Downing Avenue has admitted that members of the Prime Minister’s staff intervened earlier than an explosive story about his spouse Carrie Johnson was withdrawn from publication in The Occasions.
Downing Avenue has admitted that members of the Prime Minister’s staff intervened earlier than an explosive story about his spouse Carrie Johnson was withdrawn from publication in The Occasions.
It denied nevertheless that Boris Johnson had personally intervened to ask for the story to be eliminated, which reported claims that Johnson had tried to rent his now spouse as his chief of employees when he was overseas secretary on a 100k a yr wage.
The piece, written by veteran journalist Simon Walters, claimed that Johnson tried to nominate his now-wife Carrie as his £100,000-a-year chief of employees whereas he was overseas secretary in 2018, nevertheless the story was taken down hours after being printed on Saturday, inflicting numerous head-scratching over the weekend.
The story was withdrawn with none clarification and nor was the article ever revealed on the Occasions’ web site. The MailOnline, which additionally picked up the story, deleted its copy too.
Preliminary claims about Johnson trying to rent Carrie to a senior position had already been made by Michael Ashcroft in his biography of Carrie who had alleged that Johnson had tried to nominate her to a £100,000-a-year authorities job when he was overseas secretary in 2018.
Nonetheless, Johnson’s want was by no means realised after opposition from a few of his closest advisers. Carrie Johnson has categorically rejected the claims saying that they had been ‘completely unfaithful’.
Within the Occasions story, Walters quoted one among Johnson’s senior overseas workplace staffers as saying: “A bootleg relationship with Carrie was none of our enterprise. Making her chief of employees was positively our enterprise. Our job was to guard him and we knew what was happening between them, and it might have been an insane threat to let him do it.”
The New European reviews that the Every day Mail was additionally supplied the story however that ‘it turned it down, with the tipster being instructed it didn’t accord with the newspaper’s “common standpoint”.
Walters nevertheless is standing by his story, telling the New European: “I used to be in prolonged and detailed communication with No. 10 at a excessive stage, Ben Gascoigne and Mrs Johnson’s spokeswoman for as much as 48 hours earlier than the paper went to press. At no level did any of them provide an on-the-record denial of any ingredient of the story.”
Dominic Cummings tweeted final night time that the story “is true” and that the PM additionally wished to present Carrie a authorities job throughout the third quarter of 2020, claims that Downing Avenue has denied.
Reacting to Downing Avenue’s newest admission, Jo Maugham, director of the Good Regulation Mission tweeted: “Telling, that the denials are coming from Carrie when the allegations are primarily about Johnson. Is the plan to try to give the impression of a denial with out really having to disclaim them for worry of laborious proof rising?”
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Ahead
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