Adam Boulton: Long Johnson is still plaguing the Tories – Sunak needs to take decisive action
Those worried about the health of British politics have diagnosed a new disease at Westminster.
Chris Patten, a grandee from the Conservative establishment, spotted what he called “Long Boris” last summer.
Weeks after Boris Johnson announced his resignation as prime minister, Lord Patten, a former party chairman and former BBC chairman, lamented the persistent “corrupting and debilitating impact of Johnson’s premiership on British politics and government.”
As with ‘SARS-Covid-19’ there was some debate as to how the condition should be named in general conversation.
Eventually, “Long Johnson” was settled on rather than the more familiar “Long Boris”.
The commentator Paul Waugh listed some of the symptoms of Long Johnson he saw in the bloodstream of the Conservative party: “A debilitating condition that led it to lose its sense of taste, decency and direction.”
Long Johnson hit fever pitch with the Conservative party’s short-lived collective decision to select Johnson’s preferred candidate, Liz Truss, as the next prime minister. That quickly burnt itself out.
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On taking office Rishi Sunak tried to shake off Long Johnson by promising that his government would be one of “integrity, professionalism and accountability” at all times. It is not proving so easy for the new prime minister to escape unwanted legacies from his predecessor-but-one.
Questions of probity over two men who were promoted by Johnson, Nadhim Zahawi and Richard Sharp, have combined to create the biggest political crisis of Sunak’s short premiership.
According to Raphael Behr, political columnist on The Guardian, the “Zahawi episode is a symptom of Long Johnson, the chronic, recurrent, debilitation of government by a pathogen that still circulates in the ruling party long after the original infection has been treated”.
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Analysis: Labour says PM ‘too weak’
The embarrassments Sunak is grappling with are debilitating hangovers from the Johnson era, so is the fumbling way the prime minister is dealing with them.
Nadhim Zahawi had the reputation at Westminster of a comparatively competent and personable minister, one of those credited with the successful roll-out of the vaccine programme. But as often with politicians who become conspicuously wealthy there was much gossip about his finances.
His wealth was generated as a co-founder of the polling company YouGov before he became an MP.
Scrutiny of Zahawi’s finances sharpened when he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, the politician responsible for the nation’s finances and tax system. In seeking the truth, journalists received what they considered to be aggressive threats of libel from lawyers acting for Zahawi, designed to suppress allegations, some of which have been confirmed as accurate.
It is now known that while he was Chancellor, Zahawi quietly negotiated a tax settlement totalling some £5m, including a penalty of more than £1m, with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) for which he was the minister responsible.
Zahawi says his mistake was “careless but not deliberate”. Jim Harra, the head of HMRC, told MPs this week: “There are no penalties for innocent errors in your tax affairs.”
There is no pressing reason why Boris Johnson should have made Zahawi chancellor. Nor does the haste with which the appointment was made suggest that the prime minister or his officials, led by the Cabinet Secretary, had sufficient time for due diligence looking into his suitability for this most sensitive financial post. Yet their green light then effectively gave him a free pass to prominent ministerial ranks under both Truss and Sunak.
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‘Questions need answering’ in Zahawi case
By late last year scrutiny by an honours committee elsewhere in Whitehall reportedly held up a proposed knighthood for Zahawi.
In the past, when serving prime ministers have announced their intention to resign, other ministers have stayed in post until the successor is chosen. He or she then assembles their own cabinet team. This has been so even when threatened ministerial resignations force out a prime minister, as happened to both Tony Blair and Boris Johnson.
Once he announced he was going, Johnson could have said that he was not accepting resignations and that all minsters would stay on in the interim. That is not the way Boris Johnson behaved. He used his dying powers of patronage to settle scores and to try to influence the outcome of the leadership election.
He fired Michael Gove and then he troubled the ailing Queen to appoint an entirely new temporary cabinet for the few weeks of the leadership contest. Johnson promoted Zahawi to the Treasury, thus crucially depriving Rishi Sunak of the status of high office during the leadership battle, while Truss luxuriated in the great office of state of foreign secretary.
