Johnson and Trump aren’t the same, but they swim in the same cesspool | Jon Allsop

The disgraceful smear against Keir Starmer has strong echoes of the former president's attacks on Hillary Clinton

In 2007, Boris Johnson took a shot at Hillary Clinton, then a candidate for the Democratic US presidential nomination, in his Telegraph column. He wrote that Clinton's eyes put him in mind of a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital" and that she represented everything I came into politics to oppose," not least purse-lipped political correctness".

He even threw in a reference to the position of poor Vince Foster's gun". Foster was a Clinton-era White House counsel, and his suicide in 1993 has fed wild conspiracy theories - including that the Clintons had him murdered - ever since.

Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes the Columbia Journalism Review's newsletter The Media Today