Inside politics
Boris Johnson has a strange habit, says Jane Merrick in the I newspaper: whenever he gets into political trouble, he has a chat with his good friend Volodymyr Zelensky. Last Wednesday, “less than an hour” after the PM’s ethics advisor quit, Downing Street published details of his latest call with the Ukrainian president. It was the same on 6 June after it emerged that he was facing a no-confidence vote. And on 12 April, when Johnson was fined by police over Partygate. Further back, calls were announced shortly after a bruising spring statement, after the first Partygate fines for Downing Street staff, and after Tory MPs were caught in (separate) sex and porn scandals. It’s “probably just coincidence”, of course. Probably.