‘Chuck Chequers,’ Boris tells MPs
BORIS Johnson has fired another broadside at British prime minister Theresa May’s Brexit plans, branding them unworkable and calling on Tory MPs to ‘chuck Chequers’.
Britain’s former foreign secretary – who resigned days after agreeing to the package at the prime minister’s country residence – said Mrs May’s blueprint would leave the UK in ‘vassalage, satrapy, colony status’ to the EU.
His comments came as website Buzzfeed reported that former Trump adviser Steve Bannon made contact with Mr Johnson during a recent trip to London.
A spokesman for Mr Johnson refused to comment on the report.
Mr Bannon, who is said to be planning to set up an office in Brussels to bring Donald Trump’s brand of right-wing populism to Europe, repeatedly praised Mr Johnson during interviews in the UK last week. But he also talkedup jailed far-right activist Tommy Robinson as ‘the backbone of this country’ in a bust-up with a reporter on LBC radio.
In his first public comment about Brexit since his resignation speech to the House of Commons last week, Mr Johnson said Mrs May’s plan for free trade in goods under a common rulebook with the EU ‘can’t and won’t work’.
Writing in The Spectator magazine, he said: ‘You can’t leave an organisation and still be bound by its rules. But that is what the Chequers white paper means.
‘It is vassalage, satrapy, colony status for the UK. For the first time in a thousand years our laws will be made overseas, enforced by a foreign court.
‘It can’t and won’t work. Chuck Chequers.’
Mr Johnson also defended the decision, made jointly with home secretary Sajid Javid, not to seek assurances from the US that two British jihadis would not face the death penalty.
He said Britain would have been happy to assist in the use of a drone to kill Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh if they had been located while still operating as Islamic State fighters.
‘Would the British state, in these circumstances, have connived in straightforward extrajudicial killing? Too damn right we would,’ Mr Johnson wrote.