Johnson ignores questions over row
As the Tory leadership rivals contest hustings, frontrunner focuses on ‘determination to deliver’
BORIS JOHNSON has refused to discuss why police officers were called to his home on Thursday, insisting that Conservative Party members were more concerned with the substance of his policies.
The Tory leadership front-runner repeatedly evaded questions on the subject at the first of 16 membership hustings, instead attempting to move the conversation on to his record as mayor of London.
When told by the interviewer Iain Dale that people had a right to question his character and suitability for high office, he asked voters to focus on his “determination to deliver” on his promises, adding: “When I say I will deliver, I deliver by x plus 10.”
It came as Mr Johnson faced off against Jeremy Hunt for the first time in front of the Conservative Party faithful, with both candidates fielding questions on topics ranging from Brexit to national infrastructure projects such as HS2. Boris Johnson failed to dispel the growing doubts among Tory Brexiteers about his determination to take Britain out of the European Union with or without a deal by October 31.
Whilst he reiterated that the Government must be “prepared for a nodeal Brexit” in order to secure better terms from Brussels, Mr Johnson refused to give a concrete guarantee that it would be delivered.
He also suggested that Theresa May’s decision to agree to a £39billion divorce settlement had weakened the UK’s leverage, and that as prime minister he would pursue a policy of “creative ambiguity”.
He said he had never known a EU negotiation that did not “climax with a financial settlement”, indicating that he could try to delay a final decision until the last minute to force Brussels to offer better terms.
Jeremy Hunt told Tory members that a central plank of his appeal was that he was a tried and tested negotiator who could be trusted to go to “Brussels and lead us out of this crisis”. Asked why members should trust him given he did not feel Brexit in his “gut” like Mr Johnson and other Eurosceptics, Mr Hunt said that at “every opportunity” he had voted in Parliament to enable Britain to leave the EU.
He added that he was “100 per cent” committed to no deal if he could not secure better terms from Brussels by Oct 31, but said that he would not sign up to Mr Johnson’s pledge because “it’s very important as prime minister that you only make promises... that you’re actually going to keep”. Defending his proposals to raise the 40p rate of income tax from £50,000 to £80,000, Mr Johnson told members it would form “part of a package” that would also benefit low-paid workers.
He proposed a “lift up” of the personal allowance, which stands at £12,500, and said he would “obviously continue to work on expanding the living wage”. Mr Johnson argued that Conservatives should not be “at all shy” of reducing the tax burden on middle incomes, adding that key sector workers from nurses to “heads of maths departments” had been dragged into the higher rate. Addressing the controversy over his alleged comments to the Belgian ambassador, in which he said “f--- business”, Mr Johnson said he “bitterly” resented the way in which one “stray remark” had been allowed to “cloud” his record.
Mr Hunt restated his credentials by talking up his success as an entrepreneur, whilst also admitting his frustration at the lack of credit given to the Tories on their economic record.
He said that the Tories were “the party of aspiration” responsible for creating 1,000 jobs a day since 2010.
As prime minister, he said Britain could become a world leader in technology, with places such as Leamington Spa becoming “rechristened as Silicon Spa”. He cited his pledge to cut corporation tax from 19 per cent to 12.5 per cent, which he said would “turbo charge” the wider economy. While Mr Johnson said he had “anxieties” about a third runway at Heathrow and HS2, he argued that as a “passionate advocate of infrastructure” he could not commit to mothballing them as some would like. Having previously pledged to “lie down in front of the bulldozers” before letting the expansion of Heathrow take place, he said only that he would monitor the situation closely. Likewise, he said that he would conduct a review into HS2.
Promising to answer questions on HS2 directly, Mr Hunt said that he would proceed with the project because it was “absolutely vital” for Britain. He said that delivering major infrastructure projects would signal to the world that Britain was capable of competing with countries like Japan post-Brexit. As Mayor of London, Mr Johnson said that dealing with the London riots in 2011 had left him with an “absolutely overwhelming sense of obligation and responsibility”. He said he did “absolutely everything I could to get out there and bring everyone together”.
For Mr Hunt, although the junior doctors’ strike had proved testing, he said that the backlash over his handling of the BSkyB takeover in 2010 had been the greatest challenge of his career. However, he said the controversy had helped him find his “inner steel”.