Personal abuse mounts up

Both Graun and Times, a gleeful Newsnight and several others give prominence to a story about Johnson having a domestic with his girlfriend at their home. It looks dramatic -- 'police were called' -- but the drama was introduced by the neighbours who heard crashing and banging, knocked but got no answer and then called the police.

The police gave a statement:

“Police attended and spoke to all occupants of the address, who were all safe and well. There were no offences or concerns apparent to the officers and there was no cause for police action.”

For some bizarre reason (not really), the neighbours recorded the argument, then rang the GUrdiudnai, providing newspapers with juicy quotes. The Times, but not the Guadrian (yet),  said this would raise questions about Johnson's personal fitness to lead. Perhaps it was just obvious to moralistic Graun readers? 

More direct stuff from M Hyde. Of course she is a light humorous gossip columnist, although she is recorded solemnly in the 'Opinion' section of the Graun website:

Collectors of vignettes displaying Johnson’s contempt for the public will have enjoyed the spectacle of a takeaway being delivered to his house while the other candidates debated on Channel 4....['The public' means the 1.4 million who watched C4]...the Tories’ Papa Lazarou, [a bizarre YouTube figure -- down with the kids and all that ] with his grotesque circus, his free-form gibberish, his expanding collection of wedding rings. And the rest. AND THE REST. 

Hyde chastises the supporters as well:

MP Johnny Mercer found himself on Monday, repeatedly pressed by Emma Barnett on whether it wasn’t a bit weird that we didn’t know how many children the likely next prime minister would own up to having...Johnson proxy Kwasi Kwarteng, who appeared on Channel 4 news to fume: “The idea he is racist is completely ridiculous. To say he is racist is scurrilous, offensive and completely wrong.” [just must be a shameless lie for the Graun,of course] ...Asked if he would buy a used car from Johnson, Nadhim Zahawi trilled: “I would buy anything from Boris Johnson!” In that case, I have a garden bridge to sell you. Also some water cannon, and a line about NHS funding....there is a very particular type of chap who goes in to bat for the Old Etonian Johnson with the somewhat tragic deference of a man who knows his own public school was one of the minor ones. This peculiar type of longing underpins much of the writing of Quentin Letts (Haileybury), with his most recent Sun column a case in point. Here he is on Johnson: “At an age when some blokes find their virility drooping, he still plainly has some lead in his pencil, with a new and much younger girlfriend … He has swanned through life breaking the rules, laughing and bonking. That INFURIATES [the elite]!” Always a pleasure to take lectures on “the establishment” and “the elite” and “the ruling class” from Rupert Murdoch’s highest-paid columnist.

There is a nice twist at the end:

little encapsulates the stage-four clusterfuck the UK is facing as totally as the fact that it is about to be run by a journalist. And, incredibly, by the worse of the two journalists in the final three....Is it in any way surprising to find that the UK is very drunk and has already missed two deadlines?...As for all Johnson’s proxies and the backers who should know so much better: every one of them must carry the mark of Cain when it goes tits up, as it assuredly will. It’s like the old saying goes: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me literally hundreds of times, shame on me.