The Boris Johnson Enablers Exiting Stage Left
The saga of the former Prime Minister’s cancelled book launch interviews reveals how power and media really works in the UK
Once is a mistake, twice is a choice.
The cancellation of not one, but two, major interviews scheduled this week for the launch of Boris Johnson’s new book is a highly revealing moment.
The given reasons for the cancellations are curious ones. On Thursday the BBC’s Laura Kuennsberg announced that she had scrapped her planned interview with Johnson after sending her briefing notes to him “by mistake”.
This announcement was strange enough in itself.
How could such a mistake really happen, and once it had happened, couldn’t an alternative interviewer have been found to replace her?
The second cancellation was almost as strange. The announcement, by Sky’s Beth Rigby, that she had cancelled her own interview with Johnson, came after he reportedly attempted to insist that no recording, or transcript of it could be made.
Yet how could Johnson or his aides really have expected that the interview, which was due to take place in public at a literary festival, have possibly been off the record?
The real answers to all these questions tells us a lot about how politics and media really works in the UK.
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