Jack Doyle and his knack for personal mobile numbers

Jack Doyle, Boris Johnson’s director of communications, has an uncanny knack for getting hold of personal phone numbers.

Last year, The New European‘s boss Matt Kelly was mystified how Doyle managed to call him out of the blue – though reluctant to give his name – to say the prime minister was threatening legal action against the paper.
Doyle demanded that The New European recanted its story about Johnson professing ‘buyer’s remorse’ about his marriage to Carrie at the Garrick club dinner Lord Charles Moore hosted for him during the COP26 gathering in Glasgow.

Now, Nick Moar, the founder of the now defunct Politics for All website, has disclosed he has had the same experience, and with more sinister consequences.

Moar got his call from Doyle while he was out clubbing. Johnson’s henchman was calling to threaten Politics for All with legal action if they didn’t take down a tweet they had put out to their hundreds of thousands of followers alluding to the “buyer’s remorse” scoop.

“I’ve no idea how he got my number – and I have no idea why he thought we’d delete the tweet,” Moar writes in The Spectator. “But the threat was interesting in itself. As the saying goes, news is what someone, somewhere wants to suppress.”

Moar added that he knew the PM’s wife followed Politics for All as he had noticed she had briefly “liked” another tale they had put up on Twitter.
Politics For All – set up by Moar when he was a teenager in 2019 – was subsequently suspended by Twitter, along with its associated accounts, without warning, with allegations that it had broken its rules on “platform manipulation,” but not going into details.

Mandrake is left wondering not just about how Doyle manages to obtain personal phone numbers at the drop of a hat, but also, and more disturbingly, whether the “buyer’s remorse” scoop had anything at all to do with the shutting down of Politics for All.

These days anything seems possible.