Day: August 22, 2017

    In any discussion of public profligacy and poor stewardship, one is obliged to consider the record of the foreign secretary Boris Johnson for his two terms as London mayor appear to provide numerous examples of squander in search of grandeur. The garden bridge; the little-used cable car over the east of the Thames; the new Routemaster bus, for which no sound economic case was ever established; the derided ArcelorMittal Orbit fogging the skyline of London’s Olympic park. As the Guardian reported last week, a total of £940m was spent on his vanity projects. Each debacle bears scrutiny, not just to know what has happened to public money, but also in the increasingly important context of Johnson as a senior member of a Brexit-bound government which promises, against all the ev...

    Michael Cremin falsely claimed to have a law degree from the University of London. A fantasist who posed as a barrister to trick a woman with terminal cancer out of her life savings has been jailed for eight years. Michael Cremin conned Sandra Burch out of £92,000 in a property deal and also committed other frauds to buy a fleet of cars worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Cremin falsely claimed to have a law degree from the University of London and was listed on the website of a legitimate barristers’ chambers but in reality had no legal qualifications. The 41-year-old, of Cirencester, Gloucestershire, was found guilty at Bristol crown court of six counts of fraud and one of pretending to be a barrister. The judge Michael Longman said Cremlin had used bluff and bluster ...