Former Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has criticised the Conservative Party’s decision to oust Boris Johnson, praising him as a crucial leader during major crises. The Mailhas more.
In his first newspaper interview since being sacked as party chairman, Mr. Zahawi, 56, called the former Prime Minister the most “consequential” leader since Margaret Thatcher.
He said he and other Cabinet members should not have forced him to resign in 2022.
The multi-millionaire, who was sacked by Rishi Sunak over his tax affairs, told the Sunday Times: “I wish we had held our nerve.
“If colleagues had stepped back and just realised Twitter was not the country, we’d have probably made a very different decision… how many Prime Ministers have had to deal with Brexit, a global pandemic and then economic recovery beyond that: to cap it all, war on our continent, where he led the world.”
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alfarom
11 months ago
Wrong to put him in charge in the first place. A lying coward who led us into lockdown. An absolute disaster.
And just to remind what we weren’t missing he scuppered the Ukraine peace deal.
Bunter was responsible for many a debacle but the Ukraine peace deal was not one of them:
Putin insisted that Russia would reach the goals of its military campaign: ‘denazification’ (regime change) and ‘demilitarisation’ (the destruction of Ukraine’s military potential).
The reality on the ground showed Russian troops would never have withdrawn from the newly occupied territories in the south and east of Ukraine.
Negotiators from the Russian side had been low-ranking politicians that had no power to sign any deals and no direct line to Putin, which was a clear sign that the negotiations were expedient, nothing more.
Like the Minsk agreements in the last years before the invasion and the December ‘security guarantees’, Russia’s approach to the March negotiations wasn’t genuine.
Putin simply treats negotiations as a way to buy time to strengthen Russia’s armed forces; expediency is all.
Those a bit closer to the action may, however, have a clearer view.
Finland and Sweden have joined NATO. Poland is buying 1250 tanks. The Baltic States are all spending a great deal more on defence, proportionately, than countries who do not have a common border with Russia.
We have documentary evidence that Putin has designs on Moldova and the Baltic States.
In the last few days, Medvedev has stated that Russia may require a buffer zone extending into Polish territory.
Forgive me, then, if I, like Russia’s neighbours, do not share your confidence in Russian assurances.
”By John Simpson
World Affairs editor
Turkey has positioned itself with great care to be the go-between with Russia and Ukraine – and this seems to be paying off.
On Thursday afternoon, President Vladimir Putin rang the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and told him what Russia’s precise demands were for a peace deal with Ukraine.
Within half an hour of the ending of the phone call, I interviewed Mr Erdogan’s leading adviser and spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin. Mr Kalin was part of the small group of officials who had listened in on the call.
The Russian demands fall into two categories.
The first four demands are, according to Mr Kalin, not too difficult for Ukraine to meet.
Chief among them is an acceptance by Ukraine that it should be neutral and should not apply to join Nato. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has already conceded this.
There are other demands in this category which mostly seem to be face-saving elements for the Russian side.
Ukraine would have to undergo a disarmament process to ensure it wasn’t a threat to Russia. There would have to be protection for the Russian language in Ukraine. And there is something called de-Nazification.
This is deeply offensive to Mr Zelensky, who is himself Jewish and some of whose relatives died in the Holocaust, but the Turkish side believes it will be easy enough for Mr Zelensky to accept. Perhaps it will be enough for Ukraine to condemn all forms of neo-Nazism and promise to clamp down on them.
The second category is where the difficulty will lie, and in his phone call, Mr Putin said that it would need face-to-face negotiations between him and President Zelensky before agreement could be reached on these points. Mr Zelensky has already said he’s prepared to meet the Russian president and negotiate with him one-to-one.
Mr Kalin was much less specific about these issues, saying simply that they involved the status of Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, parts of which have already broken away from Ukraine and stressed their Russianness, and the status of Crimea.
Although Mr Kalin didn’t go into detail, the assumption is that Russia will demand that the Ukrainian government should give up territory in eastern Ukraine. That will be deeply contentious.
