Thousands call on BBC to broadcast Boris Johnson interview

Thousands of people have signed a petition calling on the BBC to broadcast an interview with Boris Johnson as soon as possible. Mr Johnson is the only major party leader yet to confirm he will face Andrew Neil, with the tough interviewer’s grillings of Jeremy Corbyn and Nicola Sturgeon having already been broadcast. But it is a measure of some people’s concerns Mr Johnson may dodge a potentially damaging TV interview altogether. Hosting the BBC’s Politics Live show today, Mr Neil said he is “ready any time, anywhere, any place, so there can be no problems with scheduling”. “He’s running scared because every time he is confronted with the impact of nine years of austerity, the cost of living crisis and over his plans to sell out our NHS, the more he is exposed.” There are rumours, which have not been outright denied by Channel 4, that Mr Johnson will be replaced by a melting ice sculpture of himself at tonight’s climate change debate on Channel 4. He was also the president of the Oxford Union – a position previously held by former Prime Minister Edward Heath (1916-2005) and former Conservative leaderWilliam Hague. Of his time at The Telegraph, Johnson remarked; “Everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power”.   In 1994, he became a political columnist for The Spectator, and later went on to become the editor of the magazine in 1999, a role he continued until 2005. A few years later, Johnson again stood for Parliament and was elected as an MP for the Conservative seat of Henley-on-Thames in 2001, replacing Michael Heseltine. Despite being embroiled in various scandals at the time, including the publication of an insensitive editorial about the city of Liverspool in The Spectator in 2003 and an alleged affair with a journalist, Johnson was re-elected as a Member of Parliament in 2005.  Even after he was let go from his position as Shadow Minister for the Arts due to his alleged extramarital dealings, in 2005 he became the Shadow Minister for Higher Education after David Cameron was elected leader of the Conservative Party.  The year 2008 saw Johnson become the Mayor of London after he was elected over two-time office holder, Ken Livingstone. A year before his term as Mayor ended in 2016, Johnson won the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat and thus returned to Parliament in 2015.

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