Sunday 15 May 2022 12:07 AM Boris Johnson on 'war criminal' Putin, battles with 'Leftie lawyers' and ... trends now

Boris Johnson can't resist a boast.

'I remember sprinting down the Olympic track in Beijing,' he tells a group of young athletes, who have been showing off their skills at the new Commonwealth Games stadium in Birmingham.

The youngsters look him up and down incredulously and chorus: 'Really? Did you?' 

With a sheepish laugh the Prime Minister revises his claim downwards, saying: 'Well, I tried to sprint.'

It later transpires that the incident involved an after-hours 'race' in the famous Bird's Nest stadium with his press aide Guto Harri, who is now reunited with him after more than a decade apart.

Both men wore suits. Neither troubled the record books.

The PM is nursing a troublesome cough today but is otherwise in irrepressible form. 

He won't comment on Sir Keir Starmer's 'Beergate' woes, but he can't prevent a broad grin creeping across his face when asked whether he has experienced a tinge of schadenfreude over the tangle the Labour leader has got himself into over allegations of lockdown rule-breaking.

On his own Partygate troubles, which have now produced 100 fines for No 10 staff, he sticks rigidly to the line that he'll 'have more to say' once the police have finally completed their exhaustive enquiries.

But, despite continuing rumbles of discontent from his own MPs, not to mention the loss of 500 council seats at this month's local elections, it is clear he thinks things are going significantly better than they might seem.

At a rally for local activists in Solihull later, he appears astonished by Labour's failure to exploit the Government's mid-term woes, saying it is 'absolutely extraordinary' that the Opposition managed to make net gains of just 22 seats in England 'after all this country has been through and after everything thrown at this Government'.

Anaemic growth figures have just landed showing GDP rose by only 0.8 per cent in the first three months of this year, and actually shrank in March as families starting tightening their belts.

But asked whether Britain can avoid recession, the PM remains boosterish.

'Yes!' he replies. 'If we continue to make the investments that we're making in infrastructure, skills, and technology.

'I'm not going pretend that it's going to be plain sailing but the fundamentals are very, very strong.

The demand in the UK, the opportunities in the UK, are massive. International investment coming into the UK is massive.'

Giving an example, Mr Johnson enthuses about ceramics firm Churchill China, in Stoke, which he visited earlier.

'They are booming,' he says of a firm which is taking on an extra 300 staff to help cope with demand from the EU which has jumped 30 per cent.

'The economic issue that the country faces is totally different from the challenge that we faced in the 80s or the 90s when you had millions of people effectively thrown on to the economic scrap heap, who were made to feel that they had nothing to contribute because we had mass unemployment, and that was an utter moral disaster,' he says.

'But it's the opposite of the case today. You've actually got businesses that are growing so strongly, ones that have such demand that we need to get more people to do those.'

The PM hints at a drive to get more over-50s back into the workplace after half a million dropped out during the pandemic, saying: 'We need to persuade those people to come back because, you know, we need them.'

He also points to measures in this week's Queen's Speech on issues such as skills training, infrastructure and rebuilding the UK's energy supplies as being crucial to future growth.

On the cost of living, he insists that growth has to be the answer, given the parlous state of the public finances.

Few in government doubt that further economic help will be forthcoming this year, and the Tory clamour for tax cuts is getting louder by the week.

The PM won't be drawn on specifics. But where he does enthuse is over the scope for the Government to trim its own spending to provide savings for the taxpayer.

He has arrived directly from a Cabinet meeting where ministers were told to slash 91,000 jobs from the Civil Service headcount of 475,000, taking it down to pre-pandemic levels.

'We have got to cut the cost of government to reduce the cost of living,' he says.

The plan, which could save around £3.5billion a year, has already provoked howls of outrage from trade unions.

Could the savings be ploughed into tax cuts? The PM won't say directly, but offers a broad hint: 'Every pound the Government pre-empts from the taxpayer is money they can spend on their own priorities, on their own lives.'

The state of the economy is far from the only dark cloud hanging over British politics.

Next week Mr Johnson is set to make a final decision on whether to press ahead with legislation that would allow the Government to suspend part of the Northern Ireland Protocol in order to deal with the post-Brexit trade checks threatening to drive a wedge between the Province and the rest of the UK.

The threat has provoked alarm in both Washington and Brussels, with his 'dear, dear friends' in the EU threatening a trade war in response.

But the PM says the long-running sore has been thrown into sharp relief by this month's Stormont Assembly elections. These were topped by Sinn Fein and returned Unionist parties with a 'mandate' to boycott power-sharing unless the protocol is torn up.

'The problem with the current situation is that the Ulster unionists simply won't go back in now,' he says.

'As Prime Minister of the UK, my top priority is the Good Friday Agreement, the peace process, the balance in Northern Ireland, restoring government. And I think legally, politically, morally, that's what we've got to focus on.'

Warming to his theme, he suggests EU talk of a trade war is overblown when dealing with an issue that has some 'pretty simple bureaucratic fixes'.

'Do you know what I really think about this?' he says. 'I think in the scale of things at the moment, in the sweep of things, what we're really trying to fix is...we're trying to solve a very difficult political problem in Northern Ireland itself with what is actually some pretty simple bureaucratic fixes. And that's what we've got to do.'

Is he bluffing about blowing up the protocol, as some in Brussels believe? 'I'm certainly not bluffing in my concern about Stormont and where we need to go. We need to get it back up and running.'

Then there is Ukraine, where the PM has formed a bond with Volodymyr Zelensky that has seen the UK pour arms into the country and even help pay the wages of some of those fighting to defend their homeland.

Are we now fighting a proxy war, as Vladimir Putin likes to suggest?

'No. Look, if your neighbour's house is on fire, you lend them a hose to put it out.

'If your neighbour's being attacked by an armed robber, you might give them a weapon, with which to protect themselves. That doesn't mean you're fighting the burglar yourself.

'It's a totally different situation. And I think it's moral, it's humane, compassionate, to help the Ukrainians to fend off this absolutely barbaric, unprovoked, unnecessary attack.

He says Putin has made a 'catastrophic misjudgment', adding: 'If Putin thought he was going to get less Nato on his doorstep, he's going to be proved likely 100 per cent wrong.'

And he has no interest in pursuing the kind of unproductive dialogue with the Russian tyrant tried by Emmanuel Macron.

'I'll be honest with you, at the present time I'm not at all sure what the

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