Latest updates: defence secretary Ben Wallace denies allegations as Labour demands statement from PM
In his interview with the Today programme Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, insisted that Boris Johnson was not sleazy. Wallace said:
Do I think the prime minister is sleazy? No, I don’t.
Do I think the prime minister is an absolutely first-class leader who has led this country in a pandemic, and let’s not forget, while we are getting into Oscar-type gossip columns – there is an awful lot of gossip going around ….
The perception that Boris Johnson, and more broadly the government as a whole, could be corrupt is apparent amongst a sizeable minority of the public. Although it does not apply to all ministers, such as Sunak, who is generally seen as clean and honest.https://t.co/ITFdSFuj4X pic.twitter.com/wVFfPVX3Ll
Gavin Barwell, who was chief of staff to Theresa May when she was prime minister, told Times Radio this morning that the briefing war between Boris Johnson and his former chief adviser Dominic Cummings had the potential to be “extremely destabilising”.
At the end of last week Johnson told LBC in an interview that he did not think “people give a monkey’s” about issues like who was to blame for No 10 leaks. Yesterday Liz Truss, the international trade secretary, said the claims made by Cummings in his blog on Friday were just “a complete load of Westminster tittle tattle that people don’t care about”. But Barwell said it was a mistake to dismiss the importance of these matters. He said:
I heard Liz Truss yesterday dismissing all this as tittle tattle. Of course it is true that most people are not that interested in who did what … But it is actually really important for good government. When you get a culture of leaks there is an inevitable instinct to shrink down the number of people in the room and that is not good for good government.
My own experience working for Theresa when we had a very serious leak from the National Security Council and she asked the cabinet secretary to conduct a very aggressive inquiry to find who was responsible is that actually it only took a matter of days to go through everybody’s phones and email communication, so this has been going for four or five months now and I think MPs will want to know why it has taken so long and where it has got to.
It is difficult to say that [why the leak inquiry has taken so long] from the outside but it just surprises me, given my own experience of these things in the past, that we haven’t had an outcome.
