You couldn’t make it up
I guess we’re all living in a surrealistic comedy show based on a competition between the UK and the US on who can put more absurdly unqualified and dangerous people in minor jobs like head of state or head of foreign affairs.
Or to put it another way, I go out for a couple of hours and come back to find that Boris Johnson is Foreign Secretary. Boris Johnson! Is Foreign Secretary!
Mr Johnson said he was “very humbled” to be appointed foreign secretary.
He said Mrs May had made a “wonderful speech” earlier, saying there was a “massive opportunity in this country to make a great success of our new relationship with Europe and with the world”.
But Lib Dem leader Tim Farron predicted Mr Johnson would “spend more time apologising to nations he’s offended” than working as foreign secretary.
Slate has a partial list of the offendings.
- In 2003, Johnson described U.S. President George W. Bush as “a cross-eyed Texan warmonger, unelected, inarticulate, who [epitomizes] the arrogance of American foreign policy” in an unsigned editorial in the Spectator.
- In a 2005 Telegraph column, he wrote “…compared with the old British Empire, and the new American imperium, Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase….Chinese culture seems to stay firmly in China. Indeed, high Chinese culture and art are almost all imitative of western forms…. The number of Chinese Nobel prizes won on home turf is zero, though there are of course legions of bright Chinese trying to escape to Stanford and Caltech.”
- In a 2006 column, also for the Telegraph, Johnson wrote “For 10 years we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing.” After backtracking furiously, he said he would “add Papua New Guinea to my global itinerary of apology.”
Naturally it makes sense to appoint someone who has a global itinerary of apology to the job of Foreign Secretary.
- In an op-ed published in April, he claimed President Obama removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office upon assuming the presidency in 2009 because “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,” comments several leading British members of Parliament (rightly) condemned as racist.
He’s been rude about both Clinton and Trump.
Interesting times.
We’ve all been rude about clinton and trump – and about boris too. Political parties no longer even pretend to care about what the various publics think; it’s all just jobs for the boys and girls; although I believe the UK dodged a bullet when Leadsom dropped out only to now walk into another. Still their options look slightly better than ours right now.
My theory is she’s merely cornering Boris with the poisoned chalice he tried to evade. “Here’s your mess. You deal with it.”
And added bonus, she has a readymade target for blame when it all goes pear-shaped.
The fact that he’ll make an even bigger mess of it, well, who cares. That’ll be Labour’s problem when they get voted in.
It could be a standard teachers’ management technique – take the one who’s perfectly capable of doing the work but most likely to get carried away with his own bumptiousness and make him Class Monitor in the hope that his sense of responsibility will kick in.
It’s a risky move. Should he continue as previously noted, seriously offending an ally, then that would be a sacking offence and The End of Boris. It will for a time keep him out the way of David Davies – right-wing Tory but does have his own brain – who’ll be negotiating Brexit.
At least some of the outrageous things he’s said in the past were aimed at a very small audience which, unfortunately, was prepared to pay him enormous sums of money to do just that, wind them up in their xenophobia. I presume he’ll have to give that up.
He’s an, um, interesting choice, though he’s not quite as stupid as he appears (he is, on the other hand, every bit as much of a self-publicising egomaniac as he appears). But I wouldn’t like to think being rude about Trump disqualifies one from being Foreign Secretary, we wouldn’t have many available candidates for the job if it did.
I think Teresa May is evil, but she’s not stupid. She’s put Boris here to punish him for his part in the leave campaign. Did you see his face leaving Downing Street after his appointment? Not a happy bunny by any means.
After leave won – which Boris did not intend or expect – he ran like hell from taking any kind of responsibility. Now he’s been put front and center. He’s going to have a lot of very awkward conversations with his counterparts. He’s going to have to give up his nice little earner at the Spectator. He’s going to spend a lot of time in aeroplanes. He’s going to mess up and terminate his political career. And if he does badly enough, May can come back to the country with either a general election, or a second referendum, or both, and get a national rejection of the terms of Brexit.
