# Boris Johnson

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (born 19 June 1964) is a British politician, journalist, and popular historian. He was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from July 2019 until September 2022.
Johnson was Member of Parliament (MP) for Uxbridge and South Ruislip from May 2015 until his resignation in June 2023. Earlier in his career, Johnson was the MP for Henley from 2001 until 2008, and Mayor of London, completing two terms in office between 2008 and 2016. A member of the Conservative Party, Johnson considers himself a "One-Nation Tory" and has been described as a libertarian due to his association with both economically liberal and socially liberal policies. He is partly of Turkish descent.

## Quotes
### 1980s
#### 1988

* The tragedy of the stooge is that even if he thinks this through, he wants so much to believe that his relationship with the candidate is special that he shuts out the truth. The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge.
** From an essay entitled "Politics" on his campaign for the Oxford Union presidency, published in 1988 in The Oxford Myth (Weidenfeld & Nicholson), a book edited by Rachel Johnson, his sister, as quoted in Andrew Gimson Boris: The Adventures of Boris Johnson London: Simon & Schuster (2012 edition), p. 91

### 1990s

* I accused men of being responsible for a social breakdown which is costing us all, as taxpayers, £9.1 billion per year, and which is producing a generation of ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children.
* With £90 billion currently spent on welfare, the great economic issues of our time are social. They are moral. And yet the Government is virtually incapacitated from utterance by its own bumbling.
* The modern British male is useless. If he is blue collar, he is likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless, and perhaps claiming to suffer from low self-esteem brought on by unemployment. If he is white collar, he is likely to be little better.
* Something must be found, first, to restore women's desire to be married. That means addressing the feebleness of the modern Briton, his reluctance or inability to take control of his woman and be head of a household.
** "The male sex is to blame for the appalling proliferation of single mothers" The Spectator (19 August 1995).
* Weep O ye shirt-makers of Jermyn Street ye Cool Britannia tailors and whatever exists of human finer feeling In the Ministry of Sound, the tank-topped bumboys blub into their Pils. In the delicatessens of Elgin Crescent the sawdust is sodden with tears For months years Carla Powell will go into mourning her plumage as black as night For Mandy is dead dead ere his prime!
** "He Lived by the spin, he died by the spin" The Daily Telegraph (24 December 1998), p. 16
** Peter Mandelson had resigned as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and President of the Board of Trade.

### 2000s
#### 2000

* On the other hand we don’t want our children being taught some rubbish about homosexual marriage being the same as normal marriage and that is why I am more than happy to support Section 28 ...
** "The Dome is wonderful: it explains Blair's vacuity" The Daily Telegraph (27 January 2000), p. 28
** An attempt by the government of Tony Blair to repeal a clause in the Local Government Act 1988 barring the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities was not supported by the Conservatives and was defeated in the House of Lords in February.
* Labour's appalling agenda, encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools, and all the rest of it.
** The Spectator (15 April 2000)
* Dark forces dragged me away from the keyboard, swirling forces of irresistible intensity and power.
** "A wise guy playing the fool to win", The Sunday Times (16 July 2000), p. 17.
** While at The Daily Telegraph, explaining why his work was usually late.

#### 2001

* If you see anyone who is obeying the law, apart from the odd motorised rickshaw, please give me a ring. The national speed limit is, de facto, 99mph, because everyone knows that you lose your licence at 100mph. The law of the land is disregarded by good people, held in contempt by Middle England, and scorned by no less a person than Jack Straw, who saw fit to scream through the sound barrier when he was Home Secretary.
* Yes, cannabis is dangerous, but no more than other perfectly legal drugs. It's time for a rethink, and the Tory party - the funkiest, most jiving party on Earth - is where it's happening.
** "No one obeys the speed limit except a motorised rickshaw", The Daily Telegraph, 12 July 2001, p. 27.
** The speed limit on British motorways was, and remains, 70mph.
* Ok, I said to myself as I sighted the bird down the end of the gun. This time, my fine feathered friend, there is no escape.
** Friends, Voters, Countrymen p. 59.

#### 2002

* It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness. They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in Watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.
** "If Blair's so good at running the Congo, let him stay there" The Daily Telegraph (10 January 2002)
* The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more... Consider Uganda, pearl of Africa, as an example of the British record. … the British planted coffee and cotton and tobacco, and they were broadly right... If left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain. You never saw a place so abounding in bananas: great green barrel-sized bunches, off to be turned into matooke. Though this dish (basically fried banana) was greatly relished by Idi Amin, the colonists correctly saw that the export market was limited... The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty.
** Discussing his views on Africans and "Instant Carbohydrate Gratification" The Spectator (2 February 2002)
* I don't see why people are so snooty about Channel 5. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap dancing, and other related and vital subjects.
** "What has the BBC come to? Toilets, that's what", The Daily Telegraph (14 March 2002), p. 29.
* We are confident in our story and will be fighting this all the way. I am very sorry that Alastair Campbell has taken this decision but I can see that he got his tits in the wringer.
** Catherine Macleod, "Angry Blair takes on press", The Herald (Glasgow), 24 April 2002, p. 1.
** On Campbell's negative reply to The Spectator‍'‍s report that the Government had influence the Queen Mother's funeral arrangements.
* Nor do I propose to defend the right to talk on a mobile while driving a car, though I don't believe that is necessarily any more dangerous than the many other risky things that people do with their free hands while driving - nose-picking, reading the paper, studying the A-Z, beating the children, and so on.
** "To the lady who berated me, I say: on your bike", The Daily Telegraph (1 August 2002), p. 21.

#### 2003

* It is hard to think of a measure that the Government could have brought to the House that I could support more unreservedly and with greater pleasure than this Bill to expand the European Union. To sum up my response, I would merely say, "And about time too."
* I am not by any means an ultra-Eurosceptic. In some ways, I am a bit of a fan of the European Union. If we did not have one, we would invent something like it—some means of association between the sovereign states of Europe, perhaps an organisation in Brussels—overnight.
** From his contribution during a debate (21 May 2003) on the "European Union (Accessions) Bill" Hansard HC vol 405 cc. 1021-1121, 1080, 1082
* I forgot that to rely on a train, in Blair's Britain, is to engage in a crapshoot with the devil.
** "A horse is a safer bet than the trains", The Daily Telegraph, 3 July 2003, p. 22.
* I have as much chance of becoming Prime Minister as of being decapitated by a frisbee or of finding Elvis.
** Ephraim Hardcastle, Daily Mail, 22 July 2003, p. 13.
** Asked by pupils of Gillott's School in his constituency whether he would like the job of Prime Minister.
* The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP, they have run out of better ideas.
** "What's wrong with 40 Liverpool Road?", The Daily Telegraph, 18 September 2003, p. 24.
* The Lib Dems are not just empty. They are a void within a vacuum surrounded by a vast inanition.
** "The least said about Lib Dems, the better", The Daily Telegraph, 25 September 2003, p. 24.
* I could not fail to disagree with you less.
** 2004 winner of the Foot in Mouth Award from the Plain English Campaign, for his comment on the 12 December 2003 edition of Have I Got News For You
* Not even Mr Blair has been able to erode the unions conviction that we all have a “right” to a minimum wage... Both the minimum wage and the Social Charter would palpably destroy jobs.
** Lend Me Your Ears, p. 387

