BORIS Johnson is a deceitful individual with a history of fabrications. His resignation as Foreign Secretary is completely self-serving and hypocritical.
He was sacked from The Times in 1988 for fabricating a quote. In 2004 he was sacked from the Tory front bench for lying to the leader.
As Mayor of London he promised to totally eradicate rough sleeping by 2012; it doubled under his leadership.
His 2008 manifesto promised there would be manned ticket offices at every station; instead he closed them all. Boris aimed to reduce transport fares; instead they increased by 4.2 percent.
In 2000 he edited a magazine that said black people have lower IQs than white people. In 2002 he said of Africa: “The continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more”.
He once compared the Tory party with “Papau New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing”. When at The Spectator he accused Liverpool of wallowing in “victim status” over the murder of Ken Bigley and the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster.
In 2014 Johnson slashed London’s fire services, and told rival politician to “get stuffed” when challenged about comprising safety. He dismissed the £250,000 a year he earned from a controversial second job as “chicken feed”.
He insisted it was “wholly reasonable” for him to write newspaper columns on the side because he did them “very fast”. He called a bankers’ bonus cap “deluded” and “self-defeating”.
Boris Johnson wants to privatise the NHS. In 2003 he said: “If NHS services continue to be free in this way, they will continue to be abused like any free service. If people have to pay for them, they will value them more”.
He made a video supporting Turkish accession to the EU. He then used this as a reason people should vote to leave.
He said Trump “betrays a stupefying ignorance that makes him unfit to be US president”. After Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, he said: “Let’s see what Donald Trump does before we rush and wave fingers at him, accuse him of this, that or the other.”
He was also both for and against Brexit. He wrote an unseen article in support of EU membership just days before backing the Leave campaign.
After supporting the Iraq war he described George W Bush as “a cross-eyed Texan warmonger, unelected, inarticulate, who epitomises the arrogance of American foreign policy”.
Boris Johnson only cares about himself. He believes in nothing other than that he should be in power. This national joke should never have been appointed in the first instance.
Alan Hinnrichs
Dundee
IN all the long history of the several parliaments of these islands over the centuries, there can be few examples of a betrayal more blatant than Boris Johnson’s conduct on Monday. Having lost the argument at Chequers, and having assured the Prime Minister of his loyalty, he waits until she is delivering to the Commons assurances of a united government and then delivers the blow to her defenceless back.
In some 60 years of participating in UK and Scottish politics I have seen some dirty tricks pulled but this was entirely contemptible, unworthy even of an undergraduate “I think that went off quite well”.
Contemptible. With that contempt I treat those who laud him, including that element among Scottish Conservative MPs who believe Mrs May is too soft on Brexit.
KM Campbell
Doune
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