Pyramid of Lies: The Prime Minister, the Banker and the Billion Pound Scandal

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Mr Johnson last week issued a “humble and sincere” apology to Lord Geidt, his ethics adviser, for withholding the messages from an inquiry. Tory sleaze

Even Johnson conceded that the other two candidates – David Platt and Jill Andrew, both lawyers – were better than him on the night. Platt was the association’s favourite, but his cause had been damaged by questions about his unmarried status. “My single greatest advantage over David Platt was that I had a wife, beaming up at me from the front row, with every appearance of interest, wearing a suitably colourful flowery coat,” Johnson wrote in his 2001 book Friends, Voters, Countrymen. He beat Platt by a handful of votes. And it's a question I took to Credit Suisse, and I took to SoftBank as a journalist many times. It was so startlingly problematic. In the end, The Bond & Credit Co. was taken over by a company -- Japanese insurer, Tokio Marine. And when Tokio Marine got involved, they looked at The Bond & Credit Co's exposure to Greensill and the Green -- the funds that were investing in Greensill assets. And they said, hey, this is too much. We don't want to do this anymore. And that really spelled the end, right, because without that insurance, the funds that have invested in Greensill's assets, they're no longer able to go out to the same pool of investors. Barlow’s American assistant, Cameron, is described as having “a deep and sexist reverence for men who really knew stuff”. He wrote: “It amazed her sometimes how little appearances mattered. He could be bald, he could be spindly or sweaty or tubby, but if the man’s disquisition had enough interest, fluency and authority, it would speak directly to her groin.” Here are all the excuses Mr Johnson has used to explain away the scandals that have dogged his career: Making up quotes And as you say, in one form or another, it's been around for a long time. In the last I guess, now 25 years or so, there have been various forms of this that have developed that fund it in different ways. In particular Lex's particular slant on this was that he would fund it through selling these loans essentially to investors. So unlike a bank, which is funding this from its own balance sheet, Lex doesn't have a balance sheet. So he goes out to investment funds and says, look, I can provide you with some kind of yield by funding these transactions.DUNCAN MAVIN: Yes, I think that's right. I think this is -- it's tempting sometimes to see these big kind of corporate scandals in terms of big systems and institutions. But at the heart of this one, is the guy Lex Greensill. And he's fascinating, a really divisive character. Some people I talked to said Lex is really charismatic and a genius. And other people I talked to said, stay away from Lex, things are going to go wrong.

So the biggest trade credit insurers said, no, we're not going to work with you. That left him with a bit of a problem, which he solves by going to a very small Australian insurer called The Bond & Credit Co. And The Bond & Credit Co. ended up providing billions and billions of dollars of insurance to the Greensill business. And it was startling to me, looking at it as a journalist to say, this can't be right, how can this tiny company be so critical in these billions of dollars worth of funds. DUNCAN MAVIN: Yes, that's right. So many of these supply chain finance assets, the biggest insurers in particular, the pension funds and so on, they can't invest in them because they're not investment grade. And so the way you make the investment grade is you take out trade credit insurance, and that makes them investable for a much broader group of investors. The trouble for Lex was a lot of the big trade credit insurers wouldn't work with him. They met him over the years, and they dealt with them over the years and found they didn't like the way we did business. He has never issued a public apology to Ms Wyatt. Her mother later claimed Ms Wyatt was forced to have an abortion as a result of her relationship with Mr Johnson. Jennifer Arcuri Boris Johnson has never publicly admitted to his alleged affair with US tech entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri (Photo: Eugene Metreveli)An epic true story of ambition, greed and hubris – the collapse of Greensill Capital is a billion pound scandal that shredded the reputation of a British Prime Minister.

The Cameron government’s endorsement mattered commercially. Whitehall awarded Greensill contracts “for projects Greensill had proposed when working in Whitehall”. Greensill used the CBE the Conservatives gave him as a quality assurance mark, and in 2018 bagged the former prime minister himself. See also: Inside Jason Miller’s plan to turn the Big Lie into a big business – and a second term for Trump] Andrew Gimson, the Spectator’s then foreign editor, was also Johnson’s first biographer. He remembers his boss was already being talked about as a contender for the party leadership when Howard – always intended to be a caretaker – stepped aside. “In 2005, Boris found he couldn’t run for the leadership; he had been shown to be too unreliable. It was his connection with the Spectator that did for him. He hated the fact that [David] Cameron won, but he had got himself in a hopeless position with Petronella, where he couldn’t keep everybody happy,” Gimson said. He gets business cards with Downing Street that [indiscernible] (00:09:13) and that kind of thing. He holds meetings in Downing Street, really kind of pushes it beyond -- his role beyond what it really ought to have been. But it seems to work for him. And certainly, when Cameron leaves office, he leaves having left Lex with a much higher profile than he had previously. Johnson in his office at the Spectator. He left the conservative weekly a year after the arrival of Andrew Neil. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

“Most of these people were friends of his. They wouldn’t believe that someone close to them like that would be doing that.”

However, he dismissed claims that it constituted a party, insisting that the gathering was a “work event” and that he only stayed for 25 minutes. Mr Johnson was swiftly summoned to the office of Charles Wilson, then-editor of The Times, and dismissed. He has since apologised, while also complaining about the “snivelling, fact-grubbing historians” who called him out. Many of them, they are never going to see the amount that they had put into it,” Guth said. “But they will be able to benefit from some of it. And some of it may be better than nothing at all.” Speaking of his wife, Pullen said: “Maggie was always surprised that the ladies of Henley didn’t criticise him for his affairs. In fact, most of them would always say that it was Marina’s fault.” And interestingly, as soon as he gets a role at Greensill Capital, which lends a lot of credibility to the firm to have a former Prime Minister working for you is really a stamp of approval. Why David even did it is really interesting, right? So I think what's the upside for him of his relationship with Greensill Capital: one, is potentially a huge payout. So he gets paid a decent salary, and he gets paid a good bonus, but he also gets options, which had they paid off, he would have got tens of millions of pounds.