Conor Burns: I was traumatised after being wrongly fired for groping

About halfway through my afternoon in Conor Burns’s office, the MP jokes to his intern that this interview will be “the second-longest suicide note in history”. The reference appears to be lost on the young trainee naval officer from Connecticut, who is here on an internship from a US military school and unlikely to be familiar with Labour’s 1983 election manifesto.

What he must be making of the conversation I would love to know, because I’m already feeling fairly disorientated myself. From the moment Burns had greeted me downstairs, with his curiously slow-motion gaze, and glided through Portcullis House up to what can only be described as a shrine to Margaret Thatcher, I feel as though I’ve walked into an episode of Yes Minister crossed with The Thick of It.

The walls of his office are lined with framed photos, cartoons and paintings of the Iron Lady. Thatcherite memorabilia includes a triangle of the American flag once flown over Congress in her honour. There is a photograph of the 21-year-old Burns next to Michael Portillo, and another of him hand in hand with George Bush Jr, signed “To Conor Burns, with best wishes”. On the desk sits a replica of a sign displayed in the Oval Office throughout Ronald Reagan’s presidency that reads “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit”.

That’s funny, I think, when I first notice the slogan, because before we had even reached the office Burns had already told me a story about being the only MP able to persuade Steve Bray, the notoriously noisy anti-Brexit protester, to pipe down when President Zelensky came to address parliament. This will be only the first of many such stories. Over the next three hours he will tell one self-aggrandising anecdote after another, purring with pleasure as he quotes praise from this or that dignitary, the stories’ sole discernible purpose to leave no doubt in my mind of Burns’s rightful claim to all the credit for everything.

Burns was a great friend of Margaret Thatcher later in her life. He visited her every week after being introduced in 1997

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The magnificence of his self-regard, and the marvel of his misapprehension that he has managed to conceal it, is so mesmerising that at first I sit back and enjoy the show. When the pathos of his vanity becomes oddly moving, I find myself touched and increasingly charmed. After a while the possibility occurs that he might be successfully deceiving at least one person. Surrounded by his shrine to 1980s Thatcherism, he says confidently: “My Thatcherism isn’t sort of looking back, seeking a 1980s revival.” When he gestures to the Reagan sign on his desk and tells me, “That’s my guiding principle,” it’s all I can do not to laugh.

The 50-year-old is a genuinely remarkable character. Born in republican north Belfast during the Troubles into a largely nationalist Catholic clan, his childhood turned upside down in 1980 when his father moved the family to rural Hertfordshire. Growing up away from the “corset of sectarian identity”, he began to realise he was an extremely right-wing unionist and gay. His idol was Thatcher and in his teens he joined the Tory party, undeterred by its now notorious Section 28 legislation outlawing the promotion of homosexuality by schools and councils. A chance introduction to his heroine in 1997 forged the defining friendship of his life. A devoted source of political debate, gossip, flattery and flirtation, Burns became the ailing Thatcher’s confidant, her conduit to parliament and her protégé, and in 2010, after a career on the south coast in financial services, he won the safe seat of Bournemouth West.

A fanatical Brexiteer, under Boris Johnson he became a trade minister in 2019, but had to resign the following summer for abusing parliamentary privilege by trying to intimidate a member of the public involved in a financial dispute with his father. A year later he was back, first as Johnson’s trade envoy to Canada, then as minister of state for Northern Ireland. When Liz Truss took charge last September she made him a trade minister again.

Less than a month later she sacked him. His “public, humiliating, egregious” dismissal was, even by the standards of her dysfunctional government, a shocking mistake. Burns was fired at the end of a chaotic party conference following a report that he had stroked a young man’s thigh late at night in a hotel bar. Two months later he was fully exonerated, but the ordeal had plunged him into “desolation and isolation”, and has left him consigned to the back benches.

Burns in the Commons in September after being appointed as trade minister by Liz Truss, right

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This is the first big press interview he has given about the saga, and any MP willing to kick off with “Nothing’s off limits!” is my kind of interviewee. But by the time I leave I’m wondering how his once fearsome party can manage to stagger on through another day in office. The curdle of resentments and rivalries inferred from Burns’s account sounds completely untenable — and this from an MP nominally supportive of the current prime minister.

