THERE is an argument to be made that Boris Johnson, who resigned from his Cabinet position over Brexit yesterday, was the worst Foreign Secretary of all time.
Ian Blackford, the SNP leader at Westminster, said Johnson “should not have been allowed to resign, he should have been sacked for being a national embarrassment”. Below are just a few of his worst moments since he succeeded Philip Hammond at the Foreign Office in 2016.
Firstly, there was the time he made inaccurate remarks about a British-Iranian woman jailed in Iran, putting her in danger of having her sentence increased. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a 38-year-old dual citizen originally from Iran, was detained in April of last year and sentenced to five years for allegedly plotting to topple the Iranian regime.
She had in fact been visiting her mother with her 22-month-old daughter Gabriella. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, wanted her daughter to grown up aware of her roots and where her mother had come from.
When questioned about the incident, Johnson said “she was simply teaching people journalism, as I understand it, at the very limit”. This was not true.
Days later she was back in court with the then foreign secretary’s comments being used as evidence against her. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, remains in jail to this day. Johnson eventually apologised.
Then there was the occasion when the UK ambassador had to intervene to stop Johnson from reading out a colonial-era poem in a Buddhist temple in Myanmar.
After taking part in a ritual, Johnson spontaneously started to recite a Rudyard Kipling poem about a former serviceman reminiscing about his time in the country, previously called Burma.
An embarrassed-looking Andrew Patrick had to intervene telling Johnson the poem was“not appropriate”.
“No? Good stuff,” replied Johnson.
Then there was the time during last year’s Conservative Party conference when Johnson said that the coastal town of Sirte in Libya could be more like Dubai once “the dead bodies” are cleared away.
Hundreds of Libyans died during the liberation of the town from Daesh and are widely regarded as martyrs. Johnson refused to apologise for the remarks. That wasn’t his only conference gaffe. Twelve months before that and just three months into the job, Johnson referred to Africa as “that country” and said that it should adopt more British values as doing so continues “to lift the world out of poverty”.
We’re not done yet. Johnson also took a swipe at then French president Francois Hollande in January last year, comparing him to a German Second World War general who wanted to hand out beatings to those who wanted to leave the EU.
“If Mr Hollande wants to administer punishment beatings to anybody who seeks to escape [the EU], in the manner of some World War Two movie, I don’t think that is the way forward, and it’s not in the interests of our friends and partners,” Johnson said.
Finally, Johnson was forced to apologise for talking about whisky exports to India in a Sikh temple. Alcohol is forbidden in the Sikh faith.
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