Rule-breaking Boris is who the people voted for

THOSE who live inside the Westminster bubble are in a state of high excitement once more, scenting the whiff of blood in Downing Street.

Not since Dominic

Cummings drove to County Durham and then went on his legendary day trip to Barnard Castle, early in the first Covid lockdown, have opposition MPS and the broadcast media indulged in such a feeding frenzy.

Ironically, this time round the once-loathed Cummings is not their intended prey but has been transformed into a noble whistleblower on behalf of integrity in the political process. It is Boris Johnson himself who is now in the crosshairs of thewestminster Village’s brigade of snipers in an escalating row about so-called “Tory sleaze”.

On the back of rows about David Cameron’s private lobbying for taxpayers’ cash for a business that employed him (it didn’t get any) and Sir James Dyson seeking assurances his employees wouldn’t face tax penalties if they came to Britain to manufacture ventilators, the Prime Minister now faces questions about arrangements for refurbishing the Downing Street flat he resides in alongside his fiancee Carrie Symonds, their young son, Wilfred and Dilyn the dog.

Rules are rules and if the PM really did at one stage envisage the project being funded secretly by atory donor then that was very unwise of him and will cause him well-deserved political embarrassment.

But millions of voters will be forgiven for suspecting that the PM’S critics are getting things rather out of proportion. If those critics are alleging that Mr Johnson does not always do everything by the book then, yes, the electorate has already noticed that. And likes it.

His prorogation of Parliament, in autumn 2019, was found to be unlawful by the Supreme Court and the political establishment thought they had him bang to rights.

But the PM was judged by the great British public to be fighting to deliver on their instruction to exit the

European Union.

So when voters gave their verdict in a general election a couple of months later they awarded him a landslide majority and sent his tormentors packing.

Most sensible people will take the same view of the Dyson affair, which showed a premier determined to cut throughwhitehall red tape to ensure that more life-saving ventilators were obtained.

And Johnson was at it again when he refused to join the EU’S vaccine scheme but instead set up a British vaccines task force, bringing in someone from outsidewhitehall to lead it. Standard procedures were not followed and thank goodness for that.

Today the Sunday Express reveals that Mr Johnson is determined to keep being the man who scythes through bureaucracy on behalf of the British people by challenging his ministers to deliver on the second great priority he presented to the public at the last election: his so-called “levelling-up” agenda.

Rather than letting initiatives get lost amid the normal inertia ofwhitehall, the PM is demanding regular updates and new ideas about spreading extra investment and opportunities to every corner of the UK. He will even hold personal “challenge” sessions with every Cabinet minister to assure himself that nobody is coasting.

Again, it is not how things are normally done inwhitehall, which likes to bog down ministers in committees and surround them with Sir Humphrey figures seeking to marginalise “bold” initiatives that may upset the status quo.

But this is the Boris Johnson that voters want to see – a man determined to make the political system more responsive to the electorate it is meant to serve.

So long as he can keep deploying this unconventional approach on behalf of the British people then they are unlikely to turn against him.

‘It is not how

things are normally done’