Tapping the lectern for emphasis at the Cop26 summit last week, the prime minister intoned: “I just want to say, the most important thing is: those who break the rules must be investigated and should be punished.”
New documentary evidence suggests Boris Johnson himself may have broken the rules governing ethical conduct in public office when he was London mayor – but was never punished.
In 2019 allegations that Johnson had used his position as mayor to benefit the business interests of his American lover Jennifer Arcuri were referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).
The IOPC concluded in May 2020 that it would not launch an investigation. But it did not have access to Arcuri’s handwritten diary entries in which she says she contemporaneously noted down the highlights of his telephone calls and their conversations. Until now, these extracts have never been published.
They appear to show just how recklessly Johnson disregarded the Nolan ethical standards expected of public office holders by ignoring advice from his staff not to help Arcuri promote her business of ticket sales tech conferences called Innotech.
Arcuri declined to disclose these extracts to the IOPC because she says she is sensitive to the allegation that any City Hall grants she was awarded and trade missions she was allowed to attend were not on merit, but the result of Johnson’s generosity to her. To date, there remains no direct evidence that any of them were granted to her by Johnson (though there is evidence that he knew about the trade missions).
Arcuri entrusted me with her diaries after I reported on her affair with Johnson for an ITV documentary shortly before the 2019 election. At the time, the Conservative party told me: “Any claims of impropriety in office are untrue and unfounded.”
Her diaries appear to suggest otherwise – and after Johnson’s strictures in Glasgow about public probity, having tried to protect his friend Owen Paterson from parliamentary censure for lobbying ministers and officials on behalf of clients who had been paying Paterson a total of up to £112,000 per year, Arcuri has released me from my confidentiality undertaking.
The diaries appear to be a contemporaneous record of Johnson’s obsession with having sex with Arcuri while appearing to offer help with her business as an inducement: “How can I be the thrust – the throttle – your mere footstep as you make your career? Tell me: how I can help you?” he told her in October 2012. In January 2014 he also compliments her “most amazing body”.
He appeared to finally succeed in his ambition in September 2012 when he stopped by at Arcuri’s east London flat en route to attending the 2012 Paralympics.
Later Johnson is noted in the diary as having told Arcuri: “I can barely control myself whenever I see you. You make me too excited. Baby I couldn’t wait. All year I have been waiting for you. All year. You drove me nuts. I have thought about no woman as I have thought of you.”
However, although they continued to meet, Arcuri says they did not have sex again before she returned to the US late in December 2012, despite Johnson continuing to offer: “How can I be your footstool to your career?” He was “always trying to think of ways to please me”, she told me.
On Arcuri’s return to London in early 2013, Johnson paid an afternoon visit to her flat, where she took him up on his offer. One way of pleasing her, she told him, was to agree to be the keynote speaker at the launch of her Innotech business model in April.
At first, she says, Johnson demurred. The previous November, her diary noted he had told her: “You are going to get me in so much trouble.” She claims he spoke of a conflict of interest, but he never explained that their relationship posed a head-on conflict with the Nolan principles that were incorporated into the Greater London Authority (GLA) code of conduct. She says she had never heard of Nolan until after news broke about their relationship in the autumn of 2019.
As Arcuri persisted that afternoon with her request to Johnson to be her keynote conference speaker, he acquiesced.
While seemingly pursuing Arcuri for sex in 2012, Johnson had endorsed the GLA’s 2012 code of conduct in which he undertook not to bring the GLA “into disrepute” by using his position “improperly to confer on or secure for themselves or any other person, an advantage or disadvantage”.
Having succumbed to Arcuri’s request to be the keynote speaker at the launch of Innotech, Johnson is recorded in a diary entry for February 2013 as proudly boasting that he had ignored the advice of his staff not to attend: “I just want you to know they came to me and I crushed them – they said ‘You can’t do this Innotech in April.’ I said ‘Yes, I can, I’ll be there.’ I only want to do this to make you happy. How I do wish to make you satisfied.’” To which Arcuri quipped: “Well, at least we know there’s one way you can satisfy me” – and notes that Johnson “started laughing”.
Johnson agreed to appear at two further tech conferences organised by Arcuri. If her diary is a fair reflection of how, as mayor, he helped launch her Innotech business in April 2013, his insistence both to me in 2019 and earlier to the BBC’s Andrew Marr that “everything was done with full propriety” was clearly misleading.
Advancing Arcuri’s business interests in the expectation of sexual reward without declaring their relationship in his register of disclosable pecuniary interests manifestly was a breach of the spirit of the Nolan principles that promote “selflessness, integrity, objectivity, and honesty” in public life.
When pressed by Marr to say if he had declared his relationship with Arcuri as a pecuniary interest, Johnson replied: “There was no interest to declare.”
In this, at least, the canny Johnson appears to have relied on a change to the GLA code that he had approved as mayor shortly before having sex with Arcuri, which specifically removed “close associate” from the list of persons required to be declared as having a “pecuniary interest”.
However, while concluding not to investigate Johnson over allegations of criminal misconduct in public office, the IOPC did find that, had he been in an intimate relationship with Arcuri (as distinct from just a close associate) and used his influence to benefit her without declaring a conflict of interest, he “could still be in breach of the Nolan-type principles of the code and thus bring the GLA into disrepute”.
The IOPC said of Johnson: “It would have been wise for him to have declared this as a conflict of interest, and a failure to do so could have constituted a breach of these broader principles contained within the GLA 2012 code of conduct.”
The new diary evidence suggests that Johnson did indeed bring the GLA into disrepute as London mayor. He was not just in an “intimate relationship” with Arcuri; he appears to have obsessively pursued her, even offering to advance her pecuniary interests in the hope and expectation that this might lead to sex, while, she notes, boasting that he had ignored his staff’s advice to help Arcuri her – presumably because they knew or suspected what was going on.
As an apologist for Paterson’s multiple breaches, –not just of the Nolan principles but also of parliament’s lobbying rules – the prime minister can now add parliament to the list of institutions he has brought into disrepute, despite his new moral imperative that rule-breakers should be punished.
John Ware was the reporter for the documentary When Boris Met Jennifer in ITV’s Exposure series in November 2019
