One month after leaving Downing Street, Johnson created a company called Office of Boris Johnson to manage his paid jobs and business ventures. Most of the Boris Files covers this period after he left Downing Street, which starts in September 2022.
They paint a picture of a former PM who appears to have set out to financially enrich himself by using relationships he made while in office, potentially breaking the “revolving door” rules about post-ministerial careers.
Former prime ministers often travel the world getting paid to give speeches, but there are restrictions on what they can do once leaving office, including prohibitions on lobbying contacts which they made while in UK government office. Johnson was reminded of these rules on the day he left Downing Street.
The data was obtained by a US-registered non-profit called Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS), which hosts more than 360 data leaks online. DDoS told the Guardian it doesn’t know the provenance of the Boris Files which it received earlier this year. The fact this data was leaked also raises questions about lax security provisions in Johnson’s office.
What are the key revelations?
Here are four things we learned from the data release:
• While in office Johnson met senior Saudi officials whom he later approached when he was co-chair of a UK-based consultancy firm called Better Earth. He asked them to share a pitch with the petrostate’s autocratic crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. He wanted to persuade the Saudi government to hire Better Earth to provide advice on cutting carbon emissions. The release raises questions about whether Johnson breached lobbying restrictions imposed on former ministers.
• He received £240,000 from a hedge fund after meeting Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro. When in office Johnson had likened him to a “dictator of an evil regime”. Johnson had previously told UK government officials he was not paid for any meetings.
• Johnson had a secret meeting with Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of controversial US data firm Palantir a month after entering No 10. The meeting – which happened in August 2019 – was marked “private” in his log of activities that day. The following year Palantir was given a key role as part of the UK’s pandemic response. It is now embedded in the NHS system, and in 2023 landed the NHS’s largest ever IT contract of £330m to analyse hospital data and patient information, raising concerns among privacy campaigners.
• The day after the second national lockdown came into force during Covid, Johnson hosted a Tory peer called David Brownlow for dinner in the dining room of No 10. Brownlow had funded the lavish refurbishment of his Downing street flat, contributing £58,000 towards the renovations, which included putting in “gold” wallpaper.
What public funding does Johnson receive?
All former PMs receive funding from the public duty costs allowance (PDCA). They can claim up to £115,000 a year for the rest of their lives.
This money is not supposed to be used for private activities, it is intended to help pay for public functions that former PMs are expected to carry out “arising from their special position in public life”.
Johnson has claimed £182,000 in PDCA payments since leaving government, the data leak shows. A senior Cabinet Office source confirmed Johnson claimed PDCA funds to pay for staff salaries in his private office. All three of his private staff have supported him in his commercial activities. After publication, Johnson emailed a statement denying his office had misused the subsidy scheme. “This story is rubbish. The PDCA has been used entirely in accordance with the rules. The Guardian should change its name to Pravda,” he said.
Johnson is under mounting pressure to explain how his private office complies with rules over taxpayer subsidies.
The private offices of John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May all claim PCDA allowance, as does the office of Liz Truss (despite only serving for 49 days).
How does this compare to the activities of other PMs?
There is no indication that any other PM exploited their private office to generate their own, personally enriching business to the same degree. Some have used taxpayer-funded staff to arrange paid speeches, and others have faced scrutiny over the way they made money after leaving office.
Blair, for example, used his consultancy, Tony Blair Associates, to advise the kleptocratic leaders of Kazakhstan, while David Cameron revealed he had been lobbying former colleagues on behalf of Greensill Capital to change the rules so that Greensill could benefit from a Covid government loan scheme (although there is no suggestion Cameron’s private office was involved in this).
Five other former prime ministers – Blair, Brown, Cameron, May and Truss – have released statements saying they fully comply with rules prohibiting the use of public funds for private business. It is understood Sunak does not claim the allowance.
Senior politicians from both parties have been calling for Johnson’s taxpayer support to be suspended. Labour peer Margaret Hodge, a former chair of the public accounts committee, said the investigation suggested “Boris Johnson is prepared to break the ethical standards of behaviour we all sign up to as public servants”. She added: “We need a proper investigation to establish what happened and we must revisit the rules on both lobbying and the revolving door to make them tougher and more effective and to ensure they are implemented with proper punitive sanctions.”
The government ethics watchdog has opened an investigation into Johnson’s income since he left office.
