Johnson could be about to fall. There is a huge subtext of “he’s stuffing his pockets” in stories being put out about him by his own government ministers! E.g. that he “covered” the cost of the refurbishment. (Did he? So who put up the money?) And now the defence secretary Ben Wallace says that the report that Johnson said thousands more deaths were preferable to a lockdown was untrue…and then he calls it “gossip”.

“Gossip” is just an Anglo-Saxon way of saying what is more commonly referred to by government spokesmen as “speculation”, a standard Brit-posh (e.g. Foreign Office) way of saying something is true but you can shut up about it, you ain’t getting any more information about it either, and we aren’t admitting it openly.

As the British naval “carrier strike group” sets sail today for China…
hold on to your armrests for the ride with Michael Gove…
…or will it be with Jeremy Hunt, who made his fortune in China?

P.S. Why do they keep saying Theresa May had middle-class taste in interior design? So what? That doesn’t get Boris Johnson off the hook. He’s not accused of bad taste in sofas. He’s accused of TAKING BRIBES. It’s a pathetic bit of misdirection that might have been thought up by the kid in the office – maybe by some “rationalist” 18-year-old with a copy of “Atlas Shrugged” stuffed in his jeans? 🙂 And anyway isn’t it “as common as muck” to think you’re better than somebody else because their taste in sofas differs from yours?