Boris: Foreign aid crucial to

BORIS JOHNSON today said Britain’s foreign aid commitment will be more important than ever after Brexit.

Speaking to the Evening Standard on a trip to north-eastern Nigeria, the Foreign Secretary said aid interventions would tackle crises and showcase the country as a global force.

“There’s a need for us to show the world, more emphatically than ever, that those who say Brexit is a turning-in are 1,000 per cent wrong,” said Mr Johnson, visiting projects with International Development Secretary Priti Patel. “What happens here on the bor- der of Chad links to what happens in Libya, which leads through to Calais, which leads through to our country.

“Part of my job is to explain to the outside world, and our domestic audience, as we come out of the EU, that they don’t know how international we are, that we’re doing things around the world they have no idea about.”

Mr Johnson said the scale of UK aid took people by surprise. “On the four biggest humanitarian disasters: in Somalia, in Yemen, in Syria, in northEastern Nigeria, the three biggest donors are the US, the UK and the EU,” he said, pointing out that Britain funded 18 per cent of the EU aid budget.

Ms Patel used the trip to announce a