Earlier, after Sunak emerged as the person most likely to replace Johnson, he became the subject of damaging leaks about his US Green Card and his wife’s non-dom status. The Metropolitan Police coincidentally tarnished the teetotal Sunak’s reputation, and blunted the impact on Johnson, by issuing them both with fixed penalty notices for breaking COVID regulations at the “ambushed with a cake” Johnson birthday party in the cabinet room.
Sunak experienced the hard way the phenomenon, now hitting Zahawi and Sharp, that friendship with Johnson often has adverse consequences.
Richard Sharp insists that he was appointed the chairman of the BBC on merit after a rigorous selection process. There is no reason to doubt his perspective. When I knew him at university, more than 40 years ago, he was an exceptionally decent and considerate person. He went on to build a highly successful career in finance alongside generous voluntary contributions to public service and charity.
Men with known political affiliations such as Michael Grade, Gavyn Davies and Marmaduke Hussey have been appointed to the BBC chair by other prime ministers. But Boris Johnson made the final decision over Sharp, after he and his allies had previously broken with precedent by conjuring up culture wars and pre-endorsing friends and allies such as Paul Dacre and Charles Moore for top posts in the media, normally viewed as apolitical – unsuccessfully it turned out.
Johnson used his patronage to appoint Peter Cruddas to the House of Lords, someone who had helped him out with his personal finances. Richard Sharp says he “simply connected” people, who then facilitated an undeclared personal £800,000 overdraft guarantee for the prime minister.
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Zahawi should ‘stand aside’
Richard Sharp and cabinet secretary Simon Case may genuinely have decided this was immaterial to Sharp’s BBC application but is that the way Boris Johnson sees things? Several enquiries into Sharp’s appointment are now under way. Johnson’s benefactor Sam Blyth is an old friend of Sharp.
The inquiries will doubtless ascertain whether Boris Johnson knew of this obliging distant cousin’s existence before Sharp introduced him to the cabinet secretary.
Long Johnson is also evident in the way the government is handling these potential scandals.
Quick resignations and moving on are things of the past. Following a pattern which became familiar during the Johnson era, Sunak has presided over, and sometimes joined in, denials that have turned out to be inaccurate, playing for time by calling for further inquiries after awkward facts are established.
Sir Keir Starmer had a two-pronged attack at PMQs: “We all know why the prime minister was reluctant to ask his party chair questions about family finances and tax avoidance, but his failure to sack him, when the whole country can see what is going on, shows how hopelessly weak he is.”
Sizeable minorities in parliament and perhaps even more in the Tory membership are not loyal to Sunak and hanker for a return of Johnson. This limits Sunak’s ability to lead firmly.
With his oblique reference to the great wealth of Sunak’s family, the leader of the opposition went further, implying that the prime minister is really just one of them – sharing similar values, or the absence of them, to Johnson and Zahawi and the same acquisitiveness.
Only urgent decisive action by Sunak can demonstrate that he has beaten the plague of Long Johnson.
Two in five people over 50 say they have not had as many children as they wanted – with economic issues, health concerns and fears about the state of the world among the main barriers.
More than half said financial factors such as affordable housing, childcare options and job security were things that had limited, or would limit, their ability to grow their families.
One in four said health issues were holding them back, while a fifth of respondents mentioned fears about global issues including climate change, wars and pandemics.
The findings come from a new survey of over 14,000 people by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) – spanning 14 countries on five continents that are home to a third of the world’s population.
Birth rates have been declining across almost all regions of the world, while life expectancy continues to grow.
There are concerns, from politicians and commentators like Elon Musk, that future generations of working age people will find it more difficult to economically support people of pension age as the ratio of workers to pensioners shifts.
“Vast numbers of people are unable to create the families they want,” said Dr Natalia Kanem, executive director of the UNFPA.
“The issue is lack of choice, not desire, with major consequences for individuals and societies. That is the real fertility crisis, and the answer lies in responding to what people say they need: paid family leave, affordable fertility care, and supportive partners.”
Differences around the world
The survey was carried out in four European countries, four in Asia, three across Africa and three from the Americas.
The countries were picked to try and represent “a wide variety of countries with different cultural contexts, fertility rates and policy approaches”, according to the report’s editor Dr Rebecca Zerzan.
It includes, for example, the country with the lowest fertility rate in the world – South Korea. It also includes country with a birth rate among the highest in the world, which also happens to be the most populous country in its continent – Nigeria.