Unlike every Boris cheerleader I know on the Tory benches, Burns claims not to blame Rishi Sunak for the former prime minister’s defenestration. “I first encountered Rishi when he was a part-time waiter at Kuti’s Brasserie in Southampton in his teens and I was a councillor. I’ve known Rishi for a very long time, and Rishi never had any conversation with me about leadership while he was in the cabinet under Boris.”

After Burns was cleared of groping last year, he went to see Sunak. “Rishi said to me, ‘You have earned the admiration and respect of so many people with the dignity with which you have publicly handled this.’ ” He pauses. “I’m going to give you a quote that you will probably want to use. I said to Rishi, ‘I realise you had nothing to do with this. Nor did you have a role in tanking the UK economy and decimating our poll lead. But while you’re trying to clear those up, I’d like you to add [my sacking] to the list of Trussterf***s that you clear up.’ ”

He says the PM told him he “believes I will have a role to play in the future”. That role hasn’t materialised, has it? “I don’t want to say anything that diminishes the dignity and the poise with which I have tried to get through this,” he replies.

Shoulder to shoulder with Boris Johnson during the 2019 Tory leadership election

COURTESY OF CONOR BURNS

We meet the day after Sunak announced his Northern Ireland protocol deal with the EU. Burns offers cautious congratulations. “On balance it’s probably about as good as we’re going to get.” Whether the DUP will come on board he can’t say at this stage. “But I think Rishi has done well.” When I ask if he now regrets not backing Sunak in the Tory leadership, however, he says he was far too busy on more important business to have “any appetite for that election”, and launches into a 12-minute monologue about instead devoting himself last summer to finding a solution to the protocol.

The monologue is peppered with tributes to his talents. “I admire your chutzpah,” the Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin told him; the former unionist leader David Trimble invited him to be “one of the very few people to speak” at a private event shortly before his death in July last year. Burns heroically absorbed a barrage of anger from members of the Irish parliament in Dublin — “I gave them that, and then we were able to start to talk pragmatically” — and had Tony Blair practically on speed dial, telling EU leaders, “Conor’s a good guy, you can trust him.” At the Queen’s funeral the taoiseach introduced him to the Irish president, Michael Higgins, with “this is Conor Burns who I was telling you about, who did amazing work all summer to unlock the protocol conversations”, and the president said, “Oh, I’ve heard all about you. Thank you very much for all you’ve done for Ireland.” And so on, and so on.

I think Burns is suggesting the deal Sunak has struck could never have happened without him. “Immodestly I think what we did last summer accelerated it. I think others would acknowledge that I played a positive part.” Who should take the greatest credit? After a seven-second silence: “Well, there’s no question that the prime minister has led it. But without wishing to overblow my part, I wanted to get the ball onto the line. And then it was up to somebody to either kick it or not kick it.”

The early consensus on Sunak’s protocol deal was that it put paid to any prospect of a Johnson comeback. Only weeks earlier Burns had been on the radio suggesting Johnson would be a good candidate for the party’s new chairman, saying: “Boris has got a massive part still to play in the Conservative family.” On his wall hangs a photo of the pair, arm in arm at a barbecue at Chequers, beneath which is scrawled “To Conor, you are a hero! Thanks for everything, love from Boris.” I ask if Sunak’s deal has damaged Johnson’s political future.

Truss with her husband, Hugh O’Leary, at the Tory party conference on October 5, two days before she fired Burns

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“I was loyal to Boris, I was with Boris on the journey,” he says. “I remember the wilderness year, when he resigned [as foreign secretary in Theresa May’s cabinet] in the July of ’18. We were about as popular as vomit for a period.” Burns’s enthusiasm was always more electoral than ideological, though — “He was the only one with the merchant adventurism to win us a thundering majority” — and he sounds rather less enthusiastic now.

“My existence now is no longer to be the chief cheerleader for Boris Johnson.”