#### 2004

* Any seat would be mad not to take him. He's a terrific chap.
** "Keeping it in the family", The Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2004, p. 29.
** On his father, Stanley Johnson's plans to become an MP.
* It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall.
** "The BBC was doing its job - bring back Gilligan", The Daily Telegraph, 29 January 2004, p. 21.
** Reaction to the Hutton Report.
* As snow-jobs go, this beats the Himalayas.
** "The BBC was doing its job - bring back Gilligan", The Daily Telegraph, 29 January 2004, p. 21.
** Reaction to the Hutton Report.
* That is the best case for Bush; that, among other things, he liberated Iraq. It is good enough for me.
** The Daily Telegraph 26 February 2004
* Some readers will no doubt say that a devil is inside me; and though my faith is a bit like Magic FM in the Chilterns, in that the signal comes and goes, I can only hope that isn't so.
** "What's so funny about the Passion?", The Daily Telegraph, 4 March 2004, p. 24.
* If Amsterdam or Leningrad vie for the title of Venice of the North, then Venice - what compliment is high enough? Venice, with all her civilisation and ancient beauty, Venice with her addiction to curious aquatic means of transport, yes, my friends, Venice is the Henley of the South.
** "Paying through the Doge for Europe", The Daily Telegraph, 11 March 2004, p. 22.
* [On Tony Blair] He's lost the plot, people tell me. He's drifting rudderless in the wide Sargasso Sea of New Labour's ideological vacuum.
** "Blair dead in the water? No such luck", The Daily Telegraph, 29 April 2004, p. 24.
* Look the point is ... er, what is the point? It is a tough job but somebody has got to do it.
** Toby Helm, "Boris Johnson named shadow arts minister", The Daily Telegraph, 7 May 2004, p. 12.
** On being appointed Shadow Arts Minister.
* It was a stellar performance. I may as well give up now and make way for an older man.
** Hickey, The Express, 12 May 2004.
** On his father Stanley's appearance on Have I Got News For You.
* There is absolutely no one, apart from yourself, who can prevent you, in the middle of the night, from sneaking down to tidy up the edges of that hunk of cheese at the back of the fridge.
** "Face it: it's all your own fat fault", The Daily Telegraph, 27 May 2004, p. 24.
** On the dangers of obesity.
* My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.
** "You ask the questions", The Independent, 17 June 2004, p. 7.
** Asked "Admit it: you want to become prime minister, don't you?" by Amanda Findlay of Bolton.
* I didn't see it, but it sounds barbaric. It's become like cock-fighting: poor dumb brutes being set upon each other by conniving television producers.
** David Smith, "Focus: Big Brother brawl", The Observer, 20 June 2004, p. 17.
** On Big Brother.
* Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix, and stay conscious.
** Beth Pearson, "Has Howard got news for Boris?", The Herald (Glasgow), 13 November 2004, p. 15.
** Explaining why he quit after a week as a management consultant.

##### Affair with Petronella Wyatt

* I have not had an affair with Petronella. It is complete balderdash. It is an inverted pyramid of piffle. It is all completely untrue and ludicrous conjecture. I am amazed people can write this drivel.
** Simon Walters, "Boris, Petsy and a 'pyramid of piffle'", Mail on Sunday, 7 November 2004, p. 7.
** Denying accusations of his having an affair with Petronella Wyatt.
* Tremendous, little short of superb. On cracking form.
** David Charter, Joanna Bale, "Tories suggest door will open for Boris Johnson to return", The Times, 15 November 2004, p. 7.
** Asked how he was feeling after being sacked as Shadow Arts Minister for having lied to Michael Howard over his affair with Petronella Wyatt.
* I advise you all very strongly - go for a run, get some exercise, and have a beautiful day.
** Valentine Low, "Shiver me timbers Boris", Evening Standard, 15 November 2004, p. 3.
** Cornered by reporters asking about his affair after a morning run.
* Nothing excites compassion, in friend and foe alike, as much as the sight of you ker-splonked on the Tarmac with your propeller buried six feet under.
** "Trust me, being sacked isn't all bad", The Daily Telegraph, 2 December 2004, p. 26.
** On being sacked from the Tory front bench.
* My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.
** "Trust me, being sacked isn't all bad", The Daily Telegraph, 2 December 2004, p. 26.
** On being sacked from the Tory front bench.

#### 2005

* But here's old Ken - he's been crass, he's been insensitive and thuggish and brutal in his language - but I don't think actually if you read what he said, although it was extraordinary and rude, I don't think he was actually anti-Semitic.
** "Quotes of the Day", The Times, 18 February 2005, p. 2.
* Howard is a dynamic performer on many levels. There you are. He sent me to Liverpool. Marvellous place. Howard was the most effective Home Secretary since Peel. Hang on, was Peel Home Secretary?
** Ben Macintyre, "'Hello, I'm your MP. Actually no, I'm your candidate. Gosh'", The Times, 19 April 2005, p. 23.
** On Michael Howard.
* I'm having Sunday lunch with my family. I'm vigorously campaigning, inculcating my children in the benefits of a Tory government.
** "2-minute interview: Boris Johnson", The Guardian, 11 April 2005, p. 7.
** Asked whether he was canvassing at Sunday lunchtime.
* What we hate, what we fear, is being ignored.
** "Labour's cleaning up on the council tax", 21 April 2005, p. 24.
** On the fears of MPs.
* I love tennis with a passion. I challenged Boris Becker to a match once and he said he was up for it but he never called back. I bet I could make him run around.
** Hickey, The Express, 21 March 2005.
* The proposed ban on incitement to "religious hatred" makes no sense unless it involves a ban on the Koran itself; and that would be pretty absurd, when you consider that the Bill's intention is to fight Islamophobia.
** Daily Telegraph 21 July 2005
* I'm backing David Cameron's campaign out of pure, cynical self-interest.
** "Conference Diary", The Independent, 5 October 2005, p. 7.
** On The 2005 Conservative Leadership Contest.
* I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed so it didn't go up my nose. In fact, it may have been icing sugar.
** "Londoner's Diary", Evening Standard, 17 October 2005, p. 15.
* I lost the job, but the well the honest truth is that this has been embellished by, probably by me, in the sense that there were two of us who were taken on as trainees, and this was in the, the, the 80s, I think it was the late 80s, and it was him or me who was going to get the job at the end of, at the end of, eight months or nine months.... It was, it was absolutely, it was mano-a-mano and of course it was him who got it.
** Interviewed on Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4 (30 October 2005)
** On his short placement as a journalist at The Times. In fact, rather than failing to beat another trainee to win a permanent position, he was sacked in 1988 for falsifying a quotation by his godfather, Colin Lucas.
* I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall, and I'd listen to this amazing crash from the greenhouse, next door, over, over in England, as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory Party, and, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of, of power.
** Interviewed on Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4 (30 October 2005)
** On his period working as Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph a few years later.
* I can't remember what my line on drugs is. What's my line on drugs?
** "The Genelection Game", Sunday Mirror, 24 April 2005, p. 19.
** During the campaign trail of the 2005 general election.
* Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.
** Francis Elliott, "Boris casts his vote: 'Spectator' editor tells 'Desert Island Discs' he'll quit to spend more time with David Cameron", The Independent on Sunday, 30 October 2005, p. 3.
** Said in April 2005 during the general election.
* Old Man Howard, that Old Man Howard, he just keeps rolling, just keeps rolling.
** Andrew Pierce, "Boris on a roll", The Times, 29 April 2005, p. 40.
** When asked by The Oxford Student whether he sees anyone amongst his younger colleagues who would one day replace Howard.
* I'm very attracted to it. I may be diverting from Tory party policy here, but I don't care.
** Andrew Pierce, The Times, 30 April 2005, p. 42.
** When asked about the 24 hour drinking legislation.
* Life isn't like coursework, baby. It's one damn essay crisis after another.
** "Exams work because they're scary", The Daily Telegraph, 12 May 2005, p. 22.

#### 2006–2007

* I'm a rugby player, really, and I knew I was going to get to him, and when he was about two yards away I just put my head down. There was no malice. I was going for the ball with my head, which I understand is a legitimate move in soccer.
** Ed Harris, "Boris bites Herr legs...: The MP for Henley does his bit for Anglo-German diplomacy", Evening Standard, 4 May 2006, p. 9.
** On his tackle on German midfielder Maurizio Gaudino in a charity football match.
* Not only did I want Bush to win, but we threw the entire weight of The Spectator behind him.
** Have I Got Views for You (2006), p. 272
* Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase... Indeed, high Chinese culture and art are almost all imitative of western forms: Chinese concert pianists are technically brilliant, but brilliant at Schubert and Rachmaninov. Chinese ballerinas dance to the scores of Diaghilev. The number of Chinese Nobel prizes won on home turf is zero, although there are of course legions of bright Chinese trying to escape to Stanford and Caltech... It is hard to think of a single Chinese sport at the Olympics, compared with umpteen invented by Britain, including ping-pong, I'll have you know, which originated at upper-class dinner tables and was first called whiff-whaff. The Chinese have a script so fiendishly complicated that they cannot produce a proper keyboard for it.
** Have I Got Views for You (2006), p. 277
* For 10 years we in the Tory party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing, and so it is with a happy amazement that we watch as the madness engulfs the Labour party.
** From a Daily Telegraph column "Blair has nothing more to say to us: he should go at once" (7 September 2006) p. 22, as cited in "Boris apology to Papua New Guinea" BBC News (8 September 2006)
* I meant no insult to the people of Papua New Guinea, who I'm sure lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity like the rest of us... I am happy to add Papua New Guinea to my global itinerary of apology.
** 9 September 2006
* I've got a brilliant new strategy, which is to make so many gaffes that nobody knows which one to concentrate on. [...] They cease to be newsworthy, you completely out-general the media in that way, and they despair. [...] You shell them, you pepper the media... you've got to pepper their positions with so many gaffes that they're confused. It's like a helicopter throwing out chaff, and then you steal on quietly and drop your depth charges wherever you want to drop them.
** On BBC Booktalk in 2006 quoted in "Why Boris Johnson is coming out fighting". BBC News. 27 January 2022.
* The real hero of Jaws is the mayor. A gigantic fish is eating all your constituents and he decides to keep the beaches open. OK, in that instance he was actually wrong. But in principle, we need more politicians like the mayor - we are often the only obstacle against all the nonsense which is really a massive conspiracy against the taxpayer.
** Speech delivered at Lloyd's of London in 2006, quoted in Graeme Wilson and George Jones (18 July 2007), "Boris Johnson inspired by Jaws mayor", The Telegraph
* The world's population is now 6.7 billion, roughly double what it was when I was born. If I live to be in my mid-eighties, then it will have trebled in my lifetime. The UN last year revised its forecasts upwards, predicting that there will be 9.2 billion people by 2050, and I simply cannot understand why no one discusses this impending calamity, and why no world statesmen have the guts to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves.
* [O]ver the years, the argument changed, and certain words became taboo, and certain concepts became forbidden, and we have reached the stage where the very discussion of overall human fertility — global motherhood — has become more or less banned.
* All the evidence shows that we can help reduce population growth, and world poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and access to birth control. Isn't it time politicians stopped being so timid, and started talking about the real number one issue?
** "Global over-population is the real issue" The Telegraph (25 October 2007)

