Yahoo Finance Boris Johnson has a text addiction and it’s bad news for all of us
Incredible that Boris Johnson’s craziest ex is not actually someone he’s had sex with. When you think of the sheer volume of fatal attractions that must be stored in the prime minister’s phone under decoy names like “James Dyson” and “Mohammed bin Salman”, it seems extraordinary that the biggest bunny-boiler is alleged to be ex-spad Dominic Cummings.
Anyway, speaking of Fatal Attraction, you’ll have seen the news that undead Cummings is rearing back out of the bath again like Glenn Close, except wearing trackie bums and a T-shirt reading “My girlfriend – YES I HAVE A GIRLFRIEND – went to Los Alamos National Laboratory and all she got me was this lousy T-shirt”.
According to some concerted briefing efforts by Downing Street, the text-for-access lobbying leaks that have so adorned British public life over the past week are down to none other than the defrocked master strategist we once knew as Otto von Jizzmark. Cummings himself denies it, with his allies briefing “the rebel always wins”. Just like Princess Di, he won’t go quietly. But as one Downing Street source puts it: “If you join the dots it looks like it’s coming from Dom.” Righto. I’ve joined the dots, and it’s just … a picture of a cock and balls? Somewhat poorly drawn. Is that what you’re getting as well, Superintendent Hastings? “More than anything,” the No 10 source says, “the PM is disappointed and saddened by what Dom has been up to.”
Ooh – “saddened”. Ooh – “disappointed”. It’s very difficult to see how this government could be more comically grand about being this excruciatingly undignified. I really wouldn’t rule out a day in the near future when the Downing Street communications department draws itself up to its full height and intones: “The prime minister has entered a treatment facility to address issues in the area of sex addiction. It goes without saying that he expects the nation to respect his privacy at this difficult time.”
Related: Leak inquiry launched as No 10 insiders accuse Dominic Cummings
As I say, are we even totally sure the individual on the other end of Johnson’s text exchange is the actual hand-dryer genius James Dyson? It might just be a pseudonym for whichever tech mompreneur/concert trombonist/basic Rixo-shopping Sloane is currently keeping Johnson on the boil. I mean, MAYBE it’s a chat about respiratory aids, but maybe it’s just some mad sex code. Roughly speaking, the following is what we’re dealing with. Dyson, or rather “Dyson”: “Would you like to see my ventilators?” Johnson, panting in whatever broom cupboard in which he’s skiving off a Cobra meeting: “Oh God yes show me your ventilators.” “Sadly,” replies “Dyson”, “you need to remove the tax barriers to see them.” “I will fix it tomo!” judders the desperate Johnson. Say it. Say it. “JAMES I AM FIRST LORD OF THE TREASURY.” There you go. Better out than in.
The only statement from Downing Street this week that I actually believe is the denial that cabinet secretary Simon Case ever told Johnson to change his phone number, the PM apparently having had the same one for more than a decade. Very wise advice. That phone’s like the ghost containment grid from Ghostbusters. If you switch it off, extremely bad things will happen. Even if he’s as mediocre a yes-man as he appears, Case will surely have worked out that the phone is basically the safest repository for innumerable entities who are best “managed” rather than fully ghosted. Attempting to shut down the phone completely could result in a vast release of potentially fatal psychokinetic energy to the Sunday newspapers.
On the other hand, are there really even Chinese walls between the various forms of sleaze? And if so, who paid for the wallpaper on them? You could certainly leave it to Johnson to cross the streams of this week’s two biggest news stories – lobbying and football. It emerged that the PM was lobbied by text by Saudi crown prince and human lumberjack Mohammed bin Salman over his family’s blocked bid for Newcastle United. Hand on heart, this feels ominous. After all, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos once struck up a WhatsApp relationship with the de facto Saudi ruler, the next thing he knew the National Enquirer had their hands on a cache of text messages and photos of him in his pants. Still, as long as there’s nothing incriminating on the phone of Boris Johnson, I’m sure the Saudi crown prince having our prime minister’s deets is what the government’s shit-eater-in-chief Kwasi Kwarteng could call “good” for a modern democracy.
As for where we go next with text-for-access, none of it will be good. Today’s Cummings angle may be intended to serve as a distraction, but it is increasingly hard to separate Johnson’s career lack of standards from his administration’s rapid shedding of them. Of COURSE someone as sexually incontinent as Johnson would lead a government as procedurally incontinent as his is, spaffing unmonitored access and promises of procurement favours up whatever wall it happens to be standing next to.
And yet, a lot of senior government figures seem to take genuine pleasure in pointing at the polls and excusing any amount of obviously questionable behaviour as “just Boris being Boris”. They’re seemingly incapable of grasping that the entire executive taking on the character of this amoral and discipline-free man will end very badly indeed. It is precisely Johnson’s lack of discipline and moral courage that has resulted in this country having both the highest Covid death toll in Europe and the most unnecessarily long economic shutdown and loss of essential freedoms. Gloating that the voters don’t think they deserve better will not be the recipe for a great British future.
• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
