Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
‘Crazy’ May: I still back Boris
PM defends Johnson after his Brexit outburst
THERESA May has insisted she has full confidence in Boris Johnson in the wake of him rejecting her “crazy” EU customs plan.
The pro-leave Foreign Secretary deepened the chaos around Brexit with his attack on the Prime Minister’s blueprint for avoiding a hard border with Northern Ireland.
The pair came to face-to-face at Cabinet hours after he drew battle lines with No10. And asked if the PM had full confidence in Mr Johnson, her spokesman said: “Yes.”
Under Mrs May’s blueprint, officials would track shipments to the UK and collect tariffs for Brussels on goods sent to the EU.
The PM – back at No10 yesterday after a weekend break with husband Philip – has so far tried and failed to convince her Brexit war Cabinet to accept her plan. Lashing out at the proposals, Mr Johnson had told a newspaper: “It’s totally untried and would make it very, very difficult to do free trade deals.
“If you have the new customs partnership, you have a crazy system whereby you end up collecting the tariffs on behalf of the EU.
“If the EU decides to impose punitive tariffs on something the UK wants to bring in cheaply, there’s nothing you can do.”
Tory Remainers hit out at Mr Johnson. Ex-attorney General Dominic Grieve said the Foreign Secretary was not “in any way inhibited by normal propriety in Government”.
But he added: “I can well understand that, seeing the difficult issues we are having to confront which are very divisive, the Prime Minister should accept these rather extraordinary bursts of misbehaviour by Boris.”
And Lib Dem Layla Moran, of the Best For Britain campaign, said: “How can he continue to sit in Cabinet? It is scandalous.”
■ Last night peers inflicted a 13th Brexit defeat on the Government – voting 245 to 218 to keep the UK in the European Economic Area – and effectively the single market.