On the April 1998 Have I Got News For You appearance that made his name to six million viewers, Boris Johnson was accused of aiding a friend’s plan to beat up a journalist. To audience laughter, Johnson described the incident as a “major goof”. Eight years later, in 2006, Johnson confided a new media strategy to an interviewer. He said, “I’ve got a brilliant new strategy, which is to make so many gaffes that nobody knows which one to concentrate on.” Somewhere between those moments, the Ben Stiller film Dodgeball had been released and quickly became Johnson’s favourite. He liked to quote “the five Ds of Dodgeball”: “dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge!”
Now the Guardian thinks it has him on something that cannot be dodged. The paper accessed 1,820 files including “emails, letters, invoices, spreadsheets, speeches and business contracts”. The documents “raise questions” about whether Johnson improperly traded his public position for private deals. A series of findings will be published as “The Boris Files”. Such information would always have made headlines. But the register taken by the Guardian points to higher stakes. The paper tells us it decided to review the files based on “principles”. Namely, that “in a functioning democracy [journalists] have a role to play in holding power to account”.
The key word is “power”. That dutiful tone is more than just the lingua franca of Johnson’s “lefty neighbours” in Islington. (In his GQ car review column, he described the Guardian office as the “national epicentre of the politics of resentment”.) The fact is Johnson remains a live, significant player in British politics. His decisions between now and the next election will dramatically affect its result. But it remains to be seen how these files will affect public opinion of Johnson. After the announcement of the Files, four initial disclosures were published.
First, the Guardian allege that Johnson approached Saudi officials he had met while prime minister to pitch a consultancy firm he co-chaired to Mohammed bin Salman. The company, Better Earth, was established by a Canadian mining financier. Johnson seems to have led efforts to win a contract for its advice on reducing emissions from the Saudi government. To sell the idea, Johnson allegedly wrote a letter to bin Salman that professed to being a “fervent admirer of the vision you have for the kingdom”.
Second, they claim Johnson was paid £240,000 after meeting Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro last year. Weeks after the meeting, the third person in the room, hedge fund manager Maarten Petermann, paid Johnson £240,000. Johnson claimed he had received no payment for meetings in Venezuela.
Third, Johnson and Dominic Cummings allegedly had a secret meeting with Peter Thiel in August 2019. The meeting was marked private and not subsequently disclosed in the government’s public log of meetings. Later, during the pandemic and afterwards, Thiel’s data firm Palantir was given increasingly large responsibilities within the NHS.
Fourth, Johnson allegedly had dinner with the peer who funded the refurbishment of his flat the day after announcing the second national Covid lockdown. David Brownlow provided £58,000 for the renovations, including the infamous wallpaper. The disclosure recalls the “partygate” scandal that ousted Johnson from Downing Street in 2022. The files include other apparent breaches of lockdown rules.
There is more than enough in those revelations to sink a typical politician. The question is whether there is enough to sink Johnson. That is much more dubious. For years, there has been a rolling question about his return to politics. As the Conservative Party’s despair has deepened, the rumble has risen. Of course there is a large pile of baggage to negotiate, from partygate itself to the right’s new obsession with the “Boriswave” of immigration. The question is whether the Boris Files stack the pile too high to be clambered, make the scrapes too sharp to slip through.
It will help him now that Johnson never claimed to be perfectly upstanding, or asked his voters to be perfectly upstanding. Last week, Angela Rayner’s impropriety was fanned into scandal by gleefully circulated clips of her damning other politicians who had done similar things. But Boris isn’t like that. One of Johnson’s biographers, Andrew Gimson, records that “While many politicians have the urge to perfect society, Boris believes in the imperfectability of mankind, and especially of himself. He does not seek to attain impossibly high standards, nor does he impose them on others. He is unpompous, which is yet another reason why people like him so much.”
Johnson is either the most famous politician in the country or close to it. He won 13,966,454 votes in 2019. That is over 400,000 more than Tony Blair won in 1997 and over 4 million more than Keir Starmer won in 2024. His old party faces total collapse and apparently has no cards up its sleeve.
Kemi Badenoch wouldn’t want him back. But she is so weak that she won’t be able to stop him should he bound back into Westminster. She would have to formally approve his candidacy, but if he publicly announced a desire, she would be hard-pressed to publicly oppose it. So powerless is Badenoch, that all Johnson has to do is ring up GB News for when a seat at a by-election opens up and tell the country he wants it. He would become de facto party leader the moment he enters the Commons.
Nigel Farage wouldn’t want it. His colleagues recognise Johnson as the only man with charisma dangerous to Farage’s own. Farage enjoys considerable support from voters who liked Johnson but disliked those who came after him. They could try to nail him on immigration: indeed Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s head of policy, was singing this song on television as recently as Sunday morning. Reform owns the issue and Johnson let millions of migrants into the country. But the “Boriswave” term is so far used little outside online political corners, and there is a certain defensive nastiness to Reform’s posture on the issue that voters might like to see replaced by something with a sunnier tone. Johnson himself has been worried enough by the idea of the “Boriswave” to call up journalists who attack him over it in newspapers. Why would he call up journalists to argue with them about immigration if he wasn’t plotting a comeback?
Which is why, oddly, almost inconceivably, Keir Starmer might want Johnson back. The grim consensus within Labour seems to be that Reform are the opposition and potentially, as things stand, an unstoppable one. The government won its majority largely because Reform took a chunk out of the Tory vote. They might now welcome a Tory party with enough bite to do the same to Reform.
And one imagines that Johnson himself must want it. He measures himself by historical standards. Churchill returned to Downing Street after years cast out, and even at the next election’s latest possible date, Johnson would be younger than Churchill was at the start of his first premiership. Driving between London and his Oxfordshire constituency early on in his career, Johnson used to make up phrases from the letters on number-plates in front of him. If he saw “BWW”, that was “Boris Will Win”. Even after the release of The Boris Files, it is hard to say he won’t. The harder question is what Britain wants.
[See also: Boris Johnson’s performance art]
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