Big guns back Boris
Top Tories say he was simply speaking the truth about EU’s vision
Senior Conservative figures rallied to the defence of Boris Johnson last night after he was accused of comparing EU efforts towards building a federal superstate to Hitler’s plans to dominate the continent.
remain campaigners seized on the former London mayor’s comments in an interview – and claimed that by comparing Brussels to the Third reich he had proved he was unfit for office.
But Brexit supporters said he was simply stating a ‘historical fact of life’ about the failure of successive attempts over the centuries to establish a ‘greater europe’.
The latest row erupted a week after David Cameron was attacked by Leave campaigners for suggesting that British withdrawal from the EU could lead to the outbreak of the Third World War.
Former Lib Dem leader Lord Ashdown said Mr Johnson’s comments showed he was a ‘tuppenny tin-pot imitation Churchill’, while D-Day hero Lord Bramall said the analysis was ‘laughable’.
But a Vote Leave spokesman said: ‘This synthetic row has been whipped up by the remain camp who only a week ago
‘It was a piece of historical analysis’
were telling us that if we vote to Leave, it will lead to war.’
Mr Johnson, the most senior figure in the Leave campaign, said in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph that the past 2,000 years had been dominated by doomed attempts to unify the continent under a single government to recreate the ‘golden age’ of the romans.
‘napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically,’ he said. ‘The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods. But fundamentally what is lacking is the eternal problem, which is that there is no underlying loyalty to the idea of europe. There is no single authority that anybody respects or understands. That is causing this massive democratic void.’
Sources close to the former Mayor said he had not compared the EU and its methods to Hitler’s methods, and he had done no more than put forward a view of the continent’s history that suggest that efforts to centralise european power have all failed. Pro-Brexit Tories yesterday defended Mr Johnson following a flurry of criticism.
iain Duncan Smith, the former Work and Pensions Secretary, said he was simply stating a ‘historical fact of life’.
‘i think the whole process of trying to drive europe together by force or by bureaucracy and democratic means ultimately makes problems,’ he told BBC one’s Sunday Politics. ‘All he is doing is talking about the trend towards the idea of this kind of concept of some kind of greater europe, that’s all.’
Chris Grayling, Leader of the Commons, told BBC radio 4’s World This Weekend: ‘Boris is a historian and he was doing a piece of historical analysis.’
However, Mr Johnson’s comments were condemned by remain campaigners. Shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn said: ‘After the horror of the Second World War, the EU helped to bring an end to centuries of conflict in europe. For Boris Johnson to make this comparison is both offensive and desperate.’
Field Marshal Lord Bramall, a former head of the Armed Forces who took part in the D-Day landings, said Mr Johnson’s remarks were ‘simply laughable’.
He added: ‘i know only too well, this comparison of the EU and nazi Germany is absurd. Hitler’s main aim was to create an empire in the east and violently subjugate europeans.’
Former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown said: ‘People are fed up with yet another tuppenny tin-pot imitation Churchill promising to “fight them on the beaches” while weakening our defences and wrecking our economy.’
INVOKING the ghosts of hitler and the Nazis in any political argument is a profoundly dangerous strategy.
Trying to compare organisations or individuals – with the possible exceptions of Stalin and Pol Pot – to that uniquely evil regime can be at best invidious, at worst downright offensive.
So Brexit campaigner Boris Johnson played a risky card when he likened the EU’s bid to force europe into a single superstate to the expansionist ambitions of hitler and Napoleon.
The backlash from the Remain camp was predictably shrill. Shadow Foreign Secretary hilary Benn said Mr Johnson had lost his ‘moral compass’. Former Labour minister Yvette Cooper accused him of cynicism and hysteria. ex-Lib Dem leader Lord Campbell said he was ‘grossly misrepresenting history’.
But was he? Beyond all the sound and fury, what did Mr Johnson actually say that was wrong? he argued that for 2,000 years there had been successive attempts to unify europe in a bid to ‘rediscover the golden age of peace and prosperity’ the continent enjoyed under the Roman empire.
‘Napoleon, hitler, various people tried this out and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,’ he added.
In trying to weld together the disparate countries of europe into a fundamentally undemocratic union, Mr Johnson believes the EU is now seeking to impose its own form of dictatorship. In that sense, he suggests it is acting like the totalitarian regimes of the past and trampling on the rights and wishes of ordinary citizens.
‘There is no underlying loyalty to the idea of europe and no authority that anyone respects or understands. That is causing this massive democratic void,’ Mr Johnson said. The EU is ‘getting out of control’, he concluded.
Is this really a cynical, hysterical argument, or simply the voice of logic and common sense? On June 23, the British electorate will give their democratic answer to that question.