Theresa forced to back ‘clown’ Boris
THERESA May has been forced to defend Boris Johnson after he was lampooned as a joke and a clown both at home and abroad.
The Foreign Secretary was said to have been mocked by the White House, EU diplomats and his own civil servants amid claims of chaos in his department.
He even faced claims yesterday that intelligence chiefs did not trust him with secrets.
The criticism forced Mrs May to say Mr Johnson had her ‘full confidence’.
She defended the Foreign Secretary despite him ridiculing her decision to call a snap general election on a trip to Libya last week.
One withering assessment came from former Whitehall chief Lord Kerr, who said Mr Johnson lacked respect in the US and Europe.
The UK’s former ambassador to Washington attacked Mr Johnson’s lack of visibility and credibility at a time of global tension.
‘Keeping our heads down isn’t always wrong. But a policy of always doing so risks seeming ignominious,’ the anti-Brexit peer wrote in the London Evening Standard.
Yesterday The Times carried a column by Rachel Sylvester with anonymous criticism of the Foreign Secretary. She said a diplomatic source had told her White House officials ‘don’t want to go anywhere near Boris because they think he’s a joke’.
She reported a minister as saying: ‘It’s worse in Europe. There is not a single foreign minister there who takes him seriously. They think he’s a clown who can never resist a gag.’ ‘The French think Boris is totally unreliable, the Germans think he’s a liar and the Italians think he’s dangerous,’ she noted a Tory MP as adding. ‘He is undermining our ability to negotiate internationally and degrading our position abroad.’
Mr Johnson has joked about Italy’s falling prosecco sales if Brexit goes badly and likened ex-French president Francois Hollande to a Colditz camp guard. Last month, he was said to have infuriated the French government by revealing plans for Libyan peace talks.
A senior German politician said Mr Johnson’s approach to European politics was ‘not very clever’ but the Foreign Secretary was beginning to see that ‘big words don’t help’.
Michael Fuchs, an ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, told BBC Radio 4’s World at One yesterday that the Foreign Secretary had calmed down in recent weeks.
The Times also claimed that civil servants in the Foreign Office were ‘horrified’ by Mr Johnson’s ‘lack of discipline’. Some reportedly said they had taken to approaching his deputy – Europe minister Sir Alan Duncan – when they needed a decision to be made.
Asked about The Times’ claims yesterday, the PM’s official spokesman said Mr Johnson had Mrs May’s full confidence, adding: ‘The Prime Minister has a good relationship with Boris Johnson, has full confidence in him and he’s doing a good job.’
But Lib Dem MP Tom Brake said Downing Street’s comments sounded ‘like a football chairman just before they sack the manager’.
‘The Germans think he’s a liar’