FORMER PM Boris Johnson last night refused to rule out another bid for No10, saying: “I wish things were different — I wish I was still able to be given a chance.”
When asked if he wanted another tilt at the top job, BoJo quoted advice given to him by the late Queen Elizabeth: “Only get involved in this stuff if you think you could be useful.”
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And on his ousting, he admitted he misjudged the mood of Tory MPs, and said: “I assumed they wouldn’t do something so dumb.”
But he insisted he would have won another General Election with tax cuts and house-building plans
In a brutal assessment of his successor’s disastrous campaign, he admitted: “Sometimes I was tearing my hair out watching.”
He added that he put far too much faith in Rishi Sunak after he was “captured by the Treasury”.
Mr Johnson sat down on The Sun’s Never Mind the Ballots show to lift the lid on his final weeks in office and discuss what the Tory Party needs to do to win back power.
He insisted there should be no deal with Nigel Farage and that the Conservatives should not try to “cannibalise” his Reform UK party.
Instead, Mr Johnson said they needed the right leader and to “think about the voters” and their “frustrations”.
Despite record migration on his watch, Mr Johnson blamed a post-Covid “abnormality” for the numbers and the need to get inflation down with imported workers.
He even insisted he “could have won that argument with the public” had he been given the chance to fight the General Election.
Admitting he didn’t see his political assassination coming, he added: “I was sad about Rishi, I really was.”
And defending his record when asked if he had unfinished business, he said: “I look back and I’m very, very proud of the things we did.
“I delivered national independence for this country, full control of our laws again after a very, very long time — four or five decades.
“I helped defend the freedom of another European country [Ukraine]. The UK really did play a decisive role in that.
“And I protected the population of this country from a disease faster than any other European government.
I was tearing my hair out watching Rishi ..but I was sad about what happened
Boris on Sunak campaign
“I think to pack all that in, in three years, wasn’t half bad.”
In a blast at Labour’s time in office since the election, he said: “Am I frustrated about the way things are going now under Labour and Keir Starmer? Yes, I certainly am.”
“If I look at what he’s doing — with huge bungs to the unions, tax increases are coming, giving up sovereignty over British possessions like Chagos — I think it’s a disaster.”
“And taking us back into the EU single market — effectively as rule-takers . . . ”
Despite taking plenty of freebies himself during his time in office, Mr Johnson savaged Labour boss Sir Keir over his love of gifts.
On the Lord Alli scandal, he raged: “Thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds for suits and clothes and spectacles. How can he still wear the spectacles?
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“And the guy who then got the pass to No10 — I mean ‘Donnez-moi un break’, as we say.
“But much more important than that, I don’t see an agenda for this government.”
On his attempted comeback in 2022, Mr Johnson insisted he had the support of enough MPs to get on the ballot, but: “I thought then that the party was still too sort of jangled by the whole thing. And they’d been through a lot.”
Thousands of pounds on suits & spectacles.. how can he still wear those spectacles
Boris on freebies scandal
Explaining his downfall, he admitted he should have done more to reach out to his MPs, but insisted many of them just wanted him “out of their hair”.
But Mr Johnson reserved most of his ire for his former Chancellor Mr Sunak whose dramatic resignation in July 2022 led to his downfall.
He told Never Mind the Ballots: “I was sad about Rishi, I really was, because I think he had great, great potential.”
Asked why he did not see it coming, he added: “It’s like in Jurassic Park, when you drive along and you sort of glimpse something in your rearview mirror . . .
“In a film where you glimpse something in the bottom of the screen and then you forget about it. I kept thinking, ‘Is there some issue here I have to deal with?’. And then I would just move on.”
On Mr Sunak’s record, Mr Johnson hit out: “I don’t think we needed to put up National Insurance contributions to pay for social care.
“I think it was a mistake. I don’t think I should have listened to the Treasury there.
“So my biggest regret, really looking at it, is that I didn’t understand early enough that the Treasury had captured Rishi.
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“I thought Rishi was going to be the Nigel Lawson of our times — the great tax-cutting, tax- simplifying Chancellor. And it just never happened.”
Quizzed on why he did not spot the plots against him, he insisted he was too busy — and that had been a “failure”.
He said: “When you’re Prime Minister, you’re incredibly busy.
“You’re leading the country, dealing with a lot of stuff. And this is my failure — I assumed that people would see it the way I saw it.
“And I assumed people would get the point that we’d had a fantastic mandate in 2010 and I was best placed to deliver [the manifesto] and they wouldn’t do something so dumb. That is what I assumed.”
Mr Johnson, who has just published his memoir Unleashed, added: “I think my problem — one of my many failings — was that I’d been conditioned by my career as Mayor of London.
“We got a huge amount done in London, but I got it done in a way that was very executive and monarchical. It wasn’t like I had to spend any time worrying about my backbenchers.”
And when asked if he knew about backbench unease, he blamed the pandemic and social media abuse for making his MPs nervous about supporting the government.
He went on: “Why didn’t I know? I couldn’t physically see our MPs for a long time and as soon as they got to Westminster, they were all locked up and getting bombarded with stuff on Twitter.
“I wasn’t really able to engage. And I blame myself for failing to compensate enough.
“I think people got very susceptible to some of the Twitter storms. I don’t blame them.”
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