Any honour for Stanley Johnson would raise questions about Johnson’s use of the honours system to reward family members with titles…reports Asian Lite News
Boris Johnson has put his father forward for a knighthood in his resignation honours list, it has been reported.
The former prime minister, who left office last September, has nominated Stanley Johnson for the honour, The Times newspaper said.
Stanley Johnson, a former MEP, was among as many as 100 names put forward by Johnson for Cabinet Office vetting, the paper added.
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A spokesperson for the former Conservative leader said: “We don’t comment on honours.”
Any honour for Stanley Johnson would raise questions about Johnson’s use of the honours system to reward family members with titles.
He faced accusations of cronyism in 2020 after he nominated his brother Jo Johnson, a former minister, for a peerage in 2020. He is now Lord Johnson of Marylebone.
In 2021, senior Tory MP Caroline Nokes and a journalist publicly accused Stanley Johnson of touching them at Conservative party conferences.
Nokes, chairwoman of the Commons’ women and equalities committee, accused Stanley Johnson of forcefully smacking her on the backside and making a vulgar comment at the Conservative Party conference in 2003.
Stanley Johnson said after that he had “no recollection” of either incident.
Last week a parliamentary inquiry had found BBC chair Richard Sharp made “significant errors of judgement” when he did not declare his role in the facilitation of a loan in 2020 to Boris Johnson,.
Sharp, a banker and former chair of the Royal Academy of Arts, was appointed in January 2021 on the recommendation of Oliver Dowden, then Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) secretary, and Boris Johnson, who was still Prime Minister at the time, ‘Variety reports’.
A report in ‘The Sunday Times’ in January alleged that Johnson put forward the recommendation just weeks after Sharp “helped to arrange a guarantee on a loan of up to 800,000 Pounds [$990,000 ]” for Johnson.
According to ‘The Sunday Times’, Sharp was drawn into Johnson’s finances while dining with the then prime minister and businessman Sam Blyth, a friend and “distant cousin” of Johnson’s. The report stated that Blyth had agreed to act as a guarantor for the loan and wanted Sharp’s “advice on the best way forward”.
Sharp notes appeared before a parliamentary inquiry convened by the DCMS Committee on February 7 and said: “I’ve never given the (former) Prime Minister advice. He’s never sought it. I know nothing about his personal financial affairs.”
The committee, which also interviewed Sharp prior to his appointment as BBC chair, established that Sharp had effected an introduction of Blyth to Cabinet Secretary Simon Case and repeatedly asked him why he didn’t disclose the matter during the interview. Sharp, in turn, repeatedly said that he was following “due process”.
The committee report, which was published on Sunday and is quoted by ‘Variety’, pointed out: “Richard Sharp’s decisions, firstly to become involved in the facilitation of a loan to the then Prime Minister while at the same time applying for a job that was in that same person’s gift, and then to fail to disclose this material relationship, were significant errors of judgement, which undermine confidence in the public appointments process and could deter qualified individuals from applying for such posts.”
The report added, according to ‘Variety’: “Mr Sharp’s failure to disclose his actions to the panel and the committee, although he believed this to be completely proper, constitute a breach of the standards expected of individuals applying for such public appointments…. Mr Sharp should consider the impact his omissions will have on trust in him, the BBC and the public appointments process.”
Earlier, this year, Johnson said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “threatened him with a missile strike during an extraordinary phone call” ahead of Moscow launching its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
He made the remarks in a BBC documentary titled ‘Putin Vs the West’ which will be broadcast on Monday.
“He threatened me at one point, and he said, ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you but, with a missile, it would only take a minute’ or something like that. But I think from the very relaxed tone that he was taking, the sort of air of detachment that he seemed to have, he was just playing along with my attempts to get him to negotiate,” Johnson was quoted as saying in the documentary.
The former Prime Minister also said that he warned Putin that invading Ukraine would lead to Western sanctions and more NATO troops on Russia’s borders.
He also tried to deter Russian military action by telling Putin that Ukraine would not join Nato “for the foreseeable future”, the BBC reported. Johnson further said that “Putin had been very familiar during the most extraordinary call”.
The former leader’s claims however, have been been official verified.
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