#### 2008

* Unlike the current occupant of the White House, he has no difficulty in orally extemporising a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb.
* [On attempting to find any reason to oppose Barack Obama] In the end I gave up, goggle-eyed and exhausted, having trolled the wilds of the Neocon internet without finding anything remotely approaching a smoking gun.
** "Barack Obama: Why I believe he should be the next President" The Telegraph (21 October 2008)
* Had it been us staging the Games, I don't think we would necessarily have done the switcheroo with the girl with the braces
** ""Boris Johnson In Beijing", The Guardian (21 August 2008)
** When asked whether he had any criticisms of the Beijing Summer Olympics.
* My policy on cake is still pro having it and pro eating it!
** Interview with Lynn Barber in "No more Mr Nice Guy" The Observer (19 October 2008)
** Barber had recalled the previous occasion she had interviewed Johnson in 2003 when he was both an MP and editor of The Spectator. Variant of the expression You can't have your cake and eat it

##### First Speech As London Mayor (3 May 2008)

    First Speech as Mayor of London, at City Hall (3 May 2008).
* Thank you very much Mr Meyer, Anthony Meyer that is. I want to thank you, I want to thank the police of course, and my wife Marina and my family, and my utterly brilliant campaign team, the Conservative GLA candidates — some of whom were extremely unlucky tonight — and of course the thousands of Conservative activists, the ward captains and knocker-uppers who did such an amazing job today, and indeed yesterday, rather.
* This has been a marathon election as you can tell with a record turnout and I think it has been good for politics and it has been good for London.
* I want to thank Sian [Berry, Green Party] and Lindsey [German, Left List] and Alan [Craig, Christian Peoples Party] and Gerard [Batten, UKIP], who have sometimes joined us for hustings, but mainly I want to thank my two colleagues in the strange triumvirate who have been trundling around London's church halls and TV studios violently disputing the meaning of multiculturalism and the exact cost of conductors. On which point I think I'm going to declare victory.
* And I want to congratulate you Brian [Paddick] on your great common sense and decency with which you put your case and I do hope that it is not the end of our discussions about the police.
* And as for Ken, Mayor Livingstone, I think you have been a very considerable public servant and a distinguished leader of this city.
* You shaped the office of mayor. You gave it national prominence and when London was attacked on 7 July 2005 you spoke for London.
* And I can tell you that your courage and the sheer exuberant nerve with which you stuck it to your enemies, especially in New Labour, you have thereby earned the thanks and admiration of millions of Londoners, even if you think that they have a funny way of showing it today.
* And when we have that drink together which we both so richly deserve, I hope we can discover a way in which the mayoralty can continue to benefit from your transparent love of London, a city whose energy conquered the world and which now brings the world together in one city.
* I do not for one minute believe that this election shows that London has been transformed overnight into a Conservative city but I do hope it does show that the Conservatives have changed into a party that can again be trusted after 30 years with the greatest, most cosmopolitan, multi-racial generous hearted city on earth in which there are huge and growing divisions between rich and poor.
* And that brings me to my final thank you which is of course to the people of London.
* I would like to thank first the vast multitudes who voted against me - and I have met quite a few in the last nine months, not all of them entirely polite.
* I will work flat out from now on to earn your trust and to dispel some of the myths that have been created about me.
* And as for those who voted for me, I know there will be many whose pencils hovered for an instant before putting an X in my box and I will work flat out to repay and to justify your confidence.
* We have a new team ready to go in to City Hall. Where there have been mistakes we will rectify them. Where there are achievements we will build on them.
* Where there are neglected opportunities we will seize on them, and we will focus on the priorities of the people of London: cutting crime, improving transport, protecting green space, delivering affordable housing, giving taxpayers value for money in every one of the 32 boroughs.
* And I hope that everybody who loves this city will put aside party differences to try in the making of Greater London greater still. Let's get cracking tomorrow and let's have a drink tonight.

### 2010s
#### 2010

* In 1904, 20 per cent of journeys were made by bicycle in London. I want to see a figure like that again. If you can't turn the clock back to 1904, what's the point of being a Conservative?
** Boris Johnson on South Bank for Barclays Cycle Hire launch, London SE1, 30 July 2010
** Said during the official launch of the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme.
* The meat in the sausage has got to be Conservative
** BBC News Interview with Jeremy Paxman, BBC News, 7 May 2010
** Johnson on the possibility of a coalition after the United Kingdom general election, May 2010.
*** Johnson: Whatever type of, er, of Wall's sausage, er, is contrived by this, er, this great experiment, the, the dominant ingredient has got to be conservatism. The, the meat in the sausage has got to be Conservative, I would say. There can be plenty of bread and other bits and pieces.
**** Paxman: The question is whether it's a chipolata or a Cumberland sausage, I suppose, is it?
*** Johnson: This is fantastic to listen to. Enough of this, enough of this, er, gastronomic metaphor. Er.
**** Paxman: You started it!
*** Johnson: Well, I, I've had enough of it! I—
**** Paxman: Haven't you got a city to run?
*** Johnson: Say again?
**** Paxman: I say haven't you got—
*** Johnson: Yeah, I have got a city to run and that's exactly, that's exactly the point!
**** Paxman: Well go and do it then! Goodbye!
*** Johnson: The government of London, the government of London will carry on irrespective of the, er, temporary difficulties in providing a national government. Thank you.
**** Paxman: Bye bye, Boris!

#### 2011

* When a regime has been in power too long, when it has fatally exhausted the patience of the people, and when oblivion finally beckons – I am afraid that across the world you can rely on the leaders of that regime to act solely in the interests of self-preservation, and not in the interests of the electorate. ... First-past-the-post has served this country well, and served dozens of other countries well. We would be mad to go to a great deal of trouble and expense to adopt a system that is less fair than the one we have. ... By all means let us have a referendum – the one we were promised, on the Lisbon EU Treaty.
** "AV was a last gasp from Gordon Brown's bunker – and it's a gigantic fraud" The Telegraph (28 February 2011)
** Article on the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum which was held on 5 May 2011. The proposal for AV at the referendum was defeated.

#### 2012

* The excitement is growing so much I think the Geiger counter of Olympo-mania is going to go zoink off the scale.
** On the forthcoming London Olympic Games. The Daily Telegraph, 27 July 2012.
* They are like glistening wet otters frolicking.
** Telegraph column, 31 July 2012
** On woman's beach volleyball at the 2012 Olympic Games.

