Mayors Of London

"[Response to Q1126] nobody could find a way around the problem of the Prime Minister just, like a shopping trolley, smashing from one side of the aisle into the other."

"[Response to Q1194] The heart of the problem was fundamentally I regarded him as unfit for the job."

"The culture wars suit the Johnson way of doing things [...] He's good at things that involve short, memorable slogans and showmanship. Is he good at test and trace? Not conspicuously so. Is he good at PPE? No. Is he good at lockdown timing? Absolutely not. But the thing that he's quite good at is spotting a dividing line."

"He rewrites reality in his mind afresh according to the moment’s demands. He lies — so blatantly, so naturally, so regularly — that there is no real distinction possible with him, as there is with normal people, between truth and lies."

"He [Johnson] is totally untrusted by anybody in No 10 yet has a superpower for making people feel sorry for him — "I feel sorry for him like my old dead-beat boyfriend, I hate myself for it but I can’t help it," said one in despair after a particularly dreadful meeting."

"His natural instinct is not to be open, not to be transparent, not to be accountable, but narcissitically to think 'what suits me, how can I extricate myself from this awkward situation, by what means can I arrogate blame somewhere else?'"

"I expect my leaders to shoulder the responsibility for the actions they take. Yesterday, he did the opposite of that. So I'll remind him of a quotation, altogether too familiar to him, of Leo Amery to Neville Chamberlain, "You have sat there too long, for all the good you have done, in the name of God go.""

"Most politicians, as far as I can work out, are pretty incompetent, and then have a veneer of competence, you do seem to do it the other way around."

"Right now a visit of Boris Johnson in Kyiv started from one-on-one meeting with President Zelenskyy"

"This would activate the Queen. Lascelles Principles will direct her to decline his request for a dissolution. She then is left with the choice to dismiss him or not."

"Now think of Boris Johnson. All of these feelings will apply to him. He is going to be Heath with jokes added in, and Thatcher with consistency taken out, all rolled into a bundle of resentment, denial, attention-seeking and attempted vindication that will be a permanent nightmare for the new prime minister. That he wants revenge on Rishi Sunak is already apparent, but if Liz Truss is elected, she will face the identical problem. The chances of her loyalty to him being repaid are close to zero. Boris lives his life as a performance, and he will want the next act to fill every seat in the theatre of British political life. The Conservative Party had no choice but to remove Johnson from office. His standards of governance and veracity had fallen below what reasonable people could defend. The downside is that the party will always have the problem of what he will say next."

"Q: You have supported a Prime Minister that has continually lied to the Queen, Parliament and the entire United Kingdom, therefore does this not bring into question your own personal integrity and honesty? A: I don't agree with that. Boris Johnson has been an excellent prime minister. He delivered on Brexit. He delivered on the Covid vaccine and he delivered on standing up to Vladimir Putin and backing the Ukrainians. I am proud of what he did."

"In some sense, him running is the dream [...] Droning on about how they need a sensible, serious person to fix the mess they’ve made then that honking pudding turns up with his travelling circus trailing behind. ... Is he a greased piglet any more? He became deeply unpopular with the public because the joke wore thin, he got humiliatingly booted out as PM and he set the Tories on a path to ruin. He was booed at the Queen’s Jubilee. The public tolerance for him would be so, so thin."

"There are several very good potential candidates for Conservative leader. But choosing Boris now would be — and I say this advisedly — an absolutely catastrophic decision."

"In his resignation speech, Boris Johnson showed no awareness of any personal failings that had led his party to turn on him. "When the herd moves, it moves," he complained, without apparent thought as to what might have provoked the herd into stampeding. He later complained the rules had been changed halfway through the relay race that the premiership had become. There had indeed been no rule against No 10 parties, but by the time they happened in lockdown it was against the law. There was no rule that a PM must resign if more than 50 of their ministers quit, but since being able to form a government that commands a Commons majority is the basis for being in power it should hardly need saying that these are circumstances that make resignation inevitable. Boris tried to break rules that no one had previously thought it necessary to state."

"Johnson and I really loathed each other. It was obvious. We really never spoke behind the scenes very much."

"[Sir Keir Starmer on being referred to as Sir Crasheroonie Snoozefest by Johnson.] It doesn’t matter — because I really couldn't give a toss and, you know, I really loathed him. He didn't stand for anything, he had no principles, he had no integrity, he lied through his teeth and he brings everybody down with him. Is there anybody who's had any relationship with Johnson — in any sense of the word — who hasn't ended up in the gutter?"

"We have to hope that the Johnson era is going to come to be perceived in the years ahead as a sort of dreadful aberration, as something that the British people realised was a disaster, and that the Conservative Party now has the courage to realise was disaster and to send Boris Johnson back where he belongs to the music halls [...] He is a brilliant journalist. He's a brilliant entertainer. He had no place in British public life."

"[H]is inner emptiness made it imperative for him always to be the centre of attention, craving affirmation and breaking truth and convention to achieve it."

"The damage that Johnson has done to the country is beyond measure. Has any prime minister done so much harm? Covid-19 was the most serious crisis to hit Britain since the Second World War. He ran the government as if he were the wayward manager of an amateur theatre company, full of histrionics, changes of mind and cliques."

"Much as Boris is not prone to getting really cross, nor using particularly strong language, this was one [time] where he really flipped. At our morning meeting, with a small gang of us, he just launched into a violent attack on Emmanuel Macron. And basically saying: "He’s a four-letter word that begins with 'c'’, he's a weirdo, he's Putin's lickspittle, we need to go studs up on this one" – a rugby term that basically means gloves off - "we need an orgy of frog-bashing, I’m going to have to punch his lights out"... Pretty strong stuff."

