First Minister brands Johnson ‘a disgrace to the office’ of PM
NICOLA Sturgeon said Boris Johnson has been the only Prime Minister she has worked with who was “a disgrace to the office”.
Speaking at a panel event at the Edinburgh Fringe yesterday afternoon, hosted by broadcaster Ayesha Hazarika, Ms Sturgeon called the Prime Minister a “disgrace” and said the idea that parties were taking place during the Covid-19 pandemic “blew her mind”.
“The idea that this could have happened while the rest of country was going through the horrors of it really blows my mind,” she told audience members. “Parties themselves are bad enough, but it was the lying, frankly, and the constant attempt to shift the goalposts and the narrative.
“He was a disgrace, let’s be honest.”
Four prime ministers have been in Downing Street since Ms Sturgeon took office in 2014 and she joked to audience members she never thought she would “look back fondly” on Theresa May as prime minister.
“At the beginning of Covid, I thought it would be far better to have Theresa May – she always knew her stuff. She knew her brief,” Ms Sturgeon said.
The First Minister called for more diversity in politics and praised Scottish Labour for having diverse leaders.
She added: “Here’s a sentence you’ll never hear me utter before: to be fair to Labour in Scotland, they’ve already had a woman leader and they’ve currently got a Muslim leader so UK Labour really has to get its act together on diversity.”
When asked who she would prefer to see as prime minister, Ms Sturgeon shrugged and laughed, and said none of them will win an election in Scotland.
She said: “It’s not really about that. They will never win an election in Scotland. What do Margaret Thatcher, John Major, David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson all have in common? They have never won an election in Scotland.”
She accused Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer of being “a pale imitation of the Tories”.
Ms Sturgeon also addressed comments by Tory leadership contender Liz Truss who said she should be “ignored”.
She said: “When she said I should be ignored, what a lot of people in Scotland hear is the democratic votes and choices of people in Scotland should be ignored.”
Her comments came despite criticism online earlier in the week from her opponents saying “Nicola Sturgeon is not Scotland”.
Responding to Ms Truss’s remarks she was an attention seeker, Ms Sturgeon said you had to be a bit of an attention seeker as a politician.