The lucrative secrets of Boris Johnson

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, what Boris Johnson did next.

0:21I want to thank you, Mr Speaker. I want to thank all the wonderful staff of the House of Commons. I want to thank all my friends and colleagues. I want to thank my rival friend opposite, Mr Speaker. I want to thank everybody here and hasta la vista, baby. Thank you. That, of course, was Boris Johnson, signing off from his final Prime Minister's questions in July 2022. Within hours of leaving office, he received a letter, as all departing ministers do, reminding him of the rules governing what he could and couldn't do next. Essentially, he was to uphold the highest standard of propriety. And for the next two years, he was forbidden from lobbying contacts made during his time in government for financial or business gain.

1:07But Boris Johnson never much liked rules. Today I've received a fixed penalty notice from the Metropolitan Police relating to an event in Downing Street on the 19th of June. This court has already concluded that the Prime Minister's advice to Her Majesty was unlawful, void and of no effect. The Times let you go after you made up a quote. Why did you make up a quote?

1:33Well, again, these are...

1:41This week, The Guardian published The Boris Files, an investigation based on a trove of leaked data from Johnson's private office, showing what he's been up to since he left Downing Street, as well as a few things he kept secret while he was still there. Emails, letters, spreadsheets, speeches, business contracts, they're all in there, as well as a minute-by-minute official log of how Johnson spent his time as Prime Minister. And together, they raised some serious questions for the former PM. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus, Venezuelan dictators, Saudi princes, and a shared load of money.

2:20Has Boris Johnson broken the rules again?

2:29This story began when The Guardian investigations team received a message from a non-profit organisation called Distributed Denial of Secrets, saying that they had a cache of files from the office of Boris Johnson. Now, Distributed Denial of Secrets collects leaked and hacked data from all over the world. Sometimes they just publish the data themselves. And in other cases, like this, they pass it on to trusted journalists. Henry Dyer was part of the Guardian team tasked with combing through the documents and verifying them. Welcome back to today in Focus, Henry. Before we talk about what you and your colleagues discovered in this treasure trove of spreadsheets and Word documents, can you explain for us what are the rules that govern how an ex-prime minister can behave once they've left Downing Street and how they can use public money for their life after politics?

3:19So there's two things to consider here. The first is something called the business appointment rules and these are rules that every former minister has to follow as well as former senior civil servants. And they have to follow these rules for two years after they leave office. So from September 2022 until September 2024, Johnson was required to consult something called the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, ACOBA, to say, listen, I've had this offer of employment. I'd like to take it up. Please would the committee say if it is willing for me to take up this appointment and with what restrictions?

3:56So there are typical restrictions that are applied. And these restrictions are in place to avoid the perception that ministers use their time in office to later profit. So Okobo will typically say to a former minister, yes, you can go and join this company, but you're not permitted to lobby the UK government on behalf of the company. You're not permitted to use any contacts or information you might have got from your time in government. and also crucially in this instance with Boris, you're not allowed to use any contacts in foreign governments that you may have developed during your time in government.

4:31So those are the sort of normal restrictions which all ministers expect that they will fall under for the period of two years after they leave government, such that they are actually written to when they leave government. Lord Pickles, Eric Pickles, the chair of ACOBA, wrote to every minister, including Johnson, to say just to remind you, for the next two years you've got to come to us before you take up a job. and we're going to impose these restrictions on you, most likely unless we can see good reason why not. And if you don't do so, that's a breach of the rules.

5:07So that's the first thing to consider about the rules that govern former ministers, including prime ministers. But for prime ministers, former prime ministers in particular, they then get access to something called a public duty costs allowance. Now, this is worth£115 ,000 a year, and they claim it from the Cabinet's office. And the purpose of this money is so that former prime ministers can continue to contribute in public life. They obviously continue to be figures of public interest. They've had an elevated position in our society. And maybe we hope that they will continue to contribute towards public debate and discussion, as well as appearing at important ceremonial events, such as at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.

5:48and so they're given some money which has been the amount that 115 ,000 pounds to support the staffing costs of their private office and they can only claim it against costs incurred by their private office which relates to their public duties and these funds cannot be used for private or commercial activities. Okay and so you gave one example for example attending the cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. Can you give us any other examples of legitimate uses of this private office? Yeah, so your private office might support you in giving well-meaning speeches about how the UK should be governed, perhaps, continuing to make meaningful contributions to public life, supporting charities, supporting, you know, I think Cameron has done a lot of work with the Alzheimer's charity, Theresa May has done a lot of work on diabetes.

