Johnson caught out over Turkey migrant claims

BORIS Johnson was condemned by Remain campaigners last night for claiming he said nothing about Turkey during the 2016 referendum campaign.

Answering questions from journalists, the former foreign secretary tried to distance himself from some of the claims at the time by Vote Leave, which warned of the arrival of Turkish migrants if the country was allowed to join the EU.

During his speech to JCB workers in Staffordshire yesterday, Mr Johnson said he was a ‘passionate believer in the benefits of migration’. But he said numbers need to be controlled, and argued that fewer arrivals in recent years had contributed to rising wages.

Afterwards, he was asked by Channel 4 journalist Michael Crick whether he disowned arguments made by the Vote Leave campaign that Turkey could join the EU – and this would lead to an increase in migrant workers coming to Britain.

He responded: ‘I didn’t say anything about Turkey in the referendum... Since I made no remarks, I can’t disown them.’

Within minutes critics pointed to a letter signed by Mr Johnson to then-prime minister David Cameron a week before the June 2016 poll. In it, he said it was EU policy Turkey should join and he demanded to know whether Britain would veto its accession and block plans for visa-free travel for its citizens.

‘If the Government cannot give this guarantee, the public will draw the reasonable conclusion that the only way to avoid having common borders with Turkey is to Vote Leave and take back control on 23 June,’ said the letter, which was also signed by Michael Gove and then Labour MP Gisela Stuart.

Turkey’s EU membership talks with the EU have been going on for years, without any prospect of change. Relations between Turkey and the EU deteriorated further after a failed coup in 2016 was followed by a crackdown on political opposition by president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In April that year, Mr Johnson, who has Turkish ancestry, was quoted in the Daily Express as saying: ‘I am very pro-Turkish but what I certainly can’t imagine is a situation in which 77 million of my fellow Turks and those of Turkish origin can come here without any checks at all. That is mad – that won’t work.’ During the BBC’s EU referendum debate, two days before the 2016 poll, Mr Johnson said: ‘It’s government policy to accelerate Turkish accession.’

A couple of weeks earlier, interviewed on the Andrew Marr Show, he said: ‘Frankly, I don’t mind whether Turkey joins the EU, provided the UK leaves the EU.’

The row over Mr Johnson’s Turkey comments distracted from Mr Johnson’s speech in which he accused Theresa May of ‘wasting our time’ and trying to get MPs to vote for an ‘ex-deal’.

Mr Johnson said: ‘I fear that at present we are facing the wrong direction and trying to change the wrong bit of the landscape, and if we spend the next few weeks hydraulically straining to move MPs from one camp to the other, pointlessly trying to get Corbyn to parley at No 10, we will be wasting our time.’

He added ‘the prime minister’s deal was thrown out by a record 230 votes, the largest majority in parliamentary history’, and told JCB workers that Mrs May should go back to the negotiating table with the EU ‘fortified with the emphatic and conclusive mandate of parliament and demand real change to that backstop’.

Vote Leave produced adverts posted widely on social media during the campaign which stated that ‘Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU’ and ‘Britain’s new border is with Syria and Iraq’. When it was put to him by Mr Crick that he was the leader of the Vote Leave campaign at the time these images were being produced, Mr Johnson replied: ‘You do me too much honour.

‘I was happy to support Leave and I do and I did. I happen to think that immigration can be a wonderful thing for our country, but as I’ve said time and time again, it’s got to be controlled.’

Labour MP Virendra Sharma, a campaigner for a second EU referendum, said: ‘ Boris puts the moron in oxymoron.’