The UK prime minister Boris Johnson on Monday announced names of new staffers who have been brought in to No 10 Downing Street as the Partygate scandal continues to challenge his position.
Johnson’s new appointees are Steve Barclay, a cabinet minister, who will now be the new chief of staff replacing Dan Rosenfield. He also appointed Guto Harri as the new director of communications. Harri and Johnson worked with each other when Johnson served as the mayor of London.
“It is an honour to have been asked by the PM to serve as Chief of Staff for No10 Downing Street alongside my responsibilities in the Cabinet Office,” Steve Barclay said in a tweet after his appointment.
The appointments were necessitated due to the resignation of five of his close aides. The last to resign were policy chief Munira Mirza, who was known to be close to Johnson, who cited Johnson’s attack on Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer one of the reasons for her resignation from the post.
Mirza was referring to Johnson’s remarks where the prime minister accused Starmer for not doing enough to prosecute child sex offender and TV personality Jimmy Savile when Starmer served as the director of public prosecutions in 2012. Saville died in the year 2011. “There was no fair or reasonable basis for that assertion. This was not the usual cut and thrust of politics; it was an inappropriate and partisan reference to a horrendous case of child sex abuse,” Mirza wrote while resigning.
Starmer on Monday was surrounded by protesters who accused him of protecting paedophiles. Conservative MPs denounced the protests and asked the prime minister to apologise. One conservative MP, Tobias Elwood, who urged that UK politics drift away from being ‘Trumpian’. Boris Johnson later condemned the statement in a tweet. “The behaviour directed at the Leader of the Opposition tonight is absolutely disgraceful. All forms of harassment of our elected representatives are completely unacceptable,” Boris tweeted.
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