He’s still furious about him being forced out of office, though. When the partygate scandal first broke, Conor famously claimed Johnson had been “ambushed by a cake”, and the only mistake he will now concede his friend made in Downing Street was to be “too loyal”. Seriously? “Yes, Boris’s greatest weakness is loyalty. He was not aware of some of the events going on in Downing Street, yet he stood by those people. And he faced the consequences.”

Burns even thinks Johnson would eventually have struck Sunak’s protocol deal. He’s very clear there’s no prospect of a comeback before the next election. “But I think anybody who has ever bet against Boris bouncing back has always lost money. I think it is entirely possible that Boris can have yet another resurrection.”

The MP implies he can barely bring himself to discuss Johnson’s successor, someone “as irrelevant to me now as she is to the future of British politics”. Before Truss became PM he had worked under her at the Department for International Trade, and found her “utterly untroubled by the rationality and emotions which would govern the lives of others”. He wasn’t alone, he says, in that opinion. “Everyone knew, privately, what we were really dealing with.”

Her lavish display of loyalty to Johnson was, he goes on, a charade. “Liz was planning her leadership campaign months in advance. ” Her team, he says, were talking openly about it at least back in the spring. “It was well known.” So why did he vote for her? “The message, the principles — low tax, personal responsibility, growth, enterprise — that her campaign was heralding. But some people who claim to be Thatcherites misread the lessons of Margaret Thatcher. One of the things that made Mrs Thatcher such a remarkable politician was her caution. She would not have gone in balls out on day one. So it was a combination of hubris and a total absence of emotional intelligence.”

He then delivers what is obviously a pre-rehearsed insult: “The tragedy is, that period was written up to be inspired by the success of the Thatcherite revolution. Sadly it turned into a sort of Mr Bean tribute act.”

Before the interview Burns said he didn’t want to focus on his sacking last October. I get the impression that by now he is itching to when he deploys another pre-rehearsed line: “Elizabeth Truss thought she was Elizabeth the First. ‘Off with their heads!’ ”

The drama of Truss’s ascent to power last summer had, at moments, felt almost Shakespearean. Along with partygate, a growing unease about Tory sleaze had pitched her predecessor’s premiership into crisis through the spring. One of their MPs was caught watching porn in the Commons; another was jailed for sexually assaulting a teenage boy.

What finally toppled Johnson were accusations dating back to 2017 that his deputy chief whip, Chris Pincher, had drunkenly groped several men. The PM tried to plead ignorance of the allegations, but this was exposed as a lie. Unable to deny he’d joked to colleagues about “Pincher by name, pincher by nature” before appointing him, Johnson had to resign.

Three months later his successor’s government was already crumbling into chaos when it gathered for party conference. Its disastrous mini-budget had plunged the markets into freefall, the pound was tanking and Labour had opened up a 30-point poll lead. By the morning of the second day, Monday October 2, the impression of a government that had lost control deepened even further when the chancellor was forced to reverse his 45p tax cut. The mood in the bars that night was fractiously mutinous.

As trade minister, Burns had spent the evening attending various receptions before joining the crowded conference hotel foyer at around midnight. He stood chatting at the bottom of the staircase with a group of “predominantly younger men” — who I take to be mostly gay when he adds, “You’ve been to Tory party conference, right? Young ladies don’t go there to meet their husbands.” Was everyone very drunk by that point? “Well, it wasn’t like a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.” The drinking went on into the early hours — “Not uncommon for party conference” — before he retired to his room.

Visiting No 10 with his younger brother in 1981, months after the family had moved from north Belfast to live in Hertfordshire

COURTESY OF CONOR BURNS

The following morning, at a fringe event, he told an anecdote about the first time he met Kemi Badenoch, now a cabinet minister. (He is miffed that the Tory grandee Lord Maude of Horsham gets erroneous credit for “discovering” Badenoch, when actually he did, so it’s a story he likes to tell.) She was 17 and his instant impression, Burns recounted, was of “the future of the Tory party”. A blogger promptly tweeted the quote and within minutes the chief whip, Wendy Morton, was on the phone to Burns “going bonkers”, screaming, “You can’t say that Kemi is the future! Liz is the prime minister!”

