Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, offered a similar withering critique of the UK’s new foreign secretary, labelling Johnson’s behaviour during the referendum campaign “ungeheuerlich”- meaning monstrous or outrageous.
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New Prime Minister Theresa May has promised to deliver Brexit, but it is understood she feels the U.K must only trigger Article 50 “when we are ready”.
“Boris Johnson will make a significant contribution to British relations with countries around the world and I’m particularly pleased that he has such a personal connection with Australia”, Ms Bishop told reporters in Perth on Friday.
“They’ve made Boris foreign secretary?” she asked, bewildered, before whirling her back toward the crowd in shock.
And he revealed: “The French foreign minister has in fact sent me a charming letter saying how much he looked forward to working together and to depending Anglo-French cooperation on all sorts of areas and that’s what we want to achieve”.
Others took a more conciliatory view with the belief that Johnson as foreign secretary would be more temperate than his previous incarnations as Johnson the journalist, Johnson the legislator or Johnson the London mayor.
“Hopefully he won’t have the painful anti-Russian complexes of his predecessor [Philip Hammond]”, Aleksey Pushkov tweeted after news of Johnson’s appointment broke. “This is something, frankly, that goes beyond a relationship, that goes beyond personalities”. Critics said Britain appears to be taking further steps to disengage from the world.
After Obama in April said he hoped that Britons would vote to stay in the EU, Johnson described America’s first black president as a “part-Kenyan” with an “ancestral dislike of the British empire”.
British Prime Minister Theresa May continues to fill out her government, appointing women to two top jobs. “Now it’s him with his back against the wall to defend his country and to clarify his relationship with Europe”.
US State Secretary John Kerry congratulated Boris Johnson on Thursday on his appointment as United Kingdom foreign secretary, a spokesman for the US State Department said Thursday.
Lesser-known than Johnson but at least as important to Britain’s future is 67-year-old David Davis, the new Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. It is not seen joining the bloc for many years.
Still, Hardt suggests: “Britain remaining in the European Union should also be an option for the new government – it would be better for Great Britain and the rest of the European Union”.
He said: “After a vote like the referendum result, it is inevitable that there is going to be quite a lot of plasters coming off the chanceries of Europe”.
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May has fired Justice Secretary Michael Gove, a former leader of the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union. When “The Spectator” ran a competition inviting readers to write poems insulting Turkey’s President Recip Erdogan, the then Mayor of London could not resist submitting a contribution, which included a made-up word beginning with “w” that rhymed with the Turkish capital, Ankara.
