Johnson says Brexit plan suicide vest
LONDON: Theresa May’s Brexit strategy has put the UK constitution in a ‘‘suicide vest’’ and handed the detonator to Brussels’ chief negotiator Michel Barnier, Boris Johnson says.
Britain’s former foreign secretary’s extraordinary comments provoked an immediate backlash from Tory critics in the latest sign of the bitter Conservative divide over Brexit and the future leadership of the party.
Johnson launched the attack amid further focus on his private life following the announcement that he has separated from his wife Marina Wheeler and the couple are divorcing after 25 years.
The prominent Brexiteer’s latest assault on May’s handling of negotiations with Brussels will fuel speculation about his own leadership ambitions.
Johnson quit the Cabinet in opposition to May’s Chequers plan which would keep the UK closely aligned with EU rules on goods.
Writing in the Mail On Sunday, he said: ‘‘At every stage in the talks so far, Brussels gets what Brussels wants.
‘‘We have agreed to the EU’s timetable; we have agreed to hand over £39 billion ($NZ77 billion), for nothing in return.
‘‘Under the Chequers proposal we are set to agree to accept their rules — forever — with no say on the making of those rules.
‘‘It is a humiliation. We look like a sevenstone weakling being comically bent out of shape by a 500lb gorilla.’’
He also lashed out at the Northern Ireland ‘‘backstop’’ — the measure aimed at making sure there is no hard border with Ireland. Under the EU version of the plan, if no trade deal with the UK resolved the issue, Northern Ireland would effectively remain part of the single market.
Johnson said: ‘‘We have opened ourselves to perpetual political blackmail. We have wrapped a suicide vest around the British constitution — and handed the detonator to Michel Barnier.
‘‘We have given him a jemmy with which Brussels can choose — at any time — to crack apart the union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.’’
The UK’s alternative backstop and the Chequers plan would both mean ‘‘agreeing to take EU rules, with no say on those rules’’, leaving the country a ‘‘vassal state’’.
He said: ‘‘We have managed to reduce the great British Brexit to two appalling options: either we must divide the Union, or the whole country must accept EU law forever.’’
Divorce after affair
The constituents of Uxbridge and South Ruislip say they have not seen much of Johnson, their MP, since he won the seat in 2015. He’s ‘‘been busy doing other things’’, said one local, wryly pointing to his copy of the Sun.
The local said he didn’t much care for the way that news that Johnson and his wife, barrister Marina Wheeler, are divorcing made frontpage news after details of their separation and his affair with ‘‘a blonde Tory aide’’ were published by the paper last week.
Johnson divorced his first wife, Allegra MostynOwen, in 1993 after having an affair with Wheeler. The couple married soon after and had four children. Johnson had another child with art adviser Helen Macintyre in 2009, and his affairs with journalists Petronella Wyatt and Anna Fazackerley became the subject of Toby Young’s 2005 stage play Who’s The Daddy? —
❛ We have managed to reduce the great British Brexit to two appalling options: either we must divide the Union, or the whole country must accept EU
law forever.