"[In 1964 or 1965] There was her baby, Alexander, a few months old, lying naked on a bath mat, kicking his feet in the air, round, pink and fat, with a remarkable shock of electrically bright blond hair. As I gazed at him, I didn't find that baby at all appealing, too pink and too noisy."

"That baby on the bath mat, who so decisively put me off the idea of teen motherhood, grew up to be the most disgraced prime minister under his ludicrously changed name of Boris: he looks much the same."

"As for Boris Johnson, I look back with a morbid incredulity at what that baby grew up to be. It’s a not particularly good joke to surprise people with the fact that I am one of the many women to have seen him naked."

"He can continue to cause damage to the party as he has done so conspicuously in recent years, because he retains a following in the country. That will be exploited by his friends in the popular press. But his real legacy is Brexit, the biggest historic mistake this country has made in peacetime."

"He's not a Tory, he’s somebody who used the Tory party ... he attacks what he calls the Westminster elite but he is so Westminster elite at heart - he’s wealthy, socially liberal, believes in animal rights, carbon net zero - he is not some Lee Anderson."

"[T]he interesting thing about him is that he has persecution mania. And people with persecution mania think that it's all a conspiracy and everybody's out to get them - that isn’t the case. The fact is with Boris he arouses ... such uncontrollable irritation that you just want him to go away. He brings everything on himself, he's not this victim."

"Carrie Johnson, in the caption of an Instagram post with a picture of her holding the newborn, joked: "Welcome to the world Frank Alfred Odysseus Johnson born 5th July at 9.15am. (Can you guess which name my husband chose?!)" The former prime minister Boris Johnson is keen to be thought of as a scholar of the classics. In Greek mythology, Odysseus leaves behind his wife and child to seek adventure, encountering many other women along the way."

"Boris was told to engage his brain before speaking in future."

"I accused men of being responsible for a social breakdown which is costing us all, as taxpayers, £9.1 billion per year, and which is producing a generation of ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children."

"With £90 billion currently spent on welfare, the great economic issues of our time are social. They are moral. And yet the Government is virtually incapacitated from utterance by its own bumbling."

"The modern British male is useless. If he is blue collar, he is likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless, and perhaps claiming to suffer from low self-esteem brought on by unemployment. If he is white collar, he is likely to be little better."

"Something must be found, first, to restore women's desire to be married. That means addressing the feebleness of the modern Briton, his reluctance or inability to take control of his woman and be head of a household."

"Weep O ye shirt-makers of Jermyn Street ye Cool Britannia tailors and whatever exists of human finer feeling In the Ministry of Sound, the tank-topped bumboys blub into their Pils. In the delicatessens of Elgin Crescent the sawdust is sodden with tears For months years Carla Powell will go into mourning her plumage as black as night For Mandy is dead dead ere his prime!"

"On the other hand we don’t want our children being taught some rubbish about homosexual marriage being the same as normal marriage and that is why I am more than happy to support Section 28 ..."

"Labour's appalling agenda, encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools, and all the rest of it."

"Dark forces dragged me away from the keyboard, swirling forces of irresistible intensity and power."

"If you see anyone who is obeying the law, apart from the odd motorised rickshaw, please give me a ring. The national speed limit is, de facto, 99mph, because everyone knows that you lose your licence at 100mph. The law of the land is disregarded by good people, held in contempt by Middle England, and scorned by no less a person than Jack Straw, who saw fit to scream through the sound barrier when he was Home Secretary."

"Yes, cannabis is dangerous, but no more than other perfectly legal drugs. It's time for a rethink, and the Tory party - the funkiest, most jiving party on Earth - is where it's happening."

"Ok, I said to myself as I sighted the bird down the end of the gun. This time, my fine feathered friend, there is no escape."

"It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness. They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in Watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird."

"The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more... Consider Uganda, pearl of Africa, as an example of the British record. … the British planted coffee and cotton and tobacco, and they were broadly right... If left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain. You never saw a place so abounding in bananas: great green barrel-sized bunches, off to be turned into matooke. Though this dish (basically fried banana) was greatly relished by Idi Amin, the colonists correctly saw that the export market was limited... The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty."

"I don't see why people are so snooty about Channel 5. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap dancing, and other related and vital subjects."

"We are confident in our story and will be fighting this all the way. I am very sorry that Alastair Campbell has taken this decision but I can see that he got his tits in the wringer."

"Nor do I propose to defend the right to talk on a mobile while driving a car, though I don't believe that is necessarily any more dangerous than the many other risky things that people do with their free hands while driving - nose-picking, reading the paper, studying the A-Z, beating the children, and so on."

"It is hard to think of a measure that the Government could have brought to the House that I could support more unreservedly and with greater pleasure than this Bill to expand the European Union. To sum up my response, I would merely say, "And about time too.""

"I am not by any means an ultra-Eurosceptic. In some ways, I am a bit of a fan of the European Union. If we did not have one, we would invent something like it—some means of association between the sovereign states of Europe, perhaps an organisation in Brussels—overnight."

"I forgot that to rely on a train, in Blair's Britain, is to engage in a crapshoot with the devil."

"I have as much chance of becoming Prime Minister as of being decapitated by a frisbee or of finding Elvis."

"The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP, they have run out of better ideas."