New British PM Theresa May’s decision to crown habitually undiplomatic politician and London’s ex-mayor Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary has left many in the international community scratching their heads in bewildered disbelief.
That’s US State Department spokesperson Mark Toner reacting to the news that Boris Johnson has been made the UK’s Foreign Secretary.
Much has been speculated about how this – as some in the Twitterverse have dubbed him – ‘blond xenophobe’ will negotiate with other nations, given the stinging (yet hilarious) rebukes he has often offered them.
In the absence of any foreign policy or international negotiation experience to speak of, all anyone really has to go on are the things he has said in the past. But if his comments about other world leaders and former colonies say anything at all, it’s that the UK could be in some trouble.
As Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson will be the country’s top diplomat – his most important job will be negotiating a whole lot of trade deals and bilateral agreements, since Britain can no longer negotiate as part of the EU bloc.
The EU will, of course, be the UK’s largest trading partner, but those negotiations are going to be handled by David Davis, the new Brexit Minister. Don’t feel relieved, Davis doesn’t appear to have all his ducks in a row either. Just this May, he appeared to think that Brexit would work out fine, because the UK would simply renegotiate bilateral deals with European countries – seemingly unaware that the EU negotiates as a bloc.
Britain’s second-largest trade partner is the US. Here’s where we could run into some trouble; Boris Johnson, in his wisdom (probably never suspecting that he’d be handling delicate diplomatic relationships), has efficiently and thoroughly insulted the current US President and both his potential successors.
One wonders how ‘special’ the ‘special relationship’ might stay when Obama sits down to chat about important affairs with the man who blamed his ‘part-Kenyan’ heritage for his ‘ancestral dislike’ of Britain. Or, come November, how well Donald Trump, if elected, would react to being in a negotiating room with a man who said the only reason he wouldn’t visit some parts of New York was because of the “real risk of meeting Donald Trump”, and that being mistaken for Trump was one of his “worst moments”.
And personally, I’d love to be a fly on the wall to see how much pleasure Trump’s opponent for the Presidential post, Hillary Clinton – likened to a “sadistic nurse in a mental hospital” – might take in making him squirm.
What about China, the UK’s next-largest trade partner? Mercifully, Boris has steered clear of giving hideous offence to the Chinese, other than claiming while on a visit to Beijing that it wasn’t the Chinese, but the English who had invented ping-pong – which is only a mild gaffe as far as Boris Johnson goes.
Then there’s the always chuckle-worthy limerick he spun on Turkish President Recep Erdogan, where Erdogan apparently has sex with a goat and doesn’t even thank the poor animal afterwards. When asked about his thoughts for Boris as the new Foreign Secretary, Turkish PM Yildirim replied:
May God help him and reform him, and I hope he won’t make any more mistakes and tries to make it up with the Turks.
Ouch.
This is all great entertainment, but when insulting people who have lived under colonial rule, the jibes take on a slightly nastier hue.
In a column for the Daily Telegraph six years ago, Boris insinuated that the Queen loves traveling around the Commonwealth because it affords her “regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies” [derogatory term for dark-skinned children of African descent]. Understandably, this probably does not go down well with former colonies. In a blog for The Spectator, he also said of African countries, “The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.”
But please sit down and postpone your incredulity, because I’ve saved the best for last.
Boris championed the Leave campaign, citing the threat of unrestricted immigration through the open EU borders. In a poetic twist of irony, the UK is now having to import immigrants to handle the Brexit negotiations, because there isn’t enough homegrown talent available to carry out the task.
Given his lack of experience in foreign affairs, and given his history of making objectionable statements, it’s logical to assume that Boris is going to have to – as many have suggested – go on an apology tour.
The future of British diplomacy could very well depend on how convincingly Boris Johnson can eat humble pie.
A Wikileaks cable between US diplomats, from before his election as the mayor of London, offers a clue:
Conservative candidate Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s successful candidacy for the mayor of London has defied the laws of political gravity. Johnson is best known as a mistake-prone former journalist [...] Johnson is also well known for apologizing: to the people of Liverpool for accusing them of mawkish sentimentality following the beheading of a resident of the city in Iraq; to the people of Portsmouth after describing the town as “too full of drugs, (and) obesity”; to the people of Papua New Guinea for associating them “with orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing,” and to the people of Africa after remarking on their “watermelon smiles”.
With an introduction like that to the international community, you can rest assured the diplomats of many countries are going to expect Boris Johnson to start apologising.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)