The other assumption is that Russia will demand that Ukraine should formally accept that Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, does indeed now belong to Russia. If this is the case, it will be a bitter pill for Ukraine to swallow.
Nevertheless, it is a fait accompli, even though Russia has no legal right to own Crimea and actually signed an international treaty, after the fall of Communism but before Vladimir Putin came to power, accepting that Crimea was part of Ukraine.”
“Russia’s border doesn’t end anywhere” was a joke in response to a child but he did pledge to protect ethnic Russians wherever they live, which is quite different.
Putin is well known for his jokes, isn’t he……or not really……
‘The notion of the Russian World extends far from Russia’s geographical borders and even far from the borders of the Russian ethnicity.’
V. Putin 11 Oct 2001
‘….he’s projecting a vision of Russia that he was brought up with that many people in Russia still adhere to – a vision of the Russian state as an empire that has to expand, and expansion is how you judge leaders’
Montefiore 22 March 2022
‘Russkiy Mir’ perceives Russians as a territorially divided people which should be united, making the protection of all Russian-speakers and their rights of utmost priority to the Russian state. This perception has been at the heart of Russia’s aggressive behaviour since 2008.
Plus, overnight he morphed from a climate realist into a Green Lunatic …… our “Saudi Arabia of wind” has produced virtually no energy in the past 2 weeks. Instead we’re importing roughly 30% of our energy needs, costing us a fortune.
Someone I refused to listen to at all during the panic four years ago. Evidently an opportunist, with no moral background.
Hester
11 months ago
Like being recommended a leader by Bankman-Fried, or Bernie Madeoff. Zahawi a man with a questionable history of finance, who was allowed off lightly by the HMRC for somehow forgetting a few tens of millions in cash, which presumably were lost down the back of a sofa, on his tax return, The mates in the HMRC again let him off lightly, wheras if I had failed to include a couple of thousand on my return, I would be fined or jailed. So this fine example of an upstanding politician recommends to usa Snake oil salesmen, who mis led the country, who bankrupted it through the Scamdemic, who partied whilst others were fined thousands and jailed for seeing their mum on a Sunday, who forced injections at the point of losing livelihoods of experimental failed products, on which he gave a free pass to the manufacturers to Mengele like freedom to inject Pregnant women, children and the rest of society even when they knew those same injections caused harm, and did not stop the virus. A man who scuppered a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia.
Is that the best the Conservatives can offer? The truth is we are faced with a choice at the next election of 2 Parties that nobody wants, this is the state of our so called Democracy.
Mr Johnson was, arguably, the worst PM this country has had since Harold Wilson.
He possessed charisma but lacked self discipline, direction.
He had no idea what he wanted to achieve so flattered the electorate to deceive.
His government spent £400bn on a panicked response to a simple common cold coronavirus and breached the rights and freedoms of every citizen in so doing, killing many, particularly in nursing homes, before their time through pure incompetence.
He inherited an extremely competent Defence Secretary who choreographed the European response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Johnson attempted to take the credit.
His one achievement was, inadvertently, to highlight, with stark clarity, the unfitness for purpose of this country’s state apparatus, public sector.
It’s hard to argue that Sunak and May were any better – I’m sure they would have been as bad during “covid”, and surely Blair managed to do more damage.
His only notable achievement, if we want to call it that, was to do enough political maneuvering to bring an apparent end to the “Brexit crisis” albeit the whole thing was messy – but many others were to blame for that too, both historically and at the time.
You flatter John Major, Teresa May and Gordon Brown.
JXB
11 months ago
“… praising him as a crucial leader during major crises.”
Boris is the type of leader who first finds out which way everybody is headed, and which best serves his own interests and then leads from behind.
Apart from other clues, his testimony at the CovId Enquiry demonstrated this.
Ron Smith
11 months ago
Zahawi the old bruiser was the vaccine minister. There was a UKC episode where a woman went to see him complaining about a vaccine side effect…..He shockingly just told her, with the protection of his security….”get the booster”.
