When he was the Mayor of London, I predicted that Boris Johnson would be Prime Minister one day. Indeed, I thought there was a realistic chance that he could be David Cameron’s successor.
Now, in the days of Donald Trump, Brexit, and Jeremy Corbyn, you couldn’t rule anything out in the world of politics, but every day BoJo spends at the Foreign Office seems to put him further away from his ultimate blonde ambition to hold the keys to Number Ten Downing Street.
Boris’ adage of not letting the truth get in the way of the facts is one that he has lived by for some time. He has, before now, been fired for his laissez-faire attitude to the truth by the Times newspaper.
In 1995 Johnson was caught up in a scandal when a recording of a conversation between him and his friend Darius Guppy was released. In a nutshell, Johnson was agreeing to provide Guppy with the private address of a journalist, so that Guppy could arrange for him to be beaten up.
As the Editor of The Spectator magazine, Johnson was forced to visit Liverpool, by then Conservative Party leader Michael Howard, to apologise for an editorial that had appeared in the publication, criticising the city’s reaction to the death of one of its citizens Ken Bigley.
But, it is as the holder of one of the great offices of state, that Boris Johnson has proved what a dangerous individual he is.
His buffoonery, loose lips, and Eton- Boy stuttering performances may be amusing for his appearances on ‘Have I Got News for You’, or on a Tory Party conference platform. But as the United Kingdom’s global representative, as our Foreign Secretary, then he must surely be held to a much higher account than that?
Highlights of his tenure so far include comments that led to Naznin Zaghari-Radcliffe having her sentence doubled in an Iranian prison; he expressed the view that a Libyan city would have a bright future as a luxury resort once they “cleared the dead bodies away”; he has compared a former French President to a Second World War German General wanting to administer “punishment beatings”; and he took his Carry On like humour to another level with the view that people would still be free to go off to Thailand to “indulge in a little casual sex tourism” after Brexit.
Now, it seems, he falsely claimed Porton Down had identified the Salisbury nerve agent used to poison a former spy and his daughter as being Russian in origin. Whatever your views on Putin’s Russian regime, this cavalier approach to the facts will not be looked upon with anything other than contempt by the international community.
In a recent Downtown in Business poll, Boris was deemed more dangerous to the UK than Putin. If he is allowed to continue in his role as Foreign Secretary, you have to say that he becomes a danger to the Tory Party, Theresa May, and their chances of winning a majority at the next election.