A flurry of increasingly “flustered, panicky” calls from Morton continued throughout the day. What did she say to him? Burns sighs. “You’ve got to remember, by now the Truss administration is in serious trouble. At this point they are living proof of the old saying that even paranoids have enemies.” What did he say to her? “I said the whole thing’s preposterous.” That afternoon he appeared at another fringe event where he made what was taken to be a catty swipe at Truss’s prolific social media selfies: “Kemi knows there’s more to this than Instagram posts.”

Morton was back on the phone, by now apoplectic. When she called again later that evening it was to inform him of a rumour of sexual impropriety the previous night. He was irritated but not particularly alarmed: “The whole thing seemed farcical.” Three days later Morton phoned to say the whip had been withdrawn and he was fired. “I couldn’t believe it.”

No words can convey Burns’s devastation. Even now he still looks haunted by the public humiliation and the private terror that his entire life’s work and reputation were lost. “I never thought I’d see a day when the leader of the Conservative Party, of all parties, would so casually, so easily cast aside the ancient principle of innocent until proven guilty to destroy someone. I was frankly traumatised. ” After two “deeply unhappy, miserable” months — during which both Morton and Truss lost their jobs — the whips’ office informed him that no grounds for an investigation had been found. The case was closed and the whip restored.

There has been no apology from anyone in the whips’ office for what Burns describes as a “drive-by shooting”. No one from the Conservative Party HQ has said sorry either. Burns tells me: “I actually don’t bear any ill will to anybody on this, believe it or not.” I’m inclined not to. The surprise is his suspicion of the real motive behind his dismissal.

Exchanging Christmas cards with the PM, Rishi Sunak, in December — though Burns has yet to get his old job back

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No complaint was actually ever made against him at conference. An inexperienced whips’ office — jumpy after the Pincher scandal — had dispatched a junior whip to monitor the bars. This person had then spotted Burns brushing his hand on a young man’s thigh and reported back to Morton. I didn’t go to that conference — “Lucky you, I wish I hadn’t,” Burns mutters — so I ask what the incident would have looked like to me. “Just a group of people enjoying a drink and a chat and a gossip, letting their hair down.”

Until now Burns has always maintained he was really fired as a punishment for praising Badenoch. “I think that played a huge role,” he keeps telling me, but the theory sounds less and less plausible the more he repeats it. The fiasco sounds to me much more like cock-up than conspiracy.

“When you look at the whole thing,” he continues cryptically, “people can draw their own conclusions.” We go round and round the houses, but he won’t spell it out. Minutes earlier, I remind him, he had said his big “takeaway” from the saga was a bold new resolve to “say what I believe. It has switched off the button in my head that says, ‘You shouldn’t say this or that because it will ruffle feathers.’ ” So why won’t he say what he’s driving at? He sits in gnomic silence until, finally, the penny drops.

Does he think the real reason he was fired was homophobia? He nods. “Look at the recent composition of cabinets. There isn’t currently a gay member of the cabinet. There wasn’t a gay member under Truss. I don’t think there was under Boris. And gays,” he adds, “are not underrepresented in the parliamentary party.”

Burns has always said his sexuality had been no impediment to his political career. Would he still say that? “No, I would not.”

I had assumed his party had consigned its homophobia to history. Have I been naive? He slowly nods. When I ask if he’d had other grounds to suspect this before losing his job, he studies his feet in thoughtful silence for another pointedly long seven seconds before repeating: “I think that the composition of cabinet speaks for itself.”

The silent deliberation had looked to me like he was trying to decide whether to offer more examples. Am I right? He hesitates again, then looks up.

“What I don’t want to do is come across as a pleading, moaning victim, right?”

I don’t think he needs to worry about that. It isn’t victimhood that comes across all afternoon, but vanity. I’m curious to know if he is aware of his constant humblebragging but hadn’t liked to point it out in front of his intern, so a few days later I phone him and ask. There is an uncomfortable pause.

“I don’t recognise that. I’m not someone who goes around taking credit.”