Tag Archives: things you never thought you’d write

Boris as Foreign Secretary? That was unexpected…

So, just as Theresa May left Buckingham Palace, I had to leave home to go for a meeting. When I stepped out into an Edinburgh street and checked my phone two hours later, I realised I’d stepped into a parallel universe.  I must have done. I mean, a new Prime Minister known for careful and cautious deliberation appointing a man who had grossly insulted the President of the United States just a few weeks ago as the country’s top diplomat? It’s probably worth reminding ourselves of Boris’s response to President Obama’s “back of the queue” speech.

Johnson, a high-profile figure in the campaign for Britain to leave the EU, wrote about the decision of the Obama administration to remove a bust of Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill from the Oval Office.

“Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender,” said Johnson in an article designed to hit back at Obama after the US president waded into the EU referendum debate on Friday.

As it happens, the bust was removed before Obama even took office. Again, like many of the Leave campaign’s claims, only the most casual relationship with the truth.

And then there was the time when he compared the EU to Hitler. 

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , and | 57 Comments
Advert

Recent Comments

  • Jana
    The Citizen’s Income being proposed is quite amazing $19,400 per adult over aged 18, plus add-ons like almost between $13,000 and $18,000 per child under age ...
  • Simon Robinson
    @David Raw: Many things were done 200 years ago that we would today not be proud of. The compensation to slave owners was paid because doing so neutered some of...
  • Jana
    From what I see in the news, the problems in England’s NHS are being repeated in each national health service within the UK. The issue does not appear to be a...
  • PM
    Lib Dems, and others, do like to make the case for the UK rejoining the EU with the first steps being to have closer ties with our European neighbours. The arg...
  • Roland
    >"If you look at what’s happened to immigration since we left the EU, immigration got out of control. " Factually incorrect, non-EU immigration got out ...