If, as his allies claimed last weekend, Boris Johnson secured the nominations of “far more than” the 102 MPs necessary to enter the Tory leadership contest and knew he was guaranteed to beat Rishi Sunak in a vote of members, then why did the ex-PM rule himself out of contention? The latest scuttlebutt is that he decided discretion was the better part of valour when he was tipped off the Sun was going to run a front page imploring him not to run.
Yet there was a more important influence. Anyone who knows Johnson will be aware there is only one person he listens to and that’s not his wife Carrie, but Charles Moore, the Telegraph editor who has long mentored him and whom Johnson lately ennobled for his trouble. Privately and publicly, Moore told his fellow Old Etonian that he should “sit this one out.”
Moore had a Svengali-like influence over Johnson in the Telegraph newsroom and subsequently. As a former trustee of the climate science-denying Global Warming Policy Foundation, Moore probably thought it was funny to encourage Johnson to fly down from the Cop26 summit in Glasgow in 2021 in a private jet for a Daily Telegraph reunion dinner at the Garrick club. A well-nourished Johnson was photographed leaving the club with Moore directly behind him.
I am reliably informed it was Moore – a Catholic convert – who was instrumental in persuading Johnson, who had renounced his Catholic faith for Anglicanism, to return to the fold ahead of his marriage to Carrie, herself a Catholic. A close friend of Owen Paterson, Moore told Johnson to stick by him during the lobbying scandal that eventually forced him out of politics. Johnson shares with Moore a number of especially unappealing habits, not least a tendency to make rabble-rousing Islamophobic comments.
One old Telegraph hand tells me: “Boris got used to Charles telling him what to think at the Telegraph and that has never changed. If you look at Stanley Johnson, you’ll understand why Boris needed a surrogate dad and that’s what he’s got in Charles.’
Moore’s advice to Johnson to “sit this one out” would certainly suggest “Lord Snooty” – as Moore was once dubbed – believes there will be another leadership election coming along soon that he should not sit out.
