Since being kicked out of Downing Street six months ago, Boris Johnson has earned £5m. Incredible, really.
He was a disaster of a PM, but it hasn’t stopped the money coming in.
And that’s the thing with Mr Johnson. He’s led a charmed life. Nothing really touches him.
Just a couple of weeks after a grilling over his Partygate conduct, he jetted off to the Dominican Republic.
It’s his fourth holiday since he stopped being PM – Dominican Republic, Slovenia, Greece, then back to the Dominican Republic.
It makes you wonder, what cost of living crisis?
This time he stayed at a luxury villa and enjoyed whale watching and sightseeing.
Mr Johnson has done nothing illegal by taking his holiday, of course. Everyone is entitled to an Easter getaway. But the optics – as they say in politics – are terrible.
Not only does Mr Johnson have the verdict of the standards committee hanging over him, but he’s been staying in the villa of a man linked to the £800k loan scandal that engulfed the BBC chairman.
It’s not really keeping your head down is it?
The charge often levelled at Mr Johnson during his tenure as Prime Minister was that he was unable to take anything seriously.
He was not suitable to be in charge. He was a populist, with an eccentric attitude that endeared him to people.
But the pandemic brought it home to roost that he was not up to it.
The Covid crisis was mishandled and Mr Johnson presided over a group who partied their way through it.
Par for the course. Now a luxury holiday in the face of a cost of living crisis.
Labour plan to paint the Tories as a party of millionaires, out-of-touch and immune to the struggles the country is going through.
It won’t be difficult. The Tories are already doing that themselves.
Tragic failings
This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of the tragic death of Stephen Lawrence – a young man with his whole life in front of him, cut down by racist thugs.
But in all that time, what has changed?
The Met Police has made no progress and crime still blights the capital.
Today we reveal that deadly knives are available to teens at the touch of a button.
More must be done to end this scourge and to honour the memory of Stephen.
Above Everage
“He would have been a handful in any society,” Clive James wrote about his fellow Aussie, Barry Humphries.
And he was. Equally outrageous in interviews as he was in character as Dame Edna or the Cultural Attache Les Patterson.
His family said: “His audiences were precious to him. He never took them for granted.”
We never took him for granted either.