#### 2013

* It is often useful to give the slight impression that you are deliberately pretending not to know what is going on, because the reality may be that you don't know what is going on, but people won't be able to tell the difference.
** Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise (25 March 2013)
* If we left the EU, we would end this sterile debate, and we would have to recognise that most of our problems are not caused by “Bwussels”, but by chronic British short-termism, inadequate management, sloth, low skills, a culture of easy gratification and underinvestment in both human and physical capital and infrastructure.
** Telegraph article (12 May 2013)

##### Beijing, China (October 2013)

    "Boris Johnson launches charm offensive in China", The Guardian (14 October 2013)
* Now can I ask you a question, "Why is it that we're lucky to have so many Chinese students?" Is it because of the weather? Is it because we have so many French restaurants? Is it because we have so many communist bicycles? [At Beijing's 798 art district, 13 October 2013]
* [A demonstration of "cultural interpenetration" between the UK and China] Who, according to JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter novels, was Harry Potter's first girlfriend? Who is the first person he kisses? That's right, Cho Chang, who is a Chinese overseas student at Hogwarts school. [...] Ladies and gents I rest my case. [From a speech at Peking university, 14 October 2013]

#### 2014

* [On deputy prime minister Nick Clegg] He's there to serve a very important ceremonial function as David Cameron's lapdog-cum-prophylactic protection device for all the difficult things that David Cameron has to do that cheese off the rest of the ... [ending absent] He’s a kind of shield. He’s a lapdog who’s been skinned and turned into a shield to protect.
** Interviewed on LBC, as cited in "Nick Clegg is David Cameron's condom, Boris Johnson says" The Telegraph (7 January 2014)

#### 2015

* Putin's proxy army was almost certainly guilty of killing the passengers on the Malaysia Airlines jet that came down in eastern Ukraine. He has questions to answer about the death of Alexander Litvinenko, pitilessly poisoned in a London restaurant. As for his reign in Moscow, he is allegedly the linchpin of a vast post-Soviet gangster kleptocracy, and is personally said to be the richest man on the planet. Journalists who oppose him get shot. His rivals find themselves locked up. Despite looking a bit like Dobby the House Elf, he is a ruthless and manipulative tyrant.
** "Let’s deal with the Devil: we should work with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad in Syria", The Telegraph (5 December 2015)

#### 2016

* The choice is really quite simple. In favour of staying, it is in Britain’s geo-strategic interests to be pretty intimately engaged in the doings of a continent that has a grim 20th-century history, and whose agonies have caused millions of Britons to lose their lives. History shows that they need us. Leaving would be widely read as a very negative signal for Europe. It would dismay some of our closest friends, not least the eastern Europeans for whom the EU has been a force for good: stability, openness, and prosperity. It is also true that the single market is of considerable value to many UK companies and consumers, and that leaving would cause at least some business uncertainty, while embroiling the Government for several years in a fiddly process of negotiating new arrangements, so diverting energy from the real problems of this country – low skills, low social mobility, low investment etc – that have nothing to do with Europe.
** "Voters have to ask Donald Tusk some hard questions before they accept his EU 'deal'" The Telegraph (7 February 2016)
* Think of Britain. Think of the rest of the EU. Think of the future. Think of the desire of your children and your grandchildren to live and work in other European countries; to sell things there, to make friends and perhaps to find partners there.
* And then there is the whole geostrategic anxiety. Britain is a great nation, a global force for good. It is surely a boon for the world and for Europe that she should be intimately engaged in the EU. This is a market on our doorstep, ready for further exploitation by British firms: the membership fee seems rather small for all that access.
** From a draft of a pro-EU newspaper column for The Daily Telegraph (written 19 February 2016), later reproduced in All Out War by Tim Shipman. Draft article published as "Cripes! I jolly nearly backed Dave on Europe" The Sunday Times (16 October 2016). Johnson submitted an anti-EU column for publication.
* There is only one way to get the change we need - and that is to vote to go; because all EU history shows that they only really listen to a population when it says no.
** EU referendum: Leaving EU a 'leap in the dark' says Cameron BBC News (22 February 2016)
* They want us to go to the polls in such a state of quivering apprehension that we do the bidding of the Euro-elites, and vote to stay in the European Union.
** EU referendum: Row over '10 years of uncertainty' claim BBC News (29 February 2016)
* Leaving the EU would be a win-win for all. The EU costs us a huge amount of money and subverts our democracy
** Boris Johnson: EU exit 'win-win for us all' BBC News (11 March 2016)
* [The UK is] big enough and strong enough to stand on its own
** Boris Johnson: EU exit 'win-win for us all', BBC News (11 March 2016)
* Would anyone in their right mind want to join the EU today?
** Boris Johnson: EU exit 'win-win for us all', BBC News (11 March 2016)
* You look at the plan to increase the efforts to prop up the single currency with an ever denser system of integration, with more and more regulation about all sorts of social and economic issues which will impact directly on this country, I think the risk is increasingly in staying in the project. I think the best thing we can do is show a lead, show an example and strike out for freedom.
** Boris Johnson: EU exit 'win-win for us all', BBC News (11 March 2016)
* The EU is 50 years old, it is going in the wrong direction. It is time for real reform. The only way to get that is to leave.
** Boris Johnson: EU exit 'win-win for us all' BBC News (11 March 2016)
* We will be informed by our most important ally that it is in our interests to stay in the EU, no matter how flawed we may feel that organisation to be. Never mind the loss of sovereignty; never mind the expense and the bureaucracy and the uncontrolled immigration. The American view is very clear.
** Boris Johnson urges Obama not to intervene in EU debate BBC News (14 March 2016)
* Something mysterious happened when Barack Obama entered the Oval Office in 2009. Something vanished from that room, and no one could quite explain why. It was a bust of Winston Churchill – the great British war time leader. It was a fine goggle-eyed object, done by the brilliant sculptor Jacob Epstein, and it had sat there for almost ten years. But on day one of the Obama administration it was returned, without ceremony, to the British embassy in Washington. No one was sure whether the President had himself been involved in the decision. Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President's ancestral dislike of the British empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender. Some said that perhaps Churchill was seen as less important than he once was. Perhaps his ideas were old-fashioned and out of date. Well, if that's why Churchill was banished from the Oval Office, they could not have been more wrong.
** In a column for The Sun newspaper (22 April 2016).
* There was a young fellow from Ankara Who was a terrific wankerer Till he sowed his wild oats With the help of a goat But he didn't even stop to thankera.
** Boris Johnson wins The Spectator’s President Erdogan Offensive Poetry competition, 18 May 2016.
* Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically [...] The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods. But fundamentally what is lacking is the eternal problem, which is that there is no underlying loyalty to the idea of Europe. There is no single authority that anybody respects or understands. That is causing this massive democratic void.
** "Boris Johnson: The EU wants a superstate, just as Hitler did" The Telegraph (15 May 2016).
** Lord Bramall, former head of the British army said of these comments: "Hitler's main aim was to create an empire in the East and violently subjugate Europeans. Any connection between that and the EU is simply laughable". In reference to Lord Bramall's comments, the then chancellor George Osborne, commented: "I think he said what needed to be said about Boris Johnson.". See "EU Referendum: Boris Johnson stands by Hitler EU comparison" BBC News (16 May 2016).
* After we liberate ourselves from the shackles of Brussels we will be able to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs right across the UK.
** EU referendum: Kinnock urges young voters to prevent 'Brexit by default' BBC News (4 June 2016)
* Take back control of huge sums of money, 350 million pounds a week, and spend it on our priorities such as the NHS.
** Speaking during the ITV Referendum Debate (9 June 2016)
* Oh shit, we've got no plan. We haven’t thought about it. I didn’t think it would happen. Holy crap, what will we do?
** Reported comments after the vote for 'leave' in the EU referendum result (24 June 2016), as cited by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell in Johnson at 10: The Inside Story (Atlantic Books, 2023). Quote is from an extract published by The Times (London).
* There is no need for haste about severing the UK's ties [with the EU]
** Brexit: David Cameron to quit after UK votes to leave EU, BBC News (24 June 2016)
* [The UK is] no less united... nor indeed any less European [following the decision to leave the EU].
** Brexit: David Cameron to quit after UK votes to leave EU BBC News (24 June 2016)
* It is vital now to see this [Brexit] moment for what it is. This is not a time to quail, it is not a crisis, nor should we see it as an excuse for wobbling or self-doubt, but it is a moment for hope and ambition for Britain. A time not to fight against the tide of history, but to take that tide at the flood, and sail on to fortune.
** During the announcement that he would not run to become Britain's prime minister. A reference to Brutus's "There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune" in Julius Caesar. (June 30, 2016)
* We can all spend an awfully long time going over lots of stuff that I've written over the last 30 years... all of which in my view have been taken out of context, but never mind... I'm afraid that there is such a rich thesaurus now of things that I have said that have been one way or another, through what alchemy I do not know, somehow misconstrued that it would take me too long to engage in a full global itinerary of apology to all concerned.
** in his first meeting with the press during visit by US Secretary of state John Kerry in July 2016 "Theresa May dodges question about Boris Johnson's use of racial slurs", Independent (July 20, 2016); "Kerry poker-faced as press takes Johnson to task for 'outright lies'", CNN (July 20, 2016)