6:44And so those more charitable and perhaps philanthropic ways in which a former prime minister might apply themselves. Though it's interesting to note that the scheme was actually first set up in the early 1990s after Margaret Thatcher left Downing Street. It was set up by her cabinet secretary, the top civil servant, who set it up because Thatcher had let it be known that effectively, having left Downing Street, her sources of income had dried up and she needed some financial support. And it was, I suppose, felt unbecoming of someone who had held the office of prime minister to, you know, suffer in that way.

7:32and your investigation has found that boris johnson might have been using his potentially misusing his position in those two years and also using that private office to essentially further his commercial interests and let's go now to talk about these documents There's getting on for 2 ,000 of them. There's one part of your investigation so far that has really raised my eyebrows and it involves a meeting that Boris Johnson had with Nicolas Maduro, who is the very controversial president of Venezuela. Boris Johnson no less has referred to him as a dictator of an evil regime. He's a big pal of Vladimir Putin and there's a whole sort of laundry list of dictator-y things that Maduro has done.

8:14But most recently he refused to accept defeat in last year's Venezuelan election, and there was a bloody crackdown that followed. So talk us through that meeting between these two men. In February 2024, Johnson is in the Dominican Republic on a family holiday. And what follows next is fairly murky, but much of the details were reported a few weeks later in the Sunday Times and then the Financial Times. Johnson flies by private jet to Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, and just outside Caracas he has a meeting with Maduro. And also in that meeting is a man called Martin Peterman. Now Martin Peterman is the founder of a hedge fund called Merlin Advisors.

9:00And they have a meeting which was later characterized by sources close to Johnson as more of an argument for about 45 minutes to an hour maybe. And then Johnson returns to his holiday. And Johnson said he wasn't paid for the meeting. So Johnson, you say at the time, or sources close to Johnson said he basically had some sort of argy-bargy, an argument with Maduro. And what did he say that they were arguing about? What did he claim that they discussed? So they claimed that Johnson had spoken about Ukraine and human rights and democracy, portrayed it as a diplomatic back-channel approach, effectively.

9:38You know, that Maduro needed to, I suppose, get his act together and stop running Venezuela the way that he was doing. But the presence of Peterman raises a lot of questions there. Yeah, exactly. What's that hedge fund guy doing in the meeting? And that's still not really clear. It's not clear from the documents we have. And we did approach Peterman for comment and he didn't want to comment and what people didn't know until we reported it is that weeks after the meeting johnson was paid 240 000 pounds by martin peterman the hedge fund founder who was with him in that meeting now this is interesting for a number of reasons yes the documents we have also show that a few months before in september 2023 1923, Johnson had been sent a contract drawn up by Merlin advisors to act as a senior advisor to the hedge fund.

10:33The terms of the contract was that Johnson would be paid£200 ,000 to attend a meeting with Merlin and up to eight meetings a year, so worth up to£1.6 million a year. And so the similarity between the terms of that contract, which was drafted by the company, We know it was signed by Johnson, but maybe it doesn't appear to have been put into place. And then what we know happened in terms of a£240 ,000 payment, which happened weeks after the meeting occurred, definitely raises significant questions. Right. OK. So we can't say definitively that Johnson was paid£240 ,000 by the hedge fund in order to broker this meeting with Maduro.

11:16But it certainly raises questions. If that's not what it was for, what was it for? Absolutely. Okay, so just to be absolutely clear, Johnson initially says, I was sort of, it was diplomatic back channels, I was doing my bit essentially for the British government. And now from the Boris Johnson files, what have you learned that contradicts his initial account of that meeting? When the news of the meeting first came out through the Sunday Times and then the Financial Times, it led officials at ACOBA, that watchdog I mentioned earlier, which looks at the jobs that ministers take up for that two-year period after they leave office.

11:52And the officials at Acoba were quite confused, it seems, because they had received an application from Johnson after that September contract saying, I'd like to go work for this company. But Johnson had told them he'd changed his mind and he decided not to take up that role. Okay. But there's one other question that even the officials at Acoba didn't know about. Johnson had told them that he'd had no meetings with Merlin advisors and kind of the people behind it while he was in office. But what the leak shows, specifically the official log kept by civil servants every minute of Johnson's premiership, shows that just over a week before the end of Johnson's time as prime minister, this is August 2022, Johnson is at the Grace and Favour Country House checkers.

