Boris Johnson was booed during his first public speech at the French embassy in London last night just hours after being branded a liar by the country’s foreign minister.
The new foreign secretary tried to use the event to reassure French guests that the UK was “not leaving Europe” but “finding a new relation” with the bloc. He was heckled by the audience.
He finished his talk, where the embassy was celebrating Bastille Day, by saying “to coin a phrase, toujours plus etroite”, meaning “ever closer”
However, the joke, which referred to his belief that the EU was heading for ever closer union, was received badly by the guests who booed him off stage.
He also caused angst when he said French citizens living in the UK would be protected, only if British citizens living in France were protected too.
Mr Johnson’s appointment has been the focus of an international backlash with EU ministers and officials branding him a political coward and “borderline racist”. Foreign Office staff were also said to be “gobsmacked” after his new post was announced.
Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister, ditched conventional political niceties and accused Mr Johnson of telling lies during the referendum campaign, and implied that he was not fit for office.
“Now it is him who has his back against the wall,” he said on French radio. “He is up against it to defend his country and also so that the relationship with Europe is clear.”
Mr Johnson will be under pressure to apologise on Monday at his first meeting of European foreign ministers, for comments he made in May comparing the EU’s political ambitions to Hitler’s plan to unify Europe, one diplomat said.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, called ’s Mr Johnson’s behaviour in the lead-up to the EU vote “monstrous” and argued he had tried to “bolt from responsibility” once the result came through on June 24.
“To be honest, I find this outrageous,” he said. “It’s not just bitter for Great Britain. It’s also bitter for the EU.”
Mr Johnson dismissed the hostility in typical fashion. “After a vote like the referendum result on June 23, it is inevitable there is going to be a certain amount of plaster coming off the ceiling in the chancelleries of Europe,” he said. He also claimed he had received a “charming letter” from Mr Ayrault.
At a lecture at the Foreign Office on Wednesday former cabinet secretaries, top civil servants and academics were “all gobsmacked, absolutely gobsmacked” when word went round that the former mayor had got the top job, according to the journalist Sue Cameron, who was present.
“It was quite amazing,” she told the BBC. “Suddenly everyone started looking at their phones and the word went round ‘It’s Boris, and you can’t leave the room just now because Boris is coming up the stairs’ . . . I think it took a bit of adjusting.”
Donald Tusk, the Polish president of the European Council of EU leaders, publicly denounced Mr Johnson’s “absurd arguments”.
The surprise appointment has raised doubts over whether European foreign ministers will scrap a planned dinner on Sunday night to discuss Brexit.
Mr Johnson’s first meeting with other EU foreign ministers will now take place early on Monday morning at a breakfast attended by John Kerry, the US secretary of state.
His international gaffes are widespread. Observers both at home and abroad have already questioned how a meeting with the president of Turkey might go after the MP won a poetry competition where he called Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “******er”.
His faux pas provoked laughter in the House of Commons yesterday when the Labour MP Kevin Brennan said: “the appointment of the new foreign secretary must be the most remarkable since the emperor Caligula appointed his horse as a senator”.
As well as upsetting Europeans, Mr Johnson has a track record of gaffes that have angered Washington, from his comments that President Obama was biased against Britain because of his Kenyan “ancestral dislike” to a 2007 comparison of Hillary Clinton to “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital”.
How can anyone actually read the garbage that comes from that. It is bad enough listening to the ones that come on the Sky News papers.