#### 2017

* If Monsieur Hollande wants to administer punishment beatings to anybody who chooses to escape, rather in the manner of some World War Two movie, then I don't think that is the way forward. I think, actually, it's not in the interests of our friends and our partners.
** "Brexit: Boris Johnson warns against 'punishment beatings'" BBC News (18 January 2017)
* I think Rex Tillerson is absolutely clear in his view, which is the same as mine. You have got to engage with Russia, but you have got to engage in a very guarded way. You have got to beware of what they are up to. There is no question that, when you look at Russian activity on the cyber front, when you look at what they are doing in the western Balkans, when you look at what has been happening in the Ukraine, you've got to be very, very cautious. I think it is entirely right to have a dual track approach. We don't want to get into a new Cold War. That's something London and Washington are completely at one on. But nor do we want Russian behaviour to continue as it is - and Rex Tillerson has been very clear about that.
** Boris Johnson says US agrees on need for caution over Russia, BBC News, 16 February 2017
* There is no plan for no deal because we are going to get a great deal,
** Boris Johnson: EU can 'go whistle' over Brexit divorce bill, BBC News, 11 July 2017
* There's a group of UK business people, wonderful guys who want to invest in Sirte, on the coast, near where Gaddafi was actually captured and executed as some of you may have seen. And they literally have a brilliant vision to turn Sirte, with the help of the municipality of Sirte, to turn it into the next Dubai. The only thing they've got to do is clear the dead bodies away and then they'll be there.
** Theresa May faces calls to sack Boris Johnson over Libya comments, in the Guardian; published October 4, 2017
* [At a Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee meeting on 1 November 2017] When I look at what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing, she was simply teaching people journalism, as I understand it. [Neither] Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe nor her family has been informed about what crime she has actually committed. And that I find extraordinary, incredible.
* [In the Commons on 7 November 2017, after criticism his earlier comments might make Zaghari-Ratcliffe's position worse] My point was that I disagreed with the Iranian view that training journalists was a crime - not that I wanted to lend any credence to Iranian allegations that Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been engaged in such activity. I accept that my remarks could have been clearer in that respect, and I'm glad to provide this clarification.
** Boris Johnson sorry if Zaghari-Ratcliffe remarks 'caused anxiety', BBC News (7 November 2017).
** The reason for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's visit to Iran was for her daughter, Gabriella, to meet her grandparents.

#### 2018

* Ridiculous outcry over Toby Young. He will bring independence, rigour and caustic wit. Ideal man for job.
** Tweet (3 January 2018) on Young's appointment to the board of the Office for Students, the university regulator, as cited in "Toby Young tweets: the comments that led to his resignation" Evening Standard (8 January 2018).
** Toby Young resigned after his extensive twitter history of dubious and sexist tweets received publicity.
* [The attack was] a sign [from President Putin that] no-one could escape the long arm of Russian revenge ... [The attack] was a sign that President Putin or the Russian state wanted to give to potential defectors in their own agencies: 'This is what happens to you if you decide to support a country with a different set of values. You can expect to be assassinated'.
** Putin 'will use World Cup like Hitler's Olympics', agrees Johnson, BBC News, 21 March 2018
* If you do that you have to answer the question what next? What if the Iranians do rush for a nuclear weapon? Are we seriously saying that we are going to bomb those facilities at Fordo and Natanz? Is that really a realistic possibility? Or do we work round what we have got and push back on Iran together?
** Iran nuclear deal: Johnson courts Trump on Fox & Friends, BBC News, 7 May 2018
* [T]hrow the baby out with the bathwater
** Iran nuclear deal: Johnson courts Trump on Fox & Friends, BBC News, 7 May 2018
* If he can fix North Korea and if he can fix the Iran nuclear deal then I don't see why he is any less of a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize than Barack Obama, who got it before he even did anything,
** Iran nuclear deal: Johnson courts Trump on Fox & Friends, BBC News, 7 May 2018
* I don't see why he's any less of a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize than Barack Obama.
** Boris Johnson: Why Trump could deserve Nobel Peace Prize (7 May 2018)
* [America wants to see] a confident free-trading Britain able to do its own deals
** Boris Johnson: No 10's post-Brexit customs plans 'crazy', BBC News, 8 May 2018
* [A trade deal with America can not be achieved if the UK remained] in the lunar pull of Brussels
** Boris Johnson: No 10's post-Brexit customs plans 'crazy', BBC News, 8 May 2018
* [A customs partnership would create] a whole new web of bureaucracy
** Boris Johnson: No 10's post-Brexit customs plans 'crazy', BBC News, 8 May 2018
* Fuck business.
** As cited in "Boris Johnson challenged over Brexit business 'expletive'", BBC News (26 June 2018).
** The Telegraph reported on 23 June EU diplomats present at a Foreign Office reception for the Queen's Official Birthday had heard Johnson making the comment. It followed a question from the Belgian ambassador about the concerns of business leaders over Brexit. At the same event he was apparently heard commenting about Theresa May's attempts for a soft Brexit: "We will fight it and we will win."
* [The Brexit] dream is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt
** Theresa May's new-look cabinet meets amid Brexit turmoil BBC News (10 July 2018)
* If you tell me that the burka is oppressive, then I am with you. If you say that it is weird and bullying to expect women to cover their faces, then I totally agree – and I would add that I can find no scriptural authority for the practice in the Koran. I would go further and say that it is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes; and I thoroughly dislike any attempt by any – invariably male – government to encourage such demonstrations of "modesty".
* If a constituent came to my MP’s surgery with her face obscured, I should feel fully entitled – like Jack Straw – to ask her to remove it so that I could talk to her properly. If a female student turned up at school or at a university lecture looking like a bank robber then ditto: those in authority should be allowed to converse openly with those that they are being asked to instruct.
* I am against a total ban because it is inevitably construed – rightly or wrongly – as being intended to make some point about Islam. If you go for a total ban, you play into the hands of those who want to politicise and dramatise the so-called clash of civilisations; and you fan the flames of grievance. You risk turning people into martyrs, and you risk a general crackdown on any public symbols of religious affiliation, and you may simply make the problem worse.
** "Denmark has got it wrong. Yes, the burka is oppressive and ridiculous – but that's still no reason to ban it" The Telegraph (5 August 2018)
* It [Theresa May's Chequers plan] is a humiliation. We look like a seven-stone weakling being comically bent out of shape by a 500lb gorilla.
** Boris Johnson compares Chequers deal to 'suicide vest' BBC News (9 September 2018)
* Theresa May's Chequers plan for future relations with the EU would mean] abandoning our seat around the table in Brussels and continuing to accept the single market legislation
** Boris Johnson says May's Brexit plan 'worse than status quo' BBC News (11 September 2018)
* [There has been a] collective failure of government, and a collapse of will by the British establishment, to deliver on the mandate of the people.
** Boris Johnson sets out his 'Super Canada' Brexit plan, BBC News, 28 September 2018
* [The Chequers proposals represented] the intellectual error of believing we can be half-in, half-out
** Boris Johnson sets out his 'Super Canada' Brexit plan, BBC News, 28 September 2018
* [A Super Canada deal would involve] zero tariffs and zero quotas [on all imports and exports]
** Boris Johnson sets out his 'Super Canada' Brexit plan, BBC News, 28 September 2018
* [A Super Canada deal would involve: mutual recognition agreements covering UK and EU regulations to ensure] conformity of goods with each other's standards
** Boris Johnson sets out his 'Super Canada' Brexit plan, BBC News, 28 September 2018
* [The UK should] chuck Chequers
** Boris Johnson sets out his 'Super Canada' Brexit plan, BBC News, 28 September 2018
* [There had been a] collective failure of government, and a collapse of will by the British establishment, to deliver on the mandate of the people
** Boris Johnson sets out his 'Super Canada' Brexit plan, BBC News, 28 September 2018
* [EU regulations would] cheat the electorate
** Boris Johnson sets out his 'Super Canada' Brexit plan, BBC News, 28 September 2018
* if we get it wrong we will be punished
** Theresa May on why Boris Johnson speech made her cross, BBC News, 2 October 2018
* [I am] grateful to the committee for recognising that there was no intention to mislead the House and that I had been completely transparent
** Boris Johnson apologises to MPs for failing to declare £52,000 in time, BBC News, 6 December 2018

