Politics Essential

Everyone has a view on Boris Johnson. To some, he is the hero who delivered Brexit. To others, the villain who delivered Brexit. He is either the hero who delivered the Covid vaccine early, or the villain who partied while everyone else was locked down. But it is quite hard to get to the real person. Which is what I tried to do during a combative half hour of live radio.

‌

Being prime minister is a serious job. Listener Jo in Exhall asked whether Johnson regretted not taking his premiership seriously. 

‌

“No one could say we were not serious in our approach,” he replied, citing getting Brexit done, tackling Covid and supporting Ukraine. Yet even his own book contains quite a lot of evidence that he was not always Mr Serious. The frontrunner to become prime minister in June 2016, days after the Brexit vote, he instead went to play cricket because “it would have been rude to cancel and Charlie (Earl Spencer) always provides a magnificent lunch and tea”. When he met Joe Biden for the first time, his gift to the US president was a photo he’d had printed off Wikipedia. When the Owen Paterson story broke, alleging a senior Conservative MP had broken rules on paid lobbying, he didn’t read the report and instead went for dinner with old Telegraph colleagues. 

‌

Looking at all the messages coming in live, many of them contained the same four-letter word: liar. I asked if he was a liar. Calling me “matey”, Johnson insisted, with some passion and at some length, that he was not. Indeed he said “nobody has ever accused Remain of being big fat pants-on-fire liars for the things that they said” about life after Brexit.

‌

Many listeners also wanted to know why he had appointed Charlotte Owen and Ross Kempsell , two junior aides in their twenties and thirties, into the House of Lords. He said Owen was an “extremely effective political adviser” and that some of the criticism of her was driven by “sexism”.

‌

The reaction to the interview was divided almost equally – I was too shouty, he was too shouty, I wouldn’t let him speak, he wouldn’t answer the questions. But as always, everyone has a view.

‌

The essential: Regrets? He has a few, and acknowledges that at least some of them are his own fault.

For the fourth year in a row, water firms have been asked to refund customers. And BBC InDepth explores what it would take to end the conflict in the Middle East. 

Politics Essential reader Kimberley Dayem asked: “Is this the only prime minister to ever receive gifts and hospitality?”

‌

Peter Barnes, BBC political analyst - The short answer to this question is no. Prime ministers have probably received gifts and hospitality since the post was first created in the 18th Century. But it’s only in recent years that the public has been able to see details of what they’ve received.

‌

There are different systems for MPs and government ministers to publicly declare their financial interests, including gifts, but both sets of rules have only been properly formalised and made transparent in recent decades. The MPs’ register of interests was first published in 1974, originally on an annual basis, but it now comes out much more frequently and the rules about what has to be declared have been tightened over time. There has been a code of conduct for government ministers since World War Two but it was only made public for the first time in 1992. 

‌

Under the current rules set out in what’s now called the ministerial code, gifts given to ministers have to be declared with details being made public on a quarterly basis. The government has said it wants to tighten those rules so that gifts to ministers have to be declared more quickly.