The Sunday Times newspaper backed Brexit four years ago and last summer it cautiously welcomed the prospect of Boris Johnson becoming prime minister, arguing “the United Kingdom could do with his sunny optimism” in a leader article highlighting the importance of his first hundred days in Downing Street.



But in those first hundred days it was Rupert Murdoch’s flagship Sunday broadsheet — the paper that leads the weekly agenda in Westminster more often than any rival — that rained down three heavy blows on Johnson.

Lurid claims of impropriety involving American tech entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri (denied by Johnson), allegations that Johnson once groped the paper’s columnist Charlotte Edwardes (also categorically denied), and a damaging leak of the government’s no-deal “Operation Yellowhammer” documents set the paper on a strikingly different course from its Conservative-leaning coverage of the last few years.

Last weekend came another big swing, which BuzzFeed News can reveal led to almost half a million pounds in new annual revenue for the paper.

The once symbiotic relationship between Johnson and the Sunday Times has “irretrievably broken down” after an investigation published by the paper that criticised the prime minister for his handling of the coronavirus crisis, according to interviews with multiple sources at Sunday Times and in government.

The story by the paper’s “Insight” team went viral online and won plaudits from government critics who saw it as a return to the forensic investigative journalism for which the Sunday Times was historically well-known.