#### 2019

* [I] didn't say anything about Turkey during the referendum. Since I made no remarks...I can't disown them
** Brexit: Did Boris Johnson talk Turkey during referendum campaign?, BBC News (18 January 2019)
* Take that [Irish border] backstop out, or at the very least give us a legally binding change - within the text of the agreement - that allows for the UK to come out [of the EU] of its own accord, and then we will be able to say that the agreement is imperfect but at least tolerable.
** Brexit: May boxed into comfort zone as options disappear BBC News (21 January 2019)
* I think an awful lot of money, an awful lot of police time, now goes into these historic offences and all this malarkey and you know £60million I saw has been spaffed up the wall on some investigation into historic child abuse? What on earth is that going to do to protect the public now?
** "Boris Johnson: Historical Child Abuse Investigation Is "Spaffing Money Up The Wall" LBC (13 March 2019)
* The British people won't be scared into backing a woeful Brexit deal nobody voted for
** Brexit: Boris Johnson 'wrong on no-deal polling claim', BBC News, 12 April 2019
* We are being asked to vote for a customs union and a second referendum. The Bill is directly against our manifesto - and I will not vote for it. We can and must do better - and deliver what the people voted for.
** Brexit: PM under fire over new Brexit plan BBC News (22 May 2019)
* We will leave the EU on 31 October, deal or no deal. The way to get a good deal is to prepare for a no deal.
** Tory leadership: Rivals clash over support for no-deal Brexit, BBC News (25 May 2019)
* [I will beat Labour and] put Nigel Farage back in his box
** Tory leadership: Johnson warns party of risk of Brexit 'extinction', BBC News (5 June 2019)
* We will not be forgiven if we do not deliver Brexit on October 31
** Tory leadership: Johnson warns party of risk of Brexit 'extinction', BBC News (5 June 2019)
* We need to realise the depth of the problems we face. Unless we get on and do this thing, we will be punished for a very long time. There is a very real choice between getting Brexit done and the potential extinction of this great party.
** Tory leadership: Johnson warns party of risk of Brexit 'extinction', BBC News (5 June 2019)
* I believe I am best placed to lift this party, beat Jeremy Corbyn and excite people about conservatism and conservative values.
** Tory leadership: Johnson warns party of risk of Brexit 'extinction', BBC News (5 June 2019)
* [The backstop is a "monstrosity" that wipes out the UK's sovereignty and is] being used to coerce the UK into becoming a vassal state of Brussels
** Tory leadership hopefuls set out Brexit Irish backstop policy, BBC News (11 June 2019)
* [I am] not aiming for a no-deal [Brexit] outcome
** Brexit: Boris Johnson says he is 'not aiming for no deal', BBC News (12 June 2019)
* [I will take the UK out of the EU by Halloween] come what may, do or die
** Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt divided over Brexit plans, BBC News (26 June 2019)
* If you Brexit sensibly and effectively, you take away so much of the ammunition of the SNP.
** Tory leadership: Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt on Scotland, BBC News (27 June 2019)
* We should actively campaign for a public understanding of the benefits of the [UK] union, economic and strategic, for the people and its component nations,
** Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt pledge to safeguard union, BBC News (30 June 2019)
* Interviewer: Can you give an example, in your political life, when you've set your own self-interest aside for the benefit of the country? Boris Johnson: Well, er, pfft, um, it's a good question, but er, I, I, I would, you know, I don't, obviously, it's an embarrassing but, but true that, um, er, it is obviously, possible, er, how should I put this, to make more money, er, by not being a full-time politician. Um, I don't, I don't want to put too finer point on it, er, but, you know, you have to, you have to, you have to, make sacrifices sometimes.
** Conservative Leadership Contest Hustings in Darlington, Channel 4 News/Twitter (5 July 2019)
* Andrew Neil: You talk about article 5B in GATT 24. Boris Johnson: Article 24, get it right Andrew, it's article 24, paragraph 5B. Andrew Neil: And how would you handle paragraph 5C? Boris Johnson: I would confide entirely in paragraph 5B. Andrew Neil: But how would you get round what's in 5C? Boris Johnson: I would confide entirely in paragraph 5B which is enough for out purposes. Andrew Neil: Do you know what is in 5C? Boris Johnson: No.
** Andrew Neil tests Boris Johnson's knowledge of GATT 24, BBC News (12 July 2019)
* [I will] deliver Brexit, unite the country and defeat Jeremy Corbyn
** Boris Johnson wins race to be Tory leader and PM, BBC News (23 July 2019)
* We are going to energise the country. We are going to get Brexit done on 31 October and take advantage of all the opportunities it will bring with a new spirit of can do. We are once again going to believe in ourselves, and like some slumbering giant we are going to rise and ping off the guy ropes of self doubt and negativity.
** Boris Johnson wins race to be Tory leader and PM, BBC News (23 July 2019)
* Under no circumstances would we agree to any free-trade deal that put the NHS on the table.
** Boris Johnson: Premiership will be the start of a golden age, BBC News (25 July 2019)
* We want to, and we are going to, deliver on the mandate of the people, which is to take the UK out of the EU whole and entire on 31 October
** Boris Johnson 'absolutely' rules out pre-Brexit election, BBC News (26 July 2019)
* [The Irish border backstop would] keep us locked in EU regulatory orbit, locked in the EU trading system, unable to control our own laws
** Brexit: Boris Johnson calls for 'common sense' compromise, BBC News (8 August 2019)
* Preparing urgently and rapidly for the possibility of an [EU] exit without a deal will be my top priority, and it will be the top priority for the civil service too.
** No-deal Brexit preparations 'top priority', Boris Johnson says, BBC News (9 August 2019)
* MPs should "honour the mandate of the people" by leaving the EU.
** Brexit: Corbyn seeks clarity on 'unconstitutional' election-time no-deal, BBC News (9 August 2019)
* There's a terrible kind of collaboration as it were, going on between people who think they can block Brexit in Parliament and our European friends
** Boris Johnson: Brexit opponents 'collaborating' with EU, BBC News (14 August 2019)
* [The Irish border backstop is] inconsistent with the sovereignty of the UK
** Brexit: Boris Johnson says 'anti-democratic' backstop must be scrapped, BBC News (20 August 2019)
* I do think they [the EU] understand there's an opportunity to do a deal. I think it's going to be touch and go.
** Brexit: Johnson accused of ‘gaslighting’ voters amid claims he offered nothing new in EU meeting, The Independent (26 August 2019)
* I just say to everybody in the country, including everyone in Parliament, the fundamental choice is this: Are you going to side with Jeremy Corbyn and those who want to cancel the referendum? Are you going to side with those who want to scrub the democratic verdict of the people - and plunge this country into chaos. Or are you going to side with those of us who want to get on, deliver the mandate of the people and focus with absolute, laser-like precision on the domestic agenda?
** Brexit: Michel Barnier rejects demands for backstop to be axed BBC News (1 September 2019)
* [I would] rather be dead in a ditch [than ask the EU to delay Brexit beyond 31 October]
** PM: I'd rather be dead in ditch than delay Brexit BBC News (5 September 2019)
** In October 2019 Boris Johnson did send a request to the EU to delay Brexit in breach of this assurance.
* I've looked carefully at no deal, I've assessed its consequences, both for our country and yours, and yes, of course, we could do it, the UK could certainly get through it, but be in no doubt that the outcome would be a failure of statecraft.
** Johnson tells Varadkar no-deal Brexit 'would be a failure' BBC News (9 September 2019)
* Man: The NHS has been destroyed. It's been destroyed. It's been destroyed, and now you come here for a press opportunity. Boris Johnson: Well actually there's no press here. Man: [Points at camera crew] What do you mean there's no press here?
** Boris Johnson confronted on east London hospital visit (18 September 2019)
* I've never heard such humbug in all my life.
** Response to an MP's description of being subject to death threats and abuse, BBC News (25 September 2019)
* Let's get Brexit done, but first my friends let's get breakfast done.
** 'Let's get Brexit done, but first my friends let's get breakfast done' says PM Boris Johnson, Manchester Evening News (13 December 2019)
** On the morning after 2019 parliamentary election

