May to resign as Prime Minister and party leader, Johnson launched his campaign for the leadership and became the frontrunner, finishing first in each round of voting by MPs. In the last round of the contest, in which Conservative Party members participate, Johnson defeated Jeremy Hunt by 92,153 votes (66%) to 46,656 (34%), on a turnout of 87%. Leadership campaign Brexit Johnson’s leadership campaign has inevitably been focused on the issue of Brexit. In his Telegraph column on the eve of the result, he argued that the moon landings fifty years ago showed that the ‘technical and logistical’ problems associated with the Northern Ireland border could be overcome, claiming that ‘there are few tasks so complex that humanity cannot solve if we have a real sense of mission to pull them off’ and suggesting that what the UK needed was ‘the will and the drive’. This fits with the central thrust of his campaign, which is that he will ensure that the UK leaves the EU by 31 October, with or without a deal, saying that he would do so, ‘do or die, come what may’. He has expressed a preference for a deal, claiming that the EU ‘will see’ that British ‘politics has changed’ and need to take ‘the Irish backstop and they need basically to remit it, to remove it, to delete it’ from the withdrawal agreement, with ‘maximum facilitation’ used to check goods away from the border. One means of leverage which Johnson has suggested is keeping the £39bn the UK owes the EU in a state of ‘creative ambiguity’. If no agreement is possible, he has also suggested that Article 24 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade would allow the UK and EU to agree ‘a standstill in our current arrangements’ until a new free trade deal is negotiated, a claim which has been rejected by International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, and the Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney. He has refused to rule out proroguing (i.e. suspending) Parliament to enable a no-deal Brexit if this is the only way to secure the UK’s departure from the bloc on 31 October. Although he says that the chances of a no-deal Brexit are ‘a million to one’, he has also said that his first job as Prime Minister would be to ‘make sure everybody understands all the possible risks and eventualities’ to ‘minimise any disruption that might take place’. Tax However, this Brexit focus doesn’t mean that Johnson hasn’t made pledges on other topics. One of his earliest policies was to raise the higher rate tax threshold from £50,000 to £80,000, which he suggested would ‘help the huge numbers that have been captured in the higher rate by fiscal drag’.
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