May does not want the UK to leave the EU. She’s relying on Boris to fail.
It terrifies me that the country has reached a point where Teresa May is the best available option, but we seem to have reached that point.
I’m not particularly a Boris Johnson fan, and there is a lot to criticise him fairly for. But, on a point of principle, I dislike the quoting of parts of sentences in a way that significantly changes them.
It is not true that: “In an op-ed published in April, he claimed President Obama removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office upon assuming the presidency in 2009 because “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,”
His actual words were (click the link in the OP): “Something vanished from that room, and no one could quite explain why. […] No one was sure whether the President had himself been involved in the decision. 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. Some said that perhaps Churchill was seen …”.
[By the way, that “some said it was a symbol …’ ‘ sentence is literally true since, at the time, a couple of British newspapers did carry speculations along that line”.]
This is not to say that Johnson’s comments were sensible or well-judged, but this sort of distortion is exactly what Johnson gets criticised for.
People seem to be wildly overestimating the powers of the Foreign Secretary. They have never been much – power reverts to No. 10 as soon as there is a crisis – and May has just made them much less by removing foreign trade from the brief. Johnson’s job is basically having dinner abroad. He is good at that.
There is also, of course, Boris’s President Erdogan limerick, notably invented on the fly during an interview! (story here) But since this blog has itself called for insulting doggerel toward Erdogan, over his attempts to suppress criticism, that one might be judged ok. :-)
One (of many) questions about Boris Johnson is how much of his public persona is put on?.
For example I saw a program (nothing to do with UK politics) where he was being interviewed in French. All that bumbling and half hesitation was gone and, while he still looked like a buffoon, he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.
That said he hasn’t got this job on merit. It’s a symbol that Theresa May can unite the Party and is responding to the concerns of the people. It might even prove useful – the press can focus on ‘good old Boris’ being butted by a sheep while the negotiations on lamb tariffs take place out of the spotlight.
My bet is that May has given Boris the gig as Foreign Secretary with full confidence that he will in short order stuff it up completely, giving her a credible excuse to sack him, fling him into outer darkness, be rid of him once and for all, and appoint someone less controversial in his place.
He’s been rude about both Clinton and Trump
More than that, Johnson wrote that exceedingly rude poem about Erdogan at a time when *Sultan Erdogan* was demanding Europe prosecute those who made fun of him.
It succeeded in shutting the uppity Ottoman up.
I agree with quixote. This is May handing Johnson enough rope to hang himself.
I loathe May’s politics. She stands for just about the opposite of everything I believe in but she is an extremely intelligent, highly competent woman (which makes her even more dangerous in my eyes).
Appointing Johnson Foreign Secretary is so out of left field that, given said intelligence and competence, there must be something behind it. My personal theory is that Boris has too much of a following to be ignored – leaving him off the cabinet would actually increase his standing with his followers, make him look like the “plucky outsider” who would become a thorn in May’s side. This was she has neutralised him, put him in a position where, yes, he has to deal with some of the mess he has made. He is likely to fail – Boris’s talents probably don’t stretch to the kind of work needed as Foreign Secretary. So he’s likely to crash and burn and May can then ease him out of the Cabinet.
Of course, while he’s occupying the front pages with his calculated gaffes and staged blunders, David Davis will be quietly beavering away in the background working on the Brexit Negotiations under much less scrutiny than he might be if Boris wasn’t taking up everyone’s attention.
It’s also worth noting that Foreign Secretary will be a diminished role during the two year Article 50 negotiations. There are a lot of things we will not be able to do during that period and many of them fall under the purview off foreign secretary.
When you make a person with a well known habit of insulting people in charge of foreign relations, though, you give the impression you want to officially insult your allies.
That said, he seems to have the measure of W and Erdogan.
Erdogan?
I would dearly like to know what fiendish role Boris played in the coup plot. He could be off to a flying start.