BORIS Johnson has appointed journalist Guto Harri as his director of communications, as part of a shake-up at Downing Street.

The two have worked together previously – with Harri being the now prime minister’s spokesman and chief of staff during his first term as London mayor from 2008 to 2012.

However, since then, he hasn’t been shy in his criticism of Johnson and has made the headlines himself.

Commenting on the appointment, a spokesperson for the PM said: “Guto Harri, a respected journalist with a distinguished BBC career before taking on some of the most demanding roles in communications, is joining as director of communications.”

As well as his work with Johnson and 18 years at the BBC, Welsh journalist Harri has worked with News International (2012-2015), Liberty Global (2016-2017), Hanover Communications (2018 to 2020) and Hawthorn Advisors (2020 to 2022)

The 55-year-old is replacing Jack Doyle, who resigned from the position.

The National:

Then leader of the Conservative party Michael Howard speaks to Guto Harri, political correspondent for the BBC, on a flight from Manchester to London in 2005

Harri was born in Cardiff. He studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at The Queen's College, Oxford, and has a postgraduate degree in broadcast journalism from Cardiff University.

He quit GB News last year after just five weeks in the job after the channel had suspended him.

It came after Harri's decision to take the knee during a discussion of racism against the England national team's football players.

Allegedly free-speech-loving watchers of the channel took to social media in outcry over the act.

Writing in the Sunday Times, Harri said: “I joined, part-time but with an ongoing commitment, because I liked and trusted those in charge and supported the broad vision.

“But the channel is rapidly becoming an absurd parody of what it proclaimed to be.

“Rather than defending free speech and confronting cancel culture, it has set out to replicate it on the far right.”

In 2020, Harri penned an article for the Telegraph saying Boris had been “Let down by his ‘mad and mediocre’ Vote Leave advisers”.

He wrote: “The communications strategy during this Covid crisis has been a masterclass in incompetence mitigated only by residual belief that the PM is trying his best.”

Moving back to 2018, Harri was harshly critical of Johnson’s support for Brexit, and described it as “a bad miscalculation”.

He told the BBC: “Brexit destroyed him … because nobody genuinely believes that he was sincere about Brexit.”

It’s not all negative, though. Speaking to the BBC’s Radio 4 in 2018, Harri praised Johnson’s “humour and charm and intellect”.

It came as controversies were resurfacing from Johnson’s past, which were seen as hampering his odds of moving on from then foreign secretary to becoming party leader.

Harri said Johnson being “sexually incontinent” would hurt his chances, as well as “inflammatory language” comparing Theresa May’s Brexit plan to a suicide vest.

Harri added: “I fear that Boris is digging. Somebody needs to take the spade out of his hand or it looks to me like he’s digging his political grave.

“It’s one thing to deploy humour and charm and intellect and all these things he has in spades which he has done brilliantly in the past, not least his exquisite gift of language.

“But at the moment it is being deployed in a really destructive and self-destructive way that I think is doing enormous damage to him as well as to the country.”

Harri and Johnson also later shared jokes about the “sexual incontinence” jibe.

The journalist was urging Johnson to appear on his new show on the S4C channel on Wales.

Harri texted: “If I don't have you on my show I have to secure some publicity for it myself and start saying yes to the endless stream of offers I'm getting to talk about suicide vests and sexual incontinence. You sure you can't spare 30 minutes towards the end of next week? Hope you're OK. G.'”

Johnson replied: 'I'm forwarding this to [Met Police Commissioner] Cressida Dick. It is a clear attempt at blackmail. That has been against the law since the Middle Ages.”

However, Harri has been supportive of Johnson amid the partygate row.

Speaking on LBC, he said: "I think we are dangerously close to a threshold where we go from understandable outrage at the idea of a big party that went on for hours in the back garden of Downing Street, clearly in breach of the rules, to the idea that a bunch of people in a room ... it's the size of a hall, the Cabinet Office ... who were there anyway for a meeting, have a piece of cake ... have we really reached the point where we're so prissy that a piece of cake being brought into a meeting that was happening anyway, is deemed to be, one word that somebody used last night, 'sickening'?"