Boris Johnson wants to be the “weathered father of the nation” and a “unifier who no longer divides for electoral gain”, the Evening Standard’s new political columnist has claimed.
Tom Newton Dunn, stepping in for the departed editor-in-chief George Osborne, said the “great political chameleon” is about to change his skin once again as we head out of a global pandemic and into recovery mode.
“To do all this,” Newton Dunn writes, “Johnson knows he can no longer be the identity politics Brexiteer of the past five years, or the court jester-internationalist that presided over London.
“Instead, I am told he wants to be the weathered father of the nation. A unifier who no longer divides for electoral gain.”
The column has provoked much hilarity on social media, with one person calling it the “biggest load of sycophantic b*llocks ever”.
Another pointed out that ‘weathered father’ is a strange phrase to describe a man who has abandoned an “unknown number of children”.
Newton Dunn will have a weekly political column for the Evening Standard in the slot left vacant by the departure of former chancellor Osborne.
The political writier is best known for a 2019 article for The Sun titled ‘HIJACKED LABOUR’ in which he alleged that Jeremy Corbyn was at the centre of an “extraordinary network of hard-left extremists”.
It later emerged that the ultimate sources for these claims included the antisemitic, far-right websites Aryan Unity and the Millennium Report.
His thesis was described as a “far-right conspiracy theory” by Daniel Trilling in The Guardian.
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