Hatchet job on Jeremy Hunt by Boris Johnson's allies comes as no surprise

The big newspaper proprietors – Murdoch, Rothermere and the Barclay family – remain loyal to Johnson. Admittedly The Times and the Telegraph are tougher than usual on Johnson, but crucially there are no calls for him to quit. Murdoch, the Mail newspapers and the Barclays are part of Johnson’s core political base. They all backed him to be Tory leader, all backed him in the 2019 General Election, and all have protected Johnson during the harrowing political scandals that have dogged his premiership.

The other coalition backing Johnson are the billionaire Tory donors who funded Brexit and now own Johnson’s Conservative party. They wrote a letter to Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, awarding their unconditional support to Boris Johnson. Billionaire JCB boss Lord Bamford, property magnate Sir Tony Gallagher , Carphone Warehouse founder David Ross, multimillionaire financier Howard Shore and mega-rich Simon Reuben – who alongside brother David is worth £16bn.” Nadine Dorries said on national TV: “The Conservative Party donors have said themselves that they aren’t going to support the party if the PM is removed. I think a number of MPs in marginal seats need to hear that, and need to understand what they’re doing: £80 million those donors have donated to the Conservative Party over recent times.”

We can only guess how many Tory MPs were terrified into supporting Johnson by this stark warning, amounting to an attempt at financial blackmail, that Tory donors would stop issuing cheques if they voted the wrong way.

The billionaire class put their man, Boris Johnson, in Downing Street three years ago. He suits them well because he does what they want. Johnson is at the apex of a system of government that hands out contracts, supplies favours, slashes regulation, attacks the rule of law, reduces the rights of working people, and favours the marketplace above the state. The brilliance of Boris Johnson is that he does all of this while pretending to be on the side of ordinary working people. That’s why the super-rich love Boris, the billionaire’s useful idiot.

He’s lost contact with reality, but not with the billionaires. The rich don’t want taxes on “excessive profits”, don’t want a proper tax system at all, don’t want their massive salaries and scam bonus systems interfered with, don’t want any reform on the distribution of wealth – they just want to get richer and for the rest of us to get poorer.

B Mckenna
Dumbarton

THE phrase “let’s move on” has been used by the Prime Minister many times before in his present position as well as in previous roles such as when he was Foreign Secretary. This most amoral and deceitful of politicians has left a veritable tsunami of chaos in his wake for the duration of his public and private life.

As Conservative party leader he has presided over one of the highest death tolls in Europe, turned mendacity into an art form, overseen industrial-scale government corruption, delivered a disastrous Brexit that has plunged the economy into near recession and fostered the arrogant and entitled culture of “partygate”.

Yet following the confidence vote on Monday that effectively leaves him politically as a dead man walking, his desperate and pathetic cri de coeur to just move on without a hint of self-reflection or genuine introspection demonstrates a narcissism of Trumpian proportions. 40% of his own MPs now think he is unfit for office and John Penrose, his anti-corruption tsar, has resigned from his post, an attempt perhaps to avoid further tarnish to his reputation.

The Prime Minister has sought to change the Ministerial Code rather than admit he has breached it on numerous occasions and still his supine loyalists claim, like their chief, that the country has to move on. Move on to increased poverty. Move on to allow Boris Johnson to implement more crypto-fascist reforms to the unwritten British constitution. Move on to ensure that party donors become more influential and richer under the most unprincipled Conservative administration in a generation. Move on to allow Douglas Ross, a man who has U-turned so often that he resembles a shopping trolley, and his colleagues Messrs Bowie, Mundell and Lamont, to wreck the Scottish Conservative party for the immediate and long-term future.

Oh yes, and move on to break up, once and for all, the fragmenting United Kingdom. Only then will those in the Scottish independence movement be able to sit back and say, “return to your Edinburgh base Agent Johnson, your mission is accomplished.”

Owen Kelly
Stirling

YOUR article “Top Brexiteer says UK should have stayed in single market (June 6), is somewhat misleading. Certainly, after having read the quotes relied upon, I would conclude that Daniel Hannan only wishes the UK had stayed in the single market not because it was the right thing to do, but because, in his view, and that of many Brexiteers, the Brexit the UK ended up with is not the “true” Brexit they wished for.

This is important, because when Brexit is seen to be what it truly is, an aberration, Brexiteers will always claim that “true” Brexit was not delivered – that is why it is a failure and why the UK should have stayed in the single market (or whatever). This is a trait one sees in many walks of life – blame the “implementation” of the ideology, not the ideology itself.

Patrice Fabien
Glasgow