Zahawi seems to have forgotten just how toxic the Boris/Carrie partnership had become. I suspect one of the reasons people are looking far more favourably on Boris is that his wife, children and dog don’t feature in the news any more.
Margaret Thatcher would never have allowed NET ZERO to be waved through parliament. The problem we have is not that Boris was removed. The problem is there are very few real Tories left, and the ones we do have like Braverman are ushered away in case they upset someone. Boris could just as easily have led the Green Party with his pretend to save the planet crap and his “Saudi Arabia of Wind” eco socialism.
Yes but that link you sent me was from 1989. ———Here is what Thatcher later said—————“So in a speech to scientists in 1990 I observed: whatever international action we agree upon to deal with environmental problems, we must enable all our economies to grow and develop because without growth you cannot generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment.”——————— and also “The doomsters favourite subject today is climate change, clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.”————————–My argument comes from what she said in her book Statecraft and in particular those two quotes I sent you. ——-I would sooner have Thatcher around today in the current environment of pandering to the UN with the absurd NET ZERO that we are indulging in.
By the way I did not thumbs down you. Your argument is a valid one, it is just that I was aware that global warming was something that concerned Thatcher to start with but she later changed her mind
Unlike Thatcher probablywould have , the fat useless Pig Dictator did nothing to revoke the disaster that is Treason Mays Nett Zero Act . He had an 80 seat majority and could have revoked it .Unfortunately for us all the idiot is interested in in leg over time with Nut Nut so his feeble brain thought it was all a splendid thing . What a self serving cnut he proved himself to be .
The Saudi Arabia of wind quote still makes me laugh though ..
It’s been said that the true test of any leader is how they deal with a crisis. Obviously covid wasn’t a crisis but Bojo turned it into one. In this respect his failure is even worse than failing to properly handle a crisis, he invented one when there wasn’t a crisis.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Wrong to put him in charge in the first place. A lying coward who led us into lockdown. An absolute disaster.
And just to remind what we weren’t missing he scuppered the Ukraine peace deal.
Bunter was responsible for many a debacle but the Ukraine peace deal was not one of them:
Putin insisted that Russia would reach the goals of its military campaign: ‘denazification’ (regime change) and ‘demilitarisation’ (the destruction of Ukraine’s military potential).
The reality on the ground showed Russian troops would never have withdrawn from the newly occupied territories in the south and east of Ukraine.
Negotiators from the Russian side had been low-ranking politicians that had no power to sign any deals and no direct line to Putin, which was a clear sign that the negotiations were expedient, nothing more.
Like the Minsk agreements in the last years before the invasion and the December ‘security guarantees’, Russia’s approach to the March negotiations wasn’t genuine.
Putin simply treats negotiations as a way to buy time to strengthen Russia’s armed forces; expediency is all.
The deal on the table was Russia would keep the territory it occupied and wanted, but extend no more and Ukraine would not become part of NATO.
I think your information is… incomplete.
You are, of course, entitled to your view.
Those a bit closer to the action may, however, have a clearer view.
Finland and Sweden have joined NATO. Poland is buying 1250 tanks. The Baltic States are all spending a great deal more on defence, proportionately, than countries who do not have a common border with Russia.
We have documentary evidence that Putin has designs on Moldova and the Baltic States.
In the last few days, Medvedev has stated that Russia may require a buffer zone extending into Polish territory.
Forgive me, then, if I, like Russia’s neighbours, do not share your confidence in Russian assurances.
‘Russia’s borders do not end anywhere’
V. Putin, 23 Nov 2016
It wasn’t my ‘view’, it concerns the facts.
From the BBC…
”By John Simpson
World Affairs editor
Turkey has positioned itself with great care to be the go-between with Russia and Ukraine – and this seems to be paying off.
On Thursday afternoon, President Vladimir Putin rang the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and told him what Russia’s precise demands were for a peace deal with Ukraine.
Within half an hour of the ending of the phone call, I interviewed Mr Erdogan’s leading adviser and spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin. Mr Kalin was part of the small group of officials who had listened in on the call.