12:40and Martin Peterman comes for lunch, two and a half hour lunch at Chequers. And this meeting, Johnson didn't see fit to mention to Okoba that he'd entertained the co-founder of the hedge fund at his grace and favour prime ministerial residence just before he's about to leave office. Right. I'm going to recap just to check that I've understood this. So we now know that he had a meeting off the books at Chequers in the final throes of his premiership with Martin Peterman. And then a bit more than a year later, there's a contract drawn up which would see him paid more than a million pounds to work for this hedge fund.

13:17He, Johnson, told Acoba, the watchdog, that he wasn't going to take up that offer. But then a couple of months later, he flies to Caracas, meets Maduro with Martin Peterman, and then a few weeks later is paid£240 ,000. And the question is, what was he paid that money for? Absolutely. And so one clue as to what was Johnson doing for the company is in that draft contract. And the draft contract, really early on, draft contract drawn up by Merlin, says Johnson has, quote, over a long career, acquired a unique experience and knowledge of domestic UK government politics and international relations.

13:55It's a fair summary. And then it says of the company, Merlin advisors interact with a number of different domestic and international stakeholders which would benefit from the perspectives and the experiences of Boris Johnson. So it looks like the work for the company he's doing is using the experience and knowledge that he has acquired, not just perhaps in his time as Prime Minister, he has a long political career before then, but it would be difficult to see how it would exclude his time as Prime Minister. Yep, and he was doing that within the two-year a period in which he's not supposed to do exactly that.

14:29Absolutely. Got it.

14:37So let's talk now about Boris Johnson's dealings with the Saudis, another undemocratic oil producing government. What did you learn from the files about what he's been up to over there? And I confess that my interest in this was piqued when I was reading your excellent stories by the involvement of young Charlotte Owen, who listeners may remember has a new title now. She is Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge. She was described as an extraordinarily junior aide to Boris Johnson in Downing Street, and yet he rewarded her brief service for him with the seat of the House of Lords when she was just 30 years old.

15:14She's the grand old age of 32 now. She's involved with a company called Better Earth. Tell us about Better Earth and what Johnson has been doing for them in Saudi Arabia. So this company, Better Earth, was founded by a Canadian magnate who had been in the mining industry called Amir Adnani in late 2023. And we still don't know how Adnani and Johnson first met. But what we do know is the company set up and Johnson is very quickly brought in as co-chair of the company. He gets a salary of 120 grand a year and he gets a 12.5 % stake in the business. That's what those documents suggest. And that all happened in late January 2024.

15:52So Johnson is well out of number 10 by this period. Johnson's contract suggests that he agrees to begin working for the company on the 1st of February. But what the other files show is that a few days later, he completes an application form for ACOBA, this watchdog, to say, I'm going to start working for this company in March. And ACOBA take a bit of time to approve this role. But in the period before Akoba said, yes, go ahead, Johnson is already in contact with the Saudi ministers, one minister in particular, Majid al-Khassabi, who he'd met while he was prime minister. There's photographs of them walking around Riyadh on an official trip that Johnson took there while he was prime minister.

16:37So before he's had the green light to say, yes, go ahead and do this. But if you do this, you mustn't use the contacts you established while not in government. Right. He is meeting the people who he met while in government on behalf of this company and advancing their interests. Righty. So he's chair of this company, but what does it actually do? So what Butter Earth does isn't quite clear. There's one hint in the public record, Charlotte Irwin, she describes herself as a vice president there in her entry in the House of Lords register of interests. And there she describes it as an energy transition company.

17:10Okay. But our documents appear to suggest that it's involved in consultancy work and it's seeking consultancy work in this instance with Saudi Arabia to say not just how can we advise you on transitioning from being a petro state, but also perhaps how can we advise you on what's coming up at COP. Right. COP, of course, is the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which happens every year and which always sees the Saudis getting a pretty hard time for obvious reasons. Absolutely. And a lot of Johnson's biggest legacy was on the work he did around COP and on trying to promote governments taking action on the climate crisis.

17:53I think Johnson would certainly say that he saw that as one of his most important legacies. but here it's a little bit grimier is he may be trading on that and using the connections that he built an office while discussing questions about how are we going to improve the environment how are we going to tackle the climate crisis as a way of seeking paid consultancy work for this company right okay so again i'm going to recap so there's a company that's founded in 2023 called Better Earth doing something to do with energy transition. Canadian mining financier hires Johnson to be co-chair of the company and Charlotte Owens becomes a vice president of the company, maybe also a shareholder.

