Johnson was a prominent leader of the successful referendum campaign to take Britain out of the European Union who harbored his own leadership hopes, making him a factor for Prime Minister Theresa May to deal with as she tries to unify the sharply divided Conservative Party. A month later in November of the same year he was stopped from visiting territories in Palestine after he made a number of pro-Israel remarks and called the boycott of Israeli goods “completely crazy”.
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Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton might also want to have a few words with Johnson: The new British foreign secretary previously compared Clinton to “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital”.
They also referred to Johnson’s “anti-Turkey” positions, such as comments favoring the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an insurgent group recognized in Turkey, the United States, and Europe as a terrorist organization that has been waging war against Turkey’s government for the last 32 years.
May came to power with a reputation for acting with careful calculation, but with her choice of the voluble, publicity-craving Johnson as Britain’s representative on the world stage, she appears to have thrown her customary caution to the winds.
When President Obama urged the U.K.to stay in the European Union ahead of the Brexit vote, Johnson wrote an op-ed in The Sun arguing that the president held a grudge against Winston Churchill and the British empire generally. This, however, is optimistic thinking considering Johnson’s comment’s about Zimbabwe’s iconic leader.
Earlier this year, Johnson won a magazine prize for a limerick depicting Erdogan cavorting with a goat, written to ridicule the Turkish leader’s efforts to have German courts punish a German satirist for insulting him. And on the question of global domination, “the Chinese aren’t even out of the paddock”. He was replaced by Liz Truss, a former environment minister and one of the many female faces expected to occupy May’s team.
Boris Johnson is a Conservative British politician famous for some decidedly undiplomatic utterances. Chinese diplomats were reportedly less than impressed when Johnson declared at the 2008 Beijing Olympics that ping pong was “invented on the dining tables of England”.
The dramatic events began just over an hour after David Cameron left Downing Street for the last time, accompanied by his family.
“Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically”.
The comments did not amuse Papua New Guina’s High Commissioner in London, as the BBC reported.
“And on Europe clearly we have to give effect to the will of people in the referendum, but that does not mean in any sense, leaving Europe”.
Former Scottish first minister Alex Salmond described Mr Johnson as a “court jester”.
“They say he is shortly off to the Congo”.
In a 2002 piece on then PM Tony Blair’s trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Johnson wrote: “No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird”. Like Zeus, back there in the Iliad, he has turned his shining eyes away, far over the lands of the Hippemolgoi, the drinkers of mares’ milk.
It’s not always Johnson’s insults that raise eyebrows.
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With regard to the conflicts of the Middle East, Johnson has controversially bucked the Western trend and praised Syrian President Bashar Assad for battling the Islamic State, no matter its parallel campaign of violence on Syria’s civilian population.
