New Delhi: Former British foreign secretary Boris Johnson has won the UK Conservative Party leadership race to become the next Prime Minister, succeeding Theresa May amid a vexed Brexit process that remains dogged by chaos and confusion.
An eccentric politician who has been a constant in headlines with his (often racist) gaffes, Johnson was widely acknowledged as the winner of the race even before the final results were declared.
The winner was decided through internal party votes to eliminate candidates until there were only two remaining — Johnson and Hunt.
The final vote then took place over a month-long postal ballot, in which only registered Conservative party members were allowed to participate. There are currently around 1.6 lakh registered Conservatives in the UK.
Johnson’s ascent as prime minister is probably most surprising to him, having once said that his “chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive”.
Who is Boris Johnson?
Born to British parents in New York City on 19 June 1964, Johnson was educated at the European School of Brussels, Ashdown House, and the premier Eton College.
He later attended Oxford University, where he was friends with former prime minister David Cameron.
He has three siblings, including fellow Conservative MP Jo Johnson and journalist Rachel Johnson, who joined the Liberal Democrat party in 2017 to protest against the Conservatives’ Brexit policy.
He has been married twice — the second time to a half-Indian lawyer with whom he is now estranged — and has at least four children, though he has refused to confirm the actual number.
Johnson was first elected MP for the Conservative party in 2001 and largely adhered to the party line, although he was recognised for championing some socially liberal ideas such as LGBT rights. However, he has not always been a supporter of gay rights.
In 2001, he had reportedly compared gay sex to bestiality, writing in his book, Friends, Voters, Countrymen that “if gay marriage was OK — and I was uncertain on the issue — then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog”.
His career has been riddled with personal scandals, including an attempt to cover up an extramarital affair he had with a fellow journalist and her abortion.
Journalism
In 1987, Johnson was fired from a job at The Times for allegedly making up a quote from his godfather, historian Colin Lucas. Johnson reportedly got the job through family connections.
Johnson spent several years working as the Brussels bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph in the 1990s, reporting on the Maastricht Treaty negotiations as the EU prepared for further integration.
Sonia Purnell, the only other correspondent in the Brussels office at the time, wrote for The Guardian last week that, during this time, Johnson “helped set in stone a pervasive anti-European narrative that never really encountered serious challenge in the UK”.
This narrative was built on claims ranging from plots that the then-European Commission chief was attempting to centralise power in Brussels to create a European “superstate”, to ideas that Britain needed “freedom” from the EU.
This anti-European sentiment grew until David Cameron called the referendum on EU membership in 2016, triggering a political crisis that refuses to abate three years later.
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Writing and racism
In 2008, former London mayor Johnson appeared on the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are? which explores the lineage of its celebrity guests.
Johnson’s journey on the show took him to Turkey, where his great-grandfather belonged.
Eight years later, he won a magazine’s contest for the “President Erdogan offensive poetry competition”, where he described the Turkish President having sex with a goat. The competition followed Erdogan’s bid to bar the republication of an offensive poem penned about him by a German comedian.
In 2004, Johnson published a novel titled ‘Seventy Two Virgins’, about a Tory MP so concerned about a personal scandal becoming public that he fails to notice a terrorist attack unfolding in front of him.
The book is full of sexist and racist stereotypes, including describing a group of Kosovar Albanians as having “burning eyes, hook noses and hairy black eyebrows”.
He has described Africans as “tribal warriors” having “watermelon smiles”, referred to Africa as “that country”, and deployed the slur “piccaninnies” for African children.
Other remarks have included a statement that former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton looked like “a sadistic nurse from a mental hospital”, that Malaysian women were only going to university “to find husbands”, and that Muslim women wearing burqas looked like “bank robbers” and “letter boxes”.
As mayor of London
Johnson served as the mayor of the British capital from May 2008 to May 2016. Proud of his stint there, he has said he would like to govern the UK “as he governed London”.
During his eight-year tenure as mayor, however, he was accused of wasting over £1 billion of taxpayer money “on vanity projects”.
Johnson also spent millions of pounds on an airport that was eventually never built over environmental concerns.
He refused to publish the results of a feasibility study he commissioned after the authors determined that building an airport in the Thames estuary would not be feasible for several reasons, including costs as well as coordination with other air traffic in the area (London already has six commercial airports serving international flights).
The abandoned garden bridge project — a plan to build a pedestrian bridge across the Thames covered in trees and green space — ended up costing £53.5 million, of which £43 million was taxpayer money.
Other costly projects included a £62 million cable car across the Thames and new buses that brought back conductors (the facility of conductors was subsequently discontinued as they were costing taxpayers £62,000 per bus, per year).
Term as foreign secretary
A Guardian report last week quoted Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) staff describing Johnson’s leadership as “disorganised”. One official said he was “smart, but had the attention span of a gnat”.
One of his biggest blunders during his stint as foreign secretary were his comments regarding Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian woman serving a five-year jail term in Iran after she was accused of orchestrating a “soft overthrow” of the country through her work with BBC.
Johnson “mistakenly” stated that she was “teaching people journalism” in Iran, when she was actually on holiday. Three days later she was unexpectedly summoned to an Iranian court, where his comments were cited as proof that she had been involved with “propaganda against the regime”.
Her husband has called a Johnson premiership “a potential threat to national security”.
A successful foreign policy endeavour in Johnson’s cap was standing up to Russia after Sergei Skripal, the Russian double agent, and his daughter Yulia were poisoned on UK soil last year. In response, Johnson helped pass the “Magnitsky amendment”, which allows sanctions against people accused of human rights violations.
No-deal Brexit
Although the two candidates have discussed other policy points, the biggest topic for debate has been Brexit strategy. Johnson has promised that the UK will leave the EU by 31 October, with or without a deal.
Michel Barnier, the EU’s top negotiator, countered Johnson’s suggestion that he could use the threat of a no-deal Brexit to improve the divorce deal with the EU, stating that the EU “had never been impressed by such a threat”.
However, Martin Selmayr, an aide to European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, has said the EU is in a much better position to accept a no-deal Brexit than the UK.
“We have seen what has been prepared on our side of the border for a hard Brexit. We don’t see the same level of preparation on the other side of the border,” Selmayr said.
Morgan Stanley has said that the pound could fall to parity with the US dollar over concerns of a hardline approach to a no-deal Brexit. This would be the lowest value for the pound since the mid-1980s.
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Article omits Johnson’s free market credentials