After farewell to No10, is it the quiet life for Boris?
BORIS Johnson is likely to skip the Conservative Party conference this autumn as he tries to keep a low profile after stepping down as Prime Minister, allies believe.
While supporters hope he could stage a comeback, he is instead planning to spend the coming weeks ‘representing his constituents’ and backing Liz Truss.
A Whitehall source said he would now be a ‘private individual’ and would ‘probably not’ attend his party’s annual autumn gathering in Birmingham next month.
The outgoing Prime Minister is likely to join the lucrative speaking circuit and write his memoirs but will resist making high-profile political interventions, sources said. Will Walden, who was Mr Johnson’s communications chief when he was mayor of London, told LBC radio yesterday he expected he would ‘disappear off to make a lot of money’.
Amid the speculation about Mr Johnson’s future, his wife Carrie shared a touching tribute to his time as Prime Minister as they prepared to leave Downing Street with their children.
She posted a photo on Instagram that showed her, Mr Johnson and their children Wilfred, two, and Romy, nine months, walking through the door of No 10 together for the last time.
Wearing a long white dress, she carried Romy as Wilfred did a kick with his left leg while holding his parents’ hands. Alongside the photo, Mrs Johnson, 33, wrote a
short post reflecting on her children’s happy time at both No 10 and Chequers. The family will stand outside No 10 today to watch Mr Johnson make his farewell speech.
Mr Walden also told ITV ‘not many’ MPs would like Mr Johnson to stage a comeback as there is only ‘a small coterie of very, very loyal Boris acolytes’, and predicted it would have to be a ‘strange set of circumstances’ for him to return.
But at the weekend, Mr Johnson’s former chief of staff in No 10 Lord Udny-Lister said Tory MPs would come to regret ousting him and that he might be tempted to run for leader again in future.