The others, in order of population size, are India, the US, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, Thailand, South Africa, Italy, Morocco, Sweden and Hungary.
In many cases there were significant differences in responses depending on which country people were reporting from.
For example in Nigeria, a third of men (although only 21% of women) reported that they wanted to have four or more children. The numbers were similar in South Africa. However in South Korea, Thailand, Italy, Germany and Hungary, no more than 5% agreed.
Fertility issues were twice as likely in the US (16% of respondents) as in neighbouring Mexico (8%).
In South Korea, three in five respondents reported financial limitations as an obstacle.
But in Sweden, where both men and women are entitled to 480 days of paid parental leave per child (which can also be transferred to grandparents), fewer than one in five said the same.
How paternity leave in the UK compares to other countries
Birth rates in Sweden are still among the lowest in the world, however. Dr Zerzan told Sky News that this shows that no one factor alone contributes to people feeling empowered to have children at the right time.
“A third of people in Sweden say they think raising a child will take up too much time and energy. And a higher number of people there, compared with other countries, are also concerned about climate change and bringing a child in to an uncertain world.”
Unintended pregnancies vs not as many children as wanted
A curious finding from the survey is that, while there has been much discussion around declining fertility rates, almost a third of people said they or their partner had experienced an unintended pregnancy.
Globally, as people who become pregnant unintentionally often do so more than once, half of all pregnancies are unintended.
In Morocco and South Africa, around half of people had experience of an unintended pregnancy. In the same two countries, more than half of people had experience of being unable to have a child at their preferred time.
Overall, one in eight people had experienced both an unintended pregnancy and barriers to a desired child.
“Everywhere we look, people are struggling to freely realise their reproductive aspirations,” explains the report.
People who had more children than they wanted, and people who had fewer, were present in countries with high and low fertility rates.
“That indicates that barriers to achieving one’s ideal family are ubiquitous.”
What can be done to help?
The report says that the crisis does require political interventions, but warns against policies that often amount to short-term fixes, or those designed to coerce people to either use or not use contraception.
“Whether the policies are coercive or not, there are real risks to treating fertility rates as a faucet to be turned on or off. Many of the countries that are today seeking to increase fertility have, within the last 40 years, sought to decrease birth rates.
“For example, China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Thailand and Türkiye all reported in 1986 an intention to lower their national fertility rates through policy interventions, deeming their respective fertility rates at that time as ‘too high’. By 2015, however, all five countries had switched to policies designed to boost fertility.
“Today all five have total fertility rates below two children per woman.”
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling, we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
Top US and Chinese officials are meeting in London on Monday in the hope of making further progress in easing the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
The eyes of global financial market investors are firmly on the outcome of the discussions, given the damage already inflicted by the spat and wider US-led trade war.
The US delegation is led by Treasury secretary Scott Bessent while China‘s vice premier He Lifeng – a respected negotiator at the top of the Chinese government – will represent his country.
The venue has not been disclosed.
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It is hoped the talks will build on the preliminary agreement struck in Geneva that removed the effective trade embargo between the two nations.
That deal amounted to a 90-day reduction in effective tariff rates above 100% to allow for further talks.
A phone conversation between Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping last week set the scene for Monday’s negotiations.
Mr Trump later said that Xi had agreed to resume shipments to the US of rare earths minerals and magnets.
They had been suspended by Beijing in response to Mr Trump’s tariffs and were seen as an effective tool in getting the US to talk due to the havoc it inflicted on supply chains central to many American manufacturers – the very sector the US president is trying to bolster through his “America first” agenda.
It emerged on Monday morning that Boeing had resumed shipments of planes to Chinese customers.
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Explained: The US-UK trade deal
Mr Trump has described the status of the negotiations as “very far advanced” but China, in its own remarks, has been more critical of the US position.
A Chinese government readout of the Trump-Xi conversation said the Chinese premier had told his US counterpart to back down from inflicting further hurt to the global economy.
The trade war to date has damaged growth widely, with official US figures showing a sharp slowdown in the first quarter of the year – before the worst of the tariff regime had even been announced.
Data out of China on Monday showed deflationary pressures had deepened as factory gate prices – an important signal on future price growth – slid further into negative territory during May as demand for goods continued to drag.
