Jennifer Arcuri - Not Just About Screwing

The coverage of what alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson may or may not have got up to during the “technology lessons” given to him by Jennifer Arcuri, who has been the recipient of significant amounts of UK taxpayers’ money for which those taxpayers do not appear to have received anything in return, has conveniently settled on the idea that it was just Bozo The Clown cheating on his wife. Again.

And that may have been true, but to settle on the screwing claim enables Bozo’s press pals to let him off the hook for the real scandal, which is corruption on an serious and worrying scale, and as a side issue, the closeness to power of some individuals who should not be thus rewarded. Ms Arcuri cultivated the appearance of serious respectability; in reality, she was neither serious (except in taking the money), nor respectable.

She was not a “tech entrepreneur” until after she arrived in the UK to study, in 2011. After she moved into that flat - the one with the dancing pole in the living room - she signed up to work on Bozo’s Mayoral re-election campaign, and suddenly - shazam! - she was a “tech entrepreneur”. By the following year, she had a company, and attracted speakers to her events, significantly because Bozo agreed to give his services for free.

Think about that. Johnson could score five or even six figure sums for speaking engagements, yet he would rock up at Ms Arcuri’s bashes for nothing, such was the attraction of, well, whatever it was that they were getting up to together.

Meanwhile, she got herself an occasional berth at Conservative Home, co-authoring “Understanding and engaging with tech entrepreneurs offers huge rewards” with Tory MP Ian Liddell-Grainger, promoting one of her events under the headline “Last Sunday’s #FloodHack shows how technology can revolutionise public services”, and co-authoring “The call for digital skills – Tech Vs Brains” with Tory MP George Freeman.

But then comes the deeply disturbing part: those “other speakers” that turned up to Ms Arcuri’s events, and spoke alongside Bozo, included one Milo Yiannopoulos. That’s the same Milo Yiannopoulos who was later disgraced after he appeared to condone paedophilia. And it gets worse: at the time, Yiannopoulos was at Breitbart, run by one Steve Bannon, of whom he was a protégé. Thus Bannon’s way in with Bozo.

As Nick Tolhurst has put it, “UK govt money was being siphoned off to a supposedly tech start up by a former waitress to sponsor events with US far right [involvement] … to support a foreign far right presence/network in UK by a blackmail vulnerable politician thru a ‘young friend’. That man is now Prime Minister”. That’s why it’s just too convenient for the right-leaning press to call it as Bozo screwing around, and leave it at that.

No, what we have here is a young woman being used to exploit the known vulnerability of a potentially very useful political ally, and that politician being effectively captured by the US far-right. And it appears to have worked: Steve Bannon has had access to Bozo, with the latter then parroting his playbook, Muslim bashing, EU bashing, and ratcheting up the hate speech dial as he goes. And now he is in 10 Downing Street.

That’s why the right-wing press is happy to talk about Bozo getting his leg over. Because it allows them not to talk about his capture by the US far-right. You have been warned.

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