Return of the chicken feed: Boris gets his £275k column back

Former foreign secretary Boris Johnson has strolled straight back into his lucrative role as a Daily Telegraph columnist, it was announced today.

Mr Johnson was forced to give up the £275,000-a-year column when brought in to the Cabinet by Theresa May in 2016.

But on its front page today the Brexit-backing paper announced with a fanfare ‘He’s coming home’. His column returns on Monday.

The news will concern Mrs May, whose Chequers vision of a post-Brexit Britain remaining closely aligned with the EU forced Mr Johnson’s hand and resignation.

And it flies in the face of briefings from allies in the past week that the former London mayor intended to “keep his head down” in the coming months, unless – and it appears unlikely – his columns will avoid the topic of Brexit.

Asked about his outside earnings when he was London Mayor, Johnson argued that his Telegraph pay – then £250,000 – was ‘chicken feed’ and said: ‘I don’t see why, on a Sunday morning, I shouldn’t knock off an article.’

He received a £25,000 pay rise in 2015, according to the Commons Register of Members’ Interests.

Last year it was reported Mr Johnson was struggling to get by on his £142,467 foreign secretary’s salary and wanted to get back to earning “serious money” as a writer. His appointment forced him to put on ice a biography of William Shakespeare for which he had reportedly signed a £500,000 deal.