THE answer to “why” Boris Johnson’s Conservatives are being accused of corruption might seem obvious, but not when the person being asked is Tim Montgomerie - a Tory with connections to the very top of the party.
Montgomerie was appearing on Sky News’s round-up of the front pages when he was shown The National's. It carried the story of Boris Johnson being found “corrupt on all counts”.
Asked "why" such allegations had arisen, Montgomerie had some ideas other than answering the question.
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Instead of engaging with the content of the story, he launched into an attack on this paper - calling it “a propaganda sheet” among other things.
“But to be fair and trying to be a little bit more impartial,” he went on, “there are these ethical questions that dog the Prime Minister.”
Montgomerie then spoke about the Financial Times - which he called more “serious” - and touched on one of the many occasions when Boris Johnson has taken an “economical approach to the truth”.
After he’d had his say, Sky swiftly moved on. No more discussion of Tory corruption then.
Well, The National’s not the only news outlet which Montgomerie has taken aim at in recent weeks. The retirement of Channel 4’s Jon Snow was taken as an opportunity to accuse the channel of “deep bias”, a subject on which Montgomerie appears something of an expert.
This would, after all, be the same Tim Montgomerie who founded the “news” website ConservativeHome and edited it for eight years.
The same ConservativeHome that each week publishes job adverts for public posts with the explicit aim of getting more Tories into positions of responsibility.
The same Tim Montgomerie who was brought into Downing Street by Boris Johnson - the most recent in a line of Tory leaders for whom he has worked.
The same Tim Montgomerie who suggested the UK wanted to forge a “special relationship” with Hungary - whose leader Viktor Orban happens to be an anti-semitic and Islamophobic authoritarian.
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The same Tim Montgomerie who the Financial Times reported said Orban was “tapping into the same popular mood identified by [Boris] Johnson, Donald Trump and Brexit party leader Nigel Farage”.
And that’s from the Financial Times, which Montgomerie singled out as a more “serious” paper.
What could this die-hard Tory possibly have against a newspaper that values the idea of an independent Scotland, or a news channel that doesn’t fawn over his populist mates?
Impossible to say.
"To be fair and trying to be a little bit more impartial," Montgomerie has more recently claimed to be "embarrassed" to have supported Boris Johnson and hit out at the Prime Minister after an apparent falling out with Dominic Cummings.
Many would fairly ask how anyone's judgment could have been so poor in the first place.
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