### 2020s
#### 2020

* I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you will be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands. People obviously can make up their own minds but I think the scientific evidence is... our judgement is that washing your hands is the crucial thing.
** On the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, at a press conference, as quoted in U.K. Leader Boris Johnson Boasts He Has Shaken Hands With Coronavirus Patients by Khaleda Rahman, 3 March 2020, Newsweek.
* I want to stress that for the vast majority of the people of this country, we should be going about our business as usual.
** As quoted in Coronavirus: Up to fifth of UK workers 'could be off sick at same time', 3 March 2020, BBC News.
* We are embarked now on a great voyage, a project that no one thought in the international community that this country would have the guts to undertake, but if we are brave and if we truly commit to the logic of our mission - open, outward-looking - generous, welcoming, engaged with the world championing global free trade now when global free trade needs a global champion. I believe we can make a huge success of this venture, for Britain, for our European friends, and for the world.
** Speech at Old Naval College Greenwich after Britain’s departure from the EU, 3rd Feb 2020
* We are telling cafes, bars, pubs and restaurants to close tonight as soon as they reasonably can and not to open tomorrow. To be clear they can continue to provide take out services. Night clubs, theatres, gyms and leisure centres should close on the same time scale. These are places where people come together and indeed the whole purpose is to bring people together. Some people will be tempted to go out tonight. Please don't. You may think you are invincible bit there is no guarantee you will get mild symptoms. As far as possible we want you to stay at home - that's how we can protect our NHS and save lives.
** Requested the closure of pubs, restaurants, gyms, entertainment venues, museums and galleries that evening due to the coronavirus pandemic, at his daily 5pm press conference on 20 March 2020 as quoted in The Daily Telegraph.
* We have so far succeeded in the first and most important task we set ourselves as a nation to avoid the tragedy that engulfed other parts of the world.
** Prime Minister's statement on coronavirus (30 April 2020)
* At this stage I do not think that the international comparisons and the data are yet there to draw the conclusions that we want.
** Prime Minister's Questions (6 May 2020)
* I am meant to be in control. I am the Führer. I’m the king who takes the decisions.
** Reported comment as cited by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell in Johnson at 10: The Inside Story] (Atlantic Books, 2023) reprinted in "'I’m the Führer, the king': inside Boris Johnson’s chaotic world" The Sunday Times (23 April 2023)
** Reported comments (possibly spring 2020) after he returned to work after suffering from COVID-19 in the context of having delegated responsibilities to Dominic Cummings.
* [On the assumption Carrie Symonds, now Johnson, had briefed against Dominic Cummings] She hasn't briefed anyone and my instructions to all were to shut the f*** up. How is any of us supposed to know where these briefings come from? Look at the claims made on behalf of allies of Lee [Cain] and Dom, that I'm out in six months, that I can't take decisions, that Carrie is secretly forging lockdown policy, and about a billion equally demented claims. Are you responsible for all that crap? No. Then look at it from my point of view. This is a totally disgusting orgy of narcissism by a government that should be solving a national crisis.
** Last message (November 2020) to Dominic Cummings before his departure from Downing Street, as cited in "Dominic Cummings attacks Boris Johnson over pandemic response — as it happened", The Times (31 October 2023).
* [The Conservative Party] thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just Nature's way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them. A lot of moderate people think it is a bit too much.
** Reported comment to Sir Patrick Vallance (recorded in his notes) during December 2020 revealed at the UK's COVID Inquiry, as cited in "'Nature’s way of dealing with old people': the damning messages revealed to Covid inquiry", The Guardian (31 October 2023).

#### 2021

* We have to recognise that the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on European land mass are over, and there are other, better things we should be investing in, in FCAS, in the future combat air system, in cyber, this is how warfare in the future is going to be.
** At the Liaison Committee of the House of Commons (17 November 2021) in response to Tobias Ellwood (Conservative MP and chairman of the Defence Select Committee) querying a decline in British army tank deployment, cited in "WATCH: Boris Johnson claimed the days of big tank battles in Europe were over" New Statesman (25 February 2022)
** At the time, Russian tanks were gathering on the Ukrainian border prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
* No more fucking lockdowns - let the bodies pile high in their thousands.
** Reportedly said by Johnson in a government meeting in October 2021, as cited in "UK denies that Johnson said 'let the bodies pile high'" Reuters (26 April 2022)
** Denied by Number 10. First reported by the Daily Mail, the statement was corroborated by other sources
* I repeat, Mr. Speaker, that I have been repeatedly assured since these allegations emerged that there was no party, and that no COVID rules were broken.
** Statement in the House of Commons (8 December 2021)
* I can tell you; I DO brush it! I have a comb in my office!
** Johnson to BBC Reporter (2021)
** On his untidy hair.

#### 2022

* I believed implicitly that this was a work event. But Mr. Speaker, with hindsight, I should have sent everyone back inside, I should have found some other way to thank them, and I should have recognised that even if it could be said technically to fall within the guidelines, there would be millions and millions of people who simply would not see it that way.
** Statement in the House of Commons (12 January 2022)
* [I]f we took away the whip from everyone here [in the House of Commons] who's pinched someone's bottom, we'll lose our majority.
** Said "in the heat of the moment", according to Johnson's former communications director Guto Harri reportedly during the Chris Pincher scandal (c. July 2022), as cited in "Boris Johnson joked UK Tories would lose majority if they sacked every groper, claims ex-aide", Politico (15 June 2023)
** According to Dominic Cummings, Johnson had used the phrase "Pincher by name, pincher by nature" about the MP around 2020.
* It is clearly now the will of the parliamentary Conservative Party that there should be a new leader of that party and therefore a new prime minister. … I know that there will be many people who are relieved and perhaps quite a few who will also be disappointed. And I want you to know how sad I am to be giving up the best job in the world. But them's the breaks. … I want to thank you, the British public, for the immense privilege that you have given me. And I want you to know that from now on until the new prime minister is in place, your interests will be served and the government of the country will be carried on.
** Quoted in "Boris Johnson’s resignation speech: full transcript" by Phoebe Southworth, in The Telegraph (7 July 2022)

#### 2023

* He [Vladimir Putin] threatened me at one point, and he said, "Boris, I don't want to hurt you but, with a missile, it would only take a minute" or something like that. Jolly. But I think from the very relaxed tone that he was taking, the sort of air of detachment that he seemed to have, he was just playing along with my attempts to get him to negotiate.
** "Ukraine: Boris Johnson says Putin threatened him with missile strike" BBC News (30 January 2023)
** Account of a phone call in February 2022 shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in a BBC documentary series (Putin vs the West) on President Putin's contacts with world leaders. A Kremlin spokesman is reported to have described Johnson's account as "a lie".
* To those who say we may be denuding our own arsenals by giving the support, I say what is the point in deploying tanks and planes in North Carolina or North Rhine-Westphalia when Ukrainians could be using them now, where they are needed to help assure our collective security for decades?
** From a speech delivered to the Atlantic Council cited in "Boris Johnson calls on US to give Ukraine fighter planes" The Guardian (1 February 2023)
* I believe that, once this war is done, once the Ukrainians have won, then yes they should begin the process of induction both to Nato and to the EU.
** From the same speech delivered to the Atlantic Council cited in "Brexit allowed UK to 'do things differently' in supporting Ukraine, says Johnson" The Independent (2 February 2023)
* I have received a letter from the Privileges Committee making it clear - much to my amazement - that they are determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of Parliament. They have still not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons. They know perfectly well that when I spoke in the Commons, I was saying what I believed sincerely to be true and what I had been briefed to say, like any other minister. They know that I corrected the record as soon as possible; and they know that I and every other senior official and minister - including the current Prime Minister and then occupant of the same building, Rishi Sunak - believed that we were working lawfully together. I have been an MP since 2001. I take my responsibilities seriously. I did not lie, and I believe that in their hearts, the Committee know it. But they have wilfully chosen to ignore the truth, because from the outset, their purpose has not been to discover the truth, or genuinely to understand what was in my mind when I spoke in the Commons. Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts. This is the very definition of a kangaroo court. Most members of the Committee - especially the chair - had already expressed deeply prejudicial remarks about my guilt before they had even seen the evidence. They should have recused themselves.
** "Resignation statement in full as Boris Johnson steps down", BBC News (9 June 2023)

#### 2024–present

* [In March 2021, I] had commissioned some work on whether it might be technically feasible to launch an aquatic raid on a warehouse in Leiden, in the Netherlands, and to take that which was legally ours and which the UK desperately needed.
* [After consultations] I secretly agreed with what they all thought, but did not want to say aloud: that the whole thing was nuts.
** Passages from Unleashed, as cited in "Boris Johnson: we considered 'aquatic raid' on Netherlands to seize Covid vaccine", The Guardian (28 September 2024)
** The AstraZeneca vaccine for COVID was at the centre of an argument over exports with the EU at the time. Former ministers who had worked with Johnson at the time suggested to The Observer that the former prime minister may simply have put forward such proposals as a joke with the intention of including the proposal in his eventual memoirs.
* Frankly, once I pulled the carpets out of the flat in No 11, which is where we lived … the whole thing was looking a bit like a crack den, to be totally honest, and it needed to be refurbished.
** From an interview on LBC (8 October 2024), as cited in "Boris Johnson says Downing Street flat looked like a crack den", The Times (8 October 2024)
** Defending the refurbishment of the flat, controversial at time because of the cost and (originally) opaque funding, which was formerly occupied by Johnson's predecessor, Theresa May, and her husband.
* We're waging a proxy war (Russian invasion of Ukraine), but we're not giving our proxies the ability to do the job. For years now, we've been allowing them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs and it has been cruel.
** Our troops should help defend Ukraine’s border in possible ceasefire, says Boris Johnson (Archived), Telegraph (28 November 2024)

