BEING bad has always come good for Boris Johnson. Scandals over plagiarism allegations, multiple affairs, an Avatar-length blooper reel of public blunders – disgrace is a boon for Britain’s Donald Trump, who is now well-versed in turning recklessness into riches. No surprise, then, that he did it again recently, when a major inquiry concluded that he had deliberately misled the UK Parliament multiple times during the pandemic via lockdown parties that defied the very laws he had created. On June 19, the House of Commons voted overwhelmingly to accept the report’s findings.
For these offenses, Johnson would have received a 90-day suspension from the local parliamentarian role he has retained since the end of his leadership last summer. Yet the government’s chief chaos merchant had other ideas: In a letter lambasting the “kangaroo court” that sought to bring him down, he resigned days before the investigation’s results were published. By the week’s end, he was unveiled as a new columnist for the Daily Mail, for which he could earn a reported US$1.2mil (RM5.6mil) per year, a healthy addition to the US$6mil (RM27.98mil) he received in the six months after stepping down as prime minister.
