With just four weeks left in No. 10, rumours are swirling about Boris Johnson’s future plans. Will he quit the Commons or face down his critics on the Privileges Committee? Make a mint on the speaking circuit or champion Kyiv’s cause? With debts, costs and childcare bills, one thing’s for sure: Boris’s next job will probably pay far better than the extra £79,000 he gets to be PM on top of his MPs’ salary.
So it’s no surprise then that there is plenty of talk in Fleet Street right now about the Old Etonian resuming his columnist duties. Johnson received £250,000 a year when he was London Mayor to write a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph – a sum he memorably dismissed as ‘chicken feed.’ That swelled to £275,000 a year when he temporarily resumed his writing duties in 2018 after quitting Theresa May’s government. Given Johnson’s insights as a former premier, surely such scribblings have only risen in value…
Johnson and the Telegraph go back decades but could the famously fickle Tory find new affections elsewhere? For over at Northcliffe House, the hacks there have been doing their best to woo the beleaguered PM, with this week’s splash castigating the ‘Boris witch-hunt’ and plenty of glowing editorials in favour of Liz Truss to succeed Johnson (the Prime Minister hasn’t been very subtle about the fact he would rather it wasn’t Rishi Sunak). The Mail millions are the stuff of legend and editor Ted Verity is a fan. Few spots would be better placed for Johnson to hurl rocks at his successor than the comment pages of Britain’s most read newspaper.
Perhaps, though, Johnson is done taking orders and after a stint in No. 10, only the hot seat will do. At last, his true calling beckons: the editorship of a newspaper. And, by curious chance, such a vacancy has indeed opened up at a paper Boris knows well. The Evening Standard was a staunch backer in both his mayoral triumphs and Johnson knows its owner Evgeny Lebedev extremely well. ‘We’re petrified,’ says one downbeat reporter at the free sheet.
