Mentions Boris Johnson

Veteran TV executive Samir Shah, the co-author of Boris Johnson’s controversial race report, has been named the new chairman of the BBC.

The role was vacated by Richard Sharp in a cloud of controversy earlier this year, when the ex-Goldman Sachs banker quit after failing to declare his link to an £800,000 loan made to Mr Johnson.

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The new chairman is best-known for his role co-authoring a much-criticised 2021 race report that dismissed the idea that Britain was institutionally racist.

Mr Shah strongly defended the findings of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report – and claimed the response of the “race lobby” had failed to understand it.

He argued that “class, poverty, family circumstance and geography” played as big a role as race in life outcomes.

Mr Shah also said there was “no doubt” that racial disparity still existed – but insisted that racism was “not sweeping” and was “diminishing” in the UK today.

Commissioned in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, the report found that institutional racism doesn’t exist. Some commissioners later claimed officials at No 10 helped rewrite the conclusion of the report.

On its surface, Khan’s clean air zone is hardly the stuff of revolution. Called the London Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), it imposed a daily charge of £12.50 (about $15) on highly polluting vehicles traversing the central parts of the capital and enforced the sanctions with roadside cameras. Yet its expansion in late August has distorted U.K. national politics and Khan’s political prospects, and would even come to pose a threat to his personal safety.

The new pollution charge has been met with a seething public backlash — one I would later encounter firsthand in a village on London’s furthest reaches.

According to a person close to the mayor — who, like others in this article, was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters — anti-ULEZ protesters have regularly turned up at Khan’s South London home, including when his two daughters were there alone. For several days, a caravan was chained outside his house bearing slogans and artwork that included swastikas. Protesters targeted his family for abuse at public events.

A town hall meeting in early November had to be moved to City Hall for security reasons. During the meeting, a man yelled that, centuries ago, Khan would have been hung from the “gallows.” Police have regularly searched the mayor’s house and car in response to written notes claiming explosive devices had been planted. In October, a letter came in the mail, addressed to him, with a bullet inside.

Rishi Sunak’s posh-boy reshuffle means members of the infamous Bullingdon Club have occupied the great offices of state for 85% of the time since 2010.

Since 11 May 2010, a member of the Bullingdon Club has been either Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary, or Chancellor for 4122 days – over 11 years continuously. At one point, Bullingdon Boys occupied half of the great offices of state - but had been absent since Boris Johnson was ousted from No10.

But the shock return of David Cameron as Foreign Secretary means the elitist organisation is once again represented at the top of government. 

Boris Johnson said he would rather “let the bodies pile high” than impose another lockdown, the Covid Inquiry has heard.

The former prime minister has previously denied ever making the statement, both on television and to the House of Commons, after an anonymous source told the Daily Mail in 2021 that Johnson said: “No more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

Boris Johnson told senior advisers that the Covid virus was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people” and he was “no longer buying” the fact the NHS was overwhelmed during the pandemic, the pandemic inquiry has heard.

In a WhatsApp message sent to his top aides in October 2020, the former prime minister said he had been “slightly rocked” by Covid infection rates and suggested he was, as a result, unconvinced that hospitals were on the brink despite public warnings from NHS chiefs and frontline staff.

The former chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, in his diaries described a “bonkers set of exchanges” in a meeting from that August. He noted that Johnson appeared “obsessed with older people accepting their fate” and letting younger people get on with their lives during the pandemic.