The Russian demands fall into two categories.
The first four demands are, according to Mr Kalin, not too difficult for Ukraine to meet.
Chief among them is an acceptance by Ukraine that it should be neutral and should not apply to join Nato. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has already conceded this.
There are other demands in this category which mostly seem to be face-saving elements for the Russian side.
Ukraine would have to undergo a disarmament process to ensure it wasn’t a threat to Russia. There would have to be protection for the Russian language in Ukraine. And there is something called de-Nazification.
This is deeply offensive to Mr Zelensky, who is himself Jewish and some of whose relatives died in the Holocaust, but the Turkish side believes it will be easy enough for Mr Zelensky to accept. Perhaps it will be enough for Ukraine to condemn all forms of neo-Nazism and promise to clamp down on them.
The second category is where the difficulty will lie, and in his phone call, Mr Putin said that it would need face-to-face negotiations between him and President Zelensky before agreement could be reached on these points. Mr Zelensky has already said he’s prepared to meet the Russian president and negotiate with him one-to-one.
Mr Kalin was much less specific about these issues, saying simply that they involved the status of Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, parts of which have already broken away from Ukraine and stressed their Russianness, and the status of Crimea.
Although Mr Kalin didn’t go into detail, the assumption is that Russia will demand that the Ukrainian government should give up territory in eastern Ukraine. That will be deeply contentious.
The other assumption is that Russia will demand that Ukraine should formally accept that Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, does indeed now belong to Russia. If this is the case, it will be a bitter pill for Ukraine to swallow.
Nevertheless, it is a fait accompli, even though Russia has no legal right to own Crimea and actually signed an international treaty, after the fall of Communism but before Vladimir Putin came to power, accepting that Crimea was part of Ukraine.”
“Russia’s border doesn’t end anywhere” was a joke in response to a child but he did pledge to protect ethnic Russians wherever they live, which is quite different.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38093468
Putin is well known for his jokes, isn’t he……or not really……
‘The notion of the Russian World extends far from Russia’s geographical borders and even far from the borders of the Russian ethnicity.’
V. Putin 11 Oct 2001
‘….he’s projecting a vision of Russia that he was brought up with that many people in Russia still adhere to – a vision of the Russian state as an empire that has to expand, and expansion is how you judge leaders’
Montefiore 22 March 2022
‘Russkiy Mir’ perceives Russians as a territorially divided people which should be united, making the protection of all Russian-speakers and their rights of utmost priority to the Russian state. This perception has been at the heart of Russia’s aggressive behaviour since 2008.
That’s just not true.
Exactly what is ‘just not true’, in your opinion?
Plus, overnight he morphed from a climate realist into a Green Lunatic …… our “Saudi Arabia of wind” has produced virtually no energy in the past 2 weeks. Instead we’re importing roughly 30% of our energy needs, costing us a fortune.
Someone I refused to listen to at all during the panic four years ago. Evidently an opportunist, with no moral background.
Like being recommended a leader by Bankman-Fried, or Bernie Madeoff. Zahawi a man with a questionable history of finance, who was allowed off lightly by the HMRC for somehow forgetting a few tens of millions in cash, which presumably were lost down the back of a sofa, on his tax return, The mates in the HMRC again let him off lightly, wheras if I had failed to include a couple of thousand on my return, I would be fined or jailed. So this fine example of an upstanding politician recommends to usa Snake oil salesmen, who mis led the country, who bankrupted it through the Scamdemic, who partied whilst others were fined thousands and jailed for seeing their mum on a Sunday, who forced injections at the point of losing livelihoods of experimental failed products, on which he gave a free pass to the manufacturers to Mengele like freedom to inject Pregnant women, children and the rest of society even when they knew those same injections caused harm, and did not stop the virus. A man who scuppered a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia.
Is that the best the Conservatives can offer? The truth is we are faced with a choice at the next election of 2 Parties that nobody wants, this is the state of our so called Democracy.
Absolutely nails it.
Terrific
Mr Johnson was, arguably, the worst PM this country has had since Harold Wilson.
