Guto Harri, Johnson’s communications director when Johnson was PM, is launching a new podcast about his time in No 10 and, in an article for the Daily Mail, he claimed that Johnson and King Charles had a big row after the king reportedly described the government’s Rwanda policy as “appalling”.
This morning, in an interview with LBC plugging the podcast, Harri also said that, when Sue Gray was carrying out her inquiry into Partygate, Johnson regarded her as “psycho”.
Harri said that Johnson originally respected her a lot but that, as she was carrying out her inquiry, he was “getting suspicious”. Other No 10 staff felt the same way, Harri said, because Gray was taking advice from a Labour-supporting lawyer, and using her own press officer. “Why do you need a press officer when you’re writing a report for the prime minister?” Harri asked. He went on:
So this was not this objective, dispassionate view of what really went on … There are many people who behave badly during that period. None of them are in the public domain, none of them have been mentioned. It was all landed on one guy because he happened to be the guy at the top.
Asked how Johnson described Gray at the time, Harri said he did not want to give away everything, because he wanted people to listen to his podcast on Thursday. But he went on:
If I were to say one word, maybe, that will be recurring in ‘[the podcast], ‘Psycho’ Sue Gray would be part it. There was a sense that she lacked perspective as to what he had done.
Harri also claimed that Gray “must have been” talking to Keir Starmer at the time she was compiling her report, because she has now agreed to become his chief of staff. But in fact Gray, and the Labour party, say talks about a job did not start until months after the Partygate report was finished.
In one respect, these claims are ridiculous. No one has disputed any of the facts set out in the Sue Gray report into Partygate, and Johnson himself told MPs at the time that fully he accepted its findings, and its criticism of the culture within Downing Street. The notion that she published it as part of some plot to lever Starmer into Downing Street is just a conspiracy theory.
But it is a conspiracy theory embraced by some of the small band of Johnsonites in the party who continue to believe that he was somehow a victim. Last week Sunak linked the Tory poor performance in the local elections to voters being fed up with the Conservatives running politics like a “box set drama”. Harri has just demonstrated that the drama is not yet over, and that the Johnsonites will continue to air their grievances about his downfall.
