Lying low: How BoJo earnt
Tory leader Boris Johnson worked out a plan to win back the keys to 10 Downing St, writes Talia Shadwell. Avoid scrutiny at all costs.
The day before the election, I piled off the Tube packed full of seas of Christmas jerseys and the sour stench of work party hangovers and wove my way home through carollers and campaign leafleteers.
My electorate in southwest London had emerged as a key battleground where Labour was predicted to take power from the Tories by a whisker. Putney proved to be Labour’s only gain this election as the party was dealt a humiliating drubbing.
This week Britons headed to the polls and handed Boris Johnson a clear mandate to deliver Brexit.
Jeremy Corbyn will step aside after his party suffered its worst defeat since 1935.
The Tories broke the so-called ‘‘red wall’ of northern seats in a stinging victory following three years of political turmoil as the EU referendum result cleaved the country down bitter lines into leave and remain camps.
You could never accuse the British of boring politics. And with ‘BoJo’ on the stage the final act before election campaigning began was highest camp.
Johnson barely had time to celebrate his Conservatives’ leadership battle victory in July before a bombastic American blonde popped up to plunge the PM straight into scandal.
No, not his old pal Donald Trump, but a businesswoman named Jennifer Arcuri.
Johnson faced allegations of improper use of public funds over his friendship with the tech entrepreneur during his time as London mayor.
Johnson’s personal life has never been far from the headlines throughout his political career – he has famously never confirmed how many children he has. The Arcuri scandal came within a year of Johnson leaving his wife for a girlfriend 24 years his junior. She denied an affair with Johnson, but did not shy from the British TV circuit, where she memorably insisted Johnson’s visits to her London flat were for ‘‘technology lessons’’.’
She was anointed a media darling by the British press as she went on to gamely tell the Daily Mirror that men ‘‘tripped over their dicks’’ to sleep with her, and opined on live telly that the Prime Minister had ‘‘cast me aside like I am some Gremlin’’.
Arcuri’s offence at the Prime Minister dodging her phone calls would become somewhat of a theme of Johnson’s election campaign, as it took on a sinister turn.
The Tory leader spent a significant amount of recent weeks’ campaign dodging scrutiny by avoiding high-profile interviews.
My own Daily Mirror, the UK’s only left-wing tabloid, was banned from the Tories’ campaign bus, in a move roundly condemned across the British press as a clear attempt to muzzle an outlet that has reported critically on the Government’s record and broken promises.
But it is not only the Mirror that has been left out in the cold in this winter’s election.
BBC rottweiler Andrew Neil savaged the PM for failing to show for a grilling by the broadcaster.
Channel 4 replaced Johnson’s seat with a melting ice sculpture when he failed to show up to a leaders’ climate change debate.
The PM suffered further embarrassment when he pocketed a reporter’s phone as he refused to look at a photo of a sick boy trying to sleep on an A&E hospital floor because of a lack of beds.
The Mirror had run the photo on its front page just days from the election, and the story fast became a hot election issue as the Tories squirmed under questions about the party’s record on the National Health Service (NHS).
But what should have been a debate about the impact of health service cuts took a dark turn as a woman on Facebook who claimed to know a ‘senior nursing sister’ at the hospital where the photo was taken claimed her friend had told her the photo was ‘staged’ by the boy’s mother.
By the time Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was holding up the Mirror’s front page on national television, an army of social media accounts were already dutifully parroting the allegations made by a stranger on the internet.
Worryingly, the public readily believed the allegation over trusted news sources, and even over the hospital – which had already confirmed the story and apologised.
The post swiftly vanished, and the woman at the centre of the widespread disinformation campaign swore she’d been hacked.
As the Mirror’s editor Alison Phillips wrote in the aftermath, the Government’s campaign lies were taking a toll during the campaign on an electorate that appeared to be losing its ability to tell ‘‘fact from fiction’’.
‘‘How utterly symptomatic of a country in which now so many people’s response to those with whom they don’t agree is to dismiss them as liars or opportunists,’’ she wrote.
‘‘There are many things on which we will never agree in this country. But if we’re to ever crawl out of the sewer of our recent politics we have to agree on just one thing – truth matters.’’
The election that had been threatening to transform into a Christmas pantomime at any moment finally fulfilled its promise as Johnson hid from a reporter in a fridge. ‘‘We’re actually living in an episode of The Thick of It ’’a Mirror colleague muttered as we watched the bizarre scenes of the Prime Minister’s early-morning milk delivery run unfold from our newsroom screens in London.
’Twas was the morning before polling day, and the Prime Minister’s press secretary had gone full Malcolm Tucker, as fans of the British political satire would put it, swearing at a reporter on live telly as the leader dodged Good Morning Britain’s questions.
The last time Britain was called to the polls in December was 1923, when Winston Churchill lost his seat.
Johnson famously models himself on the iconic figure who led Britain through World War II.
But political commentators here couldn’t help but note that while Churchill only used 10 Downing’s St’s bunker a handful of times during The Blitz as he refused to cower from the air raids, Johnson spent part of his day before voters went to the ballots hiding from a reporter in a Yorkshire milk depot’s fridge.
But never to be underestimated, Brits awoke Friday morning to see voters hand Johnson the majority he needs to deliver his promise to take the United Kingdom out of the EU on January 31. Although his victory speech promises that the aftermath will be a ‘‘time for healing’’ rang hollow for many.
It was under Tory rule that the country has grappled with the rise of English nationalism, of racist hate crime aimed at immigrants, a plummeting pound sterling, and rotten public discourse peppered with political invective like ‘remoaner’ to describe those who would reverse the 2016 referendum result.
Earlier this year, the Mirror sent me into northern England’s declining former industrial towns to take the pulse of Britain’s most deprived regions, where local authority budget cuts had hit hardest, and secure work was hard to come by.
In these traditionally Labour working class heartlands I found complex stories of joblessness, and of poverty and in many cases a sense of abandonment by London.
These were overlooked regions where the privatisation of industry coupled with the decline of the unions gutted Labour’s bases.
The politics of Brexit that traded on
Euroscepticism and a promise to close borders to globalisation and immigration found an audience in regions desperate for change – the chance to ‘‘take back control’’.
Even after a decade of life under the Conservatives, these traditional Labour-voting areas couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbynites’ Momentum movement’s hard-Left agenda dogged northern candidates on the doorsteps as they raced to hold their slipping grip on northern voters’ loyalties.
The bleak line I heard repeated throughout these Leave-voting towns I toured in the summer was: ‘‘It can’t get any worse.’’
The red wall was broken this election in the very towns I visited. In Redcar, where thousands of workers watched their steel furnace close just four years ago and asked why the Tories hadn’t saved their lifeblood industry voted that party into power this week.
Grenfell remains the darkest day of the Tory’s rule. And yet years after the inferno that cost 72 lives, terrified residents up and down the country still live in high-rises cladded in the same materials that turned Grenfell Tower into a flaming torch in Kensington.
This week the community around Grenfell is reeling once again as Kensington handed power back to the Tories after the Liberal Democrats divided the vote in the Labour-held marginal.
Labour failed despite a Tory campaign that stretched the definition of truth to its limits. Promises of thousands ‘more’ nurses, police and hospitals were skewered when it emerged the numbers included the existing total – and in the case of the cops, would merely restore the forces to