Britain’s blundering Johnson compares Maori welcome to headbutt
BRITAIN’S gaffe-prone Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson likened a traditional Maori greeting to a headbutt while visiting indigenous leaders in New Zealand yesterday.
Johnson opened his two-day trip with a visit to a marae, or Maori meeting house, in Kaikoura, the South Island town that was hit by a massive earthquake last year.
He was greeted with a hongi, the Maori welcome which involves two people pressing their noses together.
The ritual symbolises participants sharing the breath of life, but Johnson said he was concerned about how it would be received in Scotland, home of the “Glasgow kiss”, or headbutt.
“Thank you for teaching me the hongi, I think it is a beautiful form of introduction, though it might be misinterpreted in a pub in Glasgow if you were to try it,” he said.
Johnson also said “the marae has a tradition of strong female leadership, which we also have back home”.
His trip to New Zealand is expected to focus on trade, foreign policy and international security issues.
While in Wellington, he will also unveil a war memorial and will meet New Zealand Prime Minister Bill English.
It is the former London mayor’s first visit to New Zealand.
“I have to say this is the most mindblowingly, mind-numbingly beautiful country I’ve ever seen – I think probably the only landscape I can think of that can conceivably do justice to the imagination of JR R Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings,” he said.
Prior to becoming Britain’s top diplomat, Johnson compared Hillary Clinton to a “sadistic nurse in a mental hospital” and said ex-US president Barack Obama was part-Kenyan with “an ancestral dislike of the British Empire”.