He possessed charisma but lacked self discipline, direction.
He had no idea what he wanted to achieve so flattered the electorate to deceive.
His government spent £400bn on a panicked response to a simple common cold coronavirus and breached the rights and freedoms of every citizen in so doing, killing many, particularly in nursing homes, before their time through pure incompetence.
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/files/2020-10/Care%20Homes%20Report.pdf
He inherited an extremely competent Defence Secretary who choreographed the European response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Johnson attempted to take the credit.
His one achievement was, inadvertently, to highlight, with stark clarity, the unfitness for purpose of this country’s state apparatus, public sector.
Cock-up theory has been firmly de-bunked by many of us on here. It all starts with tof’s succinct phrase…there was no pandemic.
The criminal Zahawi defending his criminal in arms Johnson.
Birds of a feather…
It’s hard to argue that Sunak and May were any better – I’m sure they would have been as bad during “covid”, and surely Blair managed to do more damage.
His only notable achievement, if we want to call it that, was to do enough political maneuvering to bring an apparent end to the “Brexit crisis” albeit the whole thing was messy – but many others were to blame for that too, both historically and at the time.
It’s debating which actor gave the best performance. Nowadays it’s just more apparent none of these so-called “leaders” write the script.
You flatter John Major, Teresa May and Gordon Brown.
“… praising him as a crucial leader during major crises.”
Boris is the type of leader who first finds out which way everybody is headed, and which best serves his own interests and then leads from behind.
Apart from other clues, his testimony at the CovId Enquiry demonstrated this.
Zahawi the old bruiser was the vaccine minister. There was a UKC episode where a woman went to see him complaining about a vaccine side effect…..He shockingly just told her, with the protection of his security….”get the booster”.
It is amusing how far certain people will stray from the topic of the article in order to promote their agenda. It becomes a real bore.
Zahawi seems to have forgotten just how toxic the Boris/Carrie partnership had become. I suspect one of the reasons people are looking far more favourably on Boris is that his wife, children and dog don’t feature in the news any more.
Margaret Thatcher would never have allowed NET ZERO to be waved through parliament. The problem we have is not that Boris was removed. The problem is there are very few real Tories left, and the ones we do have like Braverman are ushered away in case they upset someone. Boris could just as easily have led the Green Party with his pretend to save the planet crap and his “Saudi Arabia of Wind” eco socialism.
I wouldn’t be so sure. She helped set the stage leading to the current situation.
https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107817
Yes but that link you sent me was from 1989. ———Here is what Thatcher later said—————“So in a speech to scientists in 1990 I observed: whatever international action we agree upon to deal with environmental problems, we must enable all our economies to grow and develop because without growth you cannot generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment.”——————— and also “The doomsters favourite subject today is climate change, clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.”————————–My argument comes from what she said in her book Statecraft and in particular those two quotes I sent you. ——-I would sooner have Thatcher around today in the current environment of pandering to the UN with the absurd NET ZERO that we are indulging in.
By the way I did not thumbs down you. Your argument is a valid one, it is just that I was aware that global warming was something that concerned Thatcher to start with but she later changed her mind
Unlike Thatcher probablywould have , the fat useless Pig Dictator did nothing to revoke the disaster that is Treason Mays Nett Zero Act . He had an 80 seat majority and could have revoked it .Unfortunately for us all the idiot is interested in in leg over time with Nut Nut so his feeble brain thought it was all a splendid thing . What a self serving cnut he proved himself to be .
The Saudi Arabia of wind quote still makes me laugh though ..
wink
It’s been said that the true test of any leader is how they deal with a crisis. Obviously covid wasn’t a crisis but Bojo turned it into one. In this respect his failure is even worse than failing to properly handle a crisis, he invented one when there wasn’t a crisis.
Actually Bozo didn’t invent a crisis, it was invented for him. He was simply employed as crisis manager.
I personally thought he was the weakest prime minister I have ever known.
No obvious plan, going wherever the wind was blowing him.