With his money-grubbing speeches, Boris Johnson cheapens our politics

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/26/money-grabbing-speeches-boris-johnson

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What does a person say in two speeches that is worth £160,000? Do they vomit gold? This is the amount that Boris Johnson made last month. He made a speech for the India Today conference and he got £122,990. Accommodation and transport provided of course. On the day Theresa May lost the second Brexit vote in the House of Commons he gave a speech for £38,250 to Citigroup Global Markets Ltd. Johnson is certainly taking advantage of the more liberal rules about income and interests now that he is no longer a minister.

Boris Johnson paid more than £160k for giving two speeches

Taking advantage is, after all, his modus operandi. These huge sums of money are staggering. It takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to read the news lately. Are we to accept that politics is simply the hobby of rich men and the rest of the world can go to hell, because we are a rich country, and thus it is fine?

Yet at the same time, the big growth story of the last few years is the one of foodbanks. The Trussell Trust reports a record rise of 13% in people needing food parcels. Where universal credit has been in place, food banks are four times busier, with people needing three-day emergency food packages. This is a direct result of Conservative policy, yet I doubt Johnson talks about this much to his audiences of adoring bankers when spouting off on whatever flits through his mind.

I have seen Johnson, David Cameron and George Osborne speak in the flesh over the years and it’s a low bar. Cameron can do it without notes, which is considered an immense gift rather than something that every secondary schoolteacher does every day. Johnson wings it and makes jokes, but the “charm” wears thin once you have seen it more than once. Osborne grinds on and is supremely dull but never mind, he got £85,000 for two speeches from Citigroup after he was sacked from the cabinet. Small change, I guess, for these immensely wealthy men.

What is all this money for? Johnson may have an expensive private life but it is also part of a war chest for his bid to become prime minister, make no mistake. The issue of political funding has always seemed quite nerdy, but it is one that has to be addressed now that the topic of our broken political system is top of the agenda. How can any elected representative justify having all these other jobs? How does that represent their constituents’ interests?

Johnson has carved himself out an empire in which his columns say little but: “Brexit, trust me, it will be jolly. Read the smallprint later.” It is no secret that he has been caught lying, cheating and dissembling – his own newspaper even sought to defend him by arguing his columns were not to be taken seriously. The columns of a prime minister-in-waiting.

In the US, key questions are asked about tax and also charitable giving. Right now, prospective Democratic presidential candidates are releasing their tax returns alongside the amount they give to charity. This is partly to pressure Donald Trump into disclosure and partly it is to demonstrate their virtue. It is possible that Johnson is indeed giving all this money to charity, but then it would seem rather out of character for him not to talk about it. Indeed, only last December he had to apologise for not declaring £52,000 worth of income. Did he just find fifty grand down the back of the sofa?

We are hurtling backwards to the time when only the rich could be politicians, towards a pimped-up feudal system where any notion of public service is being dumped on from great heights.

Money talks. That’s not a shock, but the huge lack of trust and the disconnect between the governed and those who govern costs us dearly. Johnson heads up this tendency, continuing to act as a law unto himself, having his cake while shoving our faces in it. For all the sums he accrues for his blathering, the cheapening of political life is something that he must one day be forced to pay for.