## Attributed

* [On George W. Bush] What has brought so many folk on to the streets, however, is a much broader case: the President is a cross-eyed Texan warmonger, unelected, inarticulate, who epitomises the arrogance of American foreign policy and who by his violent and ill-thought-out actions in Afghanistan and Iraq has made the world a more dangerous place. In so far as this may be an accurate representation of the marchers' beliefs, it deserves an answer. Let us dispense with the trivial abuse. The President was duly elected. He cannot help his buzzard-like appearance. Whatever the deficiencies of his syntax, they do not justify the loathing in which he is held.
** Unsigned editorial titled "Infantile resentment", The Spectator (22 November 2003), p. 7.
** Multiple sources attribute this column to Johnson (usually by citing the passage in bold): The Telegraph (London, 2007 and 2010), The Atlantic (2016), and The Washington Post (2019).
* With friends like these, who needs Yemenis?
** At a summit about the civil war in Yemen, Financial Times (19 September 2017)

## Quotes about Boris Johnson

    Listed in chronological order.

### 1982–2006

* Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility.
* I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.
** Martin Hammond, writing to Johnson's father Stanley, reporting on his conduct as a pupil at Eton College (April 1982).
* Boris was told to engage his brain before speaking in future.
** Conservative Party official, quoted in "Black Dog", The Mail on Sunday (12 September 2004) p. 26
* You are a self-centred, pompous twit. Even your body language on TV is pathetic. Get out of public life. Go and do something in the private sector.
** Paul Bigley (brother of murdered hostage, Kenneth Bigley) to Johnson on Radio City in Liverpool. Quoted in Nigel Bunyan, "Have we got views for you, Mr Johnson", The Daily Telegraph (21 October 2004) p. 3
* Boris Johnson, people always ask me the same question, they say, 'Is Boris a very very clever man pretending to be an idiot?' And I always say, 'No.'
** Ian Hislop on Parkinson (19 November 2006).
* Boris Johnson voted in favour of scrapping section 28, although he had previously compared gay marriage to bestiality in a book he published, and referred to gay men as "tank-topped bumboys" while working as a journalist.
** Working Class History (2020)

### 2012–2018

* Most politicians are ambitious and ruthless, but Boris is a gold medal egomaniac. I would not trust him with my wife nor – from painful experience – my wallet. It is unnecessary to take any moral view about his almost crazed infidelities, but it is hard to believe that any man so conspicuously incapable of controlling his own libido is fit to be trusted with controlling the country. His chaotic public persona is not an act – he is, indeed, manically disorganised about everything except his own image management. He is also a far more ruthless, and frankly nastier, figure than the public appreciates.
* I would not take Boris's word about whether it is Monday or Tuesday.
** Max Hastings "Boris Johnson: brilliant, warm, funny – and totally unfit to be PM" The Guardian (10 October 2012), reprinted (in an edited form) from "If Boris ever becomes PM, I'm on the first plane out of Britain" Daily Mail (9 October 2012)
* What does that say about you Boris Johnson? Aren't you in fact making up quotes, lying to your party leader, wanting to be part of someone being physically assaulted...you're a nasty piece of work, aren't you?
** Interviewed by Eddie Mair, a stand-in presenter on The Andrew Marr Show, cited in "Transcript: Eddie Mair grills Boris Johnson on the Andrew Marr Show" The Independent (24 March 2013).
** References to false quotes Johnson attributed to historian Colin Lucas (his godfather; Johnson was fired from The Times); lying to Conservative leader Michael Howard about his affair with Petronella Wyatt (he was sacked from his post as shadow arts minister) and his telephone conversation in 1990 with Old Etonian friend Darius Guppy who wanted another journalist beaten up and asked Johnson for the man's personal details.
* There's no point trying to contain Boris. He's mayor of London, he can speak out if he wants to
** David Cameron as quoted in "Cameron's heir? PM sees bright future for Boris by Alex Stevenson at Politics (7 October 2013).
* The book reads as if it was dictated, not written. All the way through we hear Boris's voice; it’s like being cornered in the Drones Club and harangued for hours by Bertie Wooster.
** Richard J. Evans "'One man who made history' by another who seems just to make it up: Boris on Churchill" New Statesman (13 November 2014).
** From a review of Johnson's book The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (Hodder & Stoughton, October 2014)
* Mr. Johnson ... made his name in Brussels not with honest reporting but with extreme euroskepticism, tirelessly attacking, mocking and denigrating the European Union. He wrote about European Union plans to take over Europe, ban Britain’s favorite potato chips, standardize condom sizes and blow up its own asbestos-filled headquarters. These articles were undoubtedly colorful but they bore scant relation to the truth.
** Martin Fletcher "Who Is to Blame for Brexit's Appeal? British Newspapers", The New York Times (21 June 2016)
* I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead.
** Michael Gove "Gove's leadership bid statement in full" The Guardian (30 June 2016)
** Gove unexpectedly became a candidate to succeed David Cameron as prime minister and Conservative party leader after Cameron's resignation following the announcement of the European Union membership referendum's 'leave' result on 24 June 2016.
* I am surprised and disappointed that you have chosen to repeat the figure of £350 million per week, in connection with the amount that might be available for extra public spending when we leave the European Union. This confuses gross and net contributions. It also assumes that payments currently made to the UK by the EU, including for example for the support of agriculture and scientific research, will not be paid by the UK government when we leave. It is a clear misuse of official statistics.
** "Open letter to Boris Johnson" from David Norgrove, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority (17 September 2017)
* He has turned being an upper-class buffoon into an art form.
** Emily Thornberry in an interview with Owen Jones, The Guardian (10 October 2017).
* Not in my lifetime has there been a politician with less substance inflicting greater national damage.
** Oliver Kamm "Boris Johnson’s big idea on Brexit is just preposterous" The Times (14 February 2018).
** Kamm was born in 1963.
* I've made an assessment of him over many years. He is a shallow populist – manifestly unsuitable for high office – who would undoubtedly be a disaster for the country and bring doom to the Conservative Party.
** Dominic Grieve (former Conservative Attorney General), as cited in "Dominic Grieve: 'Boris is a shallow populist'", The New European (10 October 2018).

### 2019–2020

* I know that within the Tory party the hard Brexiteers are compared to the leaders of the French revolution. I think Gove is Brissot, and Boris Johnson is Danton, and Rees-Mogg is compared to Robespierre. We should not forget that the efforts of these men were not appreciated by the common man they claimed to represent – because they all ended up on the guillotine. So that’s important to remind [them].
** Guy Verhofstadt, Brexit: Guy Verhofstadt suggests Leave campaigners could ‘end up on the guillotine’
* You just don't care for anything because you're spoilt. You have no care for money or anything.
** Carrie Symonds, in a recording of an altercation between her and Johnson, made by their neighbours (21 June 2019).
* Boris is an intellectual. They are rare among PMs. Gordon Brown was one, as was A J Balfour at the beginning of the 20th century. Boris should write a book a year to keep his mind engaged and active.
* Boris will be the most fun prime minister since Harold Wilson. We need that quality back into the heart of the nation and recognise that quality of life matters as much as economic statistics.
* Boris is a big man who doesn’t bear grudges. He should have a broad-based government of all talents. Once Brexit is resolved, there'll be long overdue challenges to solve.
* We must let Boris be Boris — and watch the fun begin.
** Anthony Seldon "Build a team to do the hard graft, then let Boris be Boris and watch the fun at No 10" Evening Standard (22 July 2019)
* Good man, he's tough and he's smart. They're saying "Britain Trump", they call him "Britain Trump".
** Donald Trump speaking to conservative high school students in Washington (23 July 2019).
* A clownish figure with silly hair and a passing relationship with the truth.
** John Oliver on his show, Last Week Tonight (28 July 2019). Quoted by Vanity Fair. John Oliver Explains Why Boris Johnson Is Not the Same as Donald Trump (29 July 2019).
* 90,000 Conservative members, whose views have become more extreme as their numbers have fallen, recently selected Boris Johnson as their new leader, and thus as the country's new prime minister. In doing so, they have chosen a mendacious chancer. It is no exaggeration to say that Johnson has lied his way to the