Boris Johnson sharply rebuked for suicide vest tirade over Brexit deal
▶ Former foreign secretary’s comments came amid rumours of a challenge to PM Theresa May
Senior figures from the UK’s ruling party rebuked former foreign secretary Boris Johnson yesterday after he used a suicide vest analogy to describe Britain’s position on Brexit.
Mr Johnson’s latest tirade against his party’s leadership since quitting the government in July sparked a new round of disquiet within the deeply divided Conservatives.
“We have wrapped a suicide vest around the British constitution and handed the detonator to [EU chief negotiator] Michel Barnier,” he wrote in the Mail on Sunday.
Chairman of the influential foreign affairs committee, Tom Tugendhat, a former army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said that Mr Johnson had to “grow up”.
“A suicide bomber murdered many in the courtyard of my office in Helmand,” Mr Tugendhat said on Twitter. “Some need to grow up. Comparing the PM to that isn’t funny.”
Mr Johnson is a popular figure among the party’s grassroots, but divides opinion among Conservative politicians. Some consider him a rallying figure for a post-Brexit future after fronting the campaign to leave the EU, but critics warn he is a power-hungry political opportunist intent on securing the party’s leadership.
Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston said she would consider leaving the party if Mr Johnson became leader, while Foreign Office Minister Alan Duncan suggested that the comments marked “one of the most disgusting moments in modern British politics”.
Mr Duncan said the column should mark the “political end of Boris Johnson”.
Home Secretary Sajid Javid told the BBC there were “better ways to articulate your differences”.
Mr Johnson has been touted as the favourite to succeed Theresa May, who is battling to retain her authority as she negotiates Britain’s exit from the EU against strong opposition.
Her preferred plan sparked Mr Johnson’s departure from her cabinet.
That proposal has been criticised by sections of her party, the opposition and by Mr Barnier – with today marking just 200 days before the UK’s scheduled departure in March next year.
Mr Johnson returned to the theme that the prime minister’s negotiating position gave too many concessions to European negotiators. “It is a humiliation. We look like a seven-stone weakling being comically bent out of shape by a 500-pound gorilla,” he wrote.
Mr Johnson’s intervention only partially deflected attention from public focus at the weekend over his marital woes.
It emerged that he had separated from his wife of 25 years amid suggestions of an affair with a party official.
In a sign of the war within the party, The Sunday Times reported that Mrs May’s aides had drawn up a dossier on Mr Johnson during an aborted run for the leadership in 2016.
The newspaper reported that the 4,000-word dossier was circulating in Westminster last week.