18:35Johnson also has shares. And then Johnson, in his role as the co-chair of Better Earth, is lobbying senior members of the Saudi Arabian government who he had met while in office as Prime Minister. And this is within that two-year period in which he's not supposed to be exploiting the contacts that he made as PM. Yes. And the reason he's lobbying them isn't because he wants them to make a decision necessarily, but because he wants them to pass on correspondence to Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, the guy who ultimately makes the decisions. And there's a very interesting letter in the Boris Files written to Mohammed bin Salman in February 2024, in which Johnson declares himself a fervent admirer of the vision you have for the kingdom.

19:21And in this letter, he says that he met Kasabi, who is MBS's minister, some years ago wearing a pair of floral swimming trunks because we were both diving off the coast of what was then a trackless desert. Yeah. And Johnson refers himself to now living a life of blameless, rustic obscurity in Oxfordshire, but remains deeply committed to carbon reduction. So it's typical kind of Johnson, very florid language. You can absolutely see him dictating it or saying it. But we don't know if this letter was sent on, but we do know that Kasabi meets with Johnson a few months later after these initial discussions and after the correspondence is drafted in mid-June 2024 in London.

20:05And we know where in London, 5 Hertford Street. And this is a plush private members club. Right, okay. And I guess if you're sympathetic to Johnson, you would say, well, what's wrong with this? He was on the record as being very passionate about the net zero transition. It will only happen with the cooperation of these big oil producing states like Saudi Arabia. What is wrong with him using his connections to sort of nudge them in that direction? What's wrong with that? So this isn't quite Johnson just nudging them in that direction. it's also about him using the connections that he made in office as part of a profit-making enterprise the issue is that these are connections which were developed in government these were people he met while he was prime minister and the other issue is that johnson did receive the okay from akoba now obviously he appears to have started working for them before he received the okay but even then akoba said you should not become personally involved in lobbying contacts you developed during your time in office in other governments, e.g.

21:08people you met who run other countries, and if you met them while you were Prime Minister, don't go lobbying them. What the documents suggest, that's exactly what he's been doing. Okay, so to recap, Boris Johnson has been paid£120 ,000 a year for a very part, it must be a part-time role because he's got so many other things going on, by a slightly mysterious company founded by an ex-mining financier, ostensibly to persuade the Saudis, the world's biggest oil exporters, to be a bit more green. And he was doing that, he began doing that within that two-year period in which he's not supposed to be exploiting the contacts he made in government.

21:44Yeah.

21:52And those of us who have watched Boris Johnson's post-political career with interest will know that he has been paid large sums for giving speeches around the world. And now we know exactly how much thanks to these files. Are there any of the speeches that he has given that really jumped out for you as raising an eyebrow? So we know that he's earned more than£5 million from 34 paid speeches between September 2022 and May 2024. That's according to one of the files in the leak. And these speeches span the globe. He's in Delhi, he's in Singapore, He's in Lagos. He's in Abu Dhabi. He's earning$350 ,000 a speech for those ones.

22:32Others are, you know, he earns a bit less. And it's not just the speech. There's also, you know, kind of meet and greet or like a, you know, some VIPs will get to spend a bit more time with him. But it's fast turnaround stuff. And some of these speeches have been reported on and were done in public but others were in private behind closed doors where he maybe feels like he can speak more freely and so audiences get his views on for instance barack obama who he calls the most inert invertebrate president we've had for a long long time vladimir putin he describes as like the fat boy in dickens he wants to make your flesh creep and then actually i suppose my personal favourite is he speaks a little bit about discussions he'd had with Queen Elizabeth II.

23:21It might not be stipulated in the sort of rules for what you can do after you leave office, but convention dictates you're not supposed to reveal any of your conversations with the monarch, right? If you've been a prime minister. Correct. So those meetings which are held, those audiences, those weekly audiences are supposed to be completely confidential. But there were some interesting things that he revealed the Queen had spoken to about, that the Queen had lobbied him during Brexit negotiations to ensure that her horses could be transported to France for breeding operations. Yeah, doesn't he say that the horses wanted to go over to see their boyfriends in France?

23:56Yeah, she was keen that her horses could meet their French boyfriends.