Customs data had already showed that China’s exports to the US – its biggest single market – slumped by 34.5% year-on-year during May in value terms.
That was up from a 21% drop the previous month.
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White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Fox News: “We want China and the United States to continue moving forward with the agreement that was struck in Geneva.
“The administration has been monitoring China’s compliance with the deal, and we hope that this will move forward to have more comprehensive trade talks.”
A UK government spokesperson said of hosting the negotiations: “We are a nation that champions free trade and have always been clear that a trade war is in nobody’s interests, so we welcome these talks.”
NATO needs a 400% increase in air and missile defence to maintain a credible deterrence, its secretary general has said in a speech in London.
Mark Rutte called for a “quantum leap” in collective security, warning threats facing the alliance “will not disappear even when the war in Ukraine ends”.
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It comes ahead of a summit in The Hague later this month, when the UK and its NATO allies are expected to agree to a Donald Trump-inspired pledge to spend 5% of GDP on defence and related areas.
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Speaking at Chatham House, Mr Rutte said the investment plan is “grounded in hard facts”.
He said: “The fact is, we need a quantum leap in our collective defence. The fact is, we must have more forces and capabilities to implement our defence plans in full. The fact is, danger will not disappear even when the war in Ukraine ends.”
Mr Rutte argued that in order to maintain credible deterrence and defence, NATO needs “a 400% increase in air and missile defence”.
“We see in Ukraine how Russia delivers terror from above, so we will strengthen the shield that protects our skies,” he said.
“Our militaries also need thousands more armoured vehicles and tanks, millions more artillery shells, and we must double our enabling capabilities, such as logistics, supply, transportation, and medical support.”
Mr Rutte also referred to countries other than Russia that pose a threat to the alliance and said: “Russia has teamed up with China, North Korea and Iran. They are expanding their militaries and their capabilities. Putin’s war machine is speeding up, not slowing down.”
He continued: “In terms of ammunition, Russia produces in three months what the whole of NATO produces in a year, and its defence industrial base is expected to roll out 1,500 tanks, 3,000 armoured vehicles and 200 Iskander missiles this year alone. Russia could be ready to use military force against NATO within five years.”
Mr Rutte added: “China is also modernising and expanding its military at breakneck speed. It already has the world’s largest navy, and this battle force is expected to grow to 435 ships by 2030.”
On the threats against the alliance, he also warned: “Wishful thinking will not keep us safe. We cannot dream away the danger. Hope is not a strategy. So NATO has to become a stronger, fairer and more lethal alliance.”
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NATO spending targets explained
Mr Rutte earlier met with Sir Keir Starmer and visited Sheffield Forgemasters with Defence Secretary John Healey.
The prime minister has committed to spend 2.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence from April 2027, with a goal of increasing that to 3% over the next parliament.
Although the government’s language has been cloudy on the 3% figure, describing it as an ambition rather than a commitment, Sky News understands the UK will in fact agree to increase defence spending to 3.5% of national income within a decade as part of Mr Rutte’s push to rearm NATO and keep the US on side.
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As reported by our security and defence editor Deborah Haynes, Sir Keir will also likely be forced to commit a further 1.5% of GDP to defence-related areas such as spy agencies and infrastructure.
This would bolster total broader defence spending to 5%, in what is being described as the “Hague investment plan”.
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NATO countries have faced pressure from US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly hit out at European allies for not spending enough on defence and taking advantage of American taxpayers.
Speaking at Chatham House today, Mr Rutte said: “Spending more (on defence) is not about pleasing an audience of one. This is about protecting one billion people.”
He added: “America has carried too much of the burden for too long. America’s allies have broad shoulders, and Europe and Canada will do more for our shared security. And that will be backed by America’s rock solid commitment to NATO.“
The NATO plan to increase defence spending among its members comes as Sir Keir is facing pressure at home on where his priorities lie, with many of his own MPs wanting to see more funding on welfare.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves will deliver her spending review on Wednesday, when health and defence are expected to be the winners in the process to allocate cash to government departments.
Cuts to the Department of Work and Pensions have already been announced, but other unprotected departments like the Home Office and Department of Communities and Local Government could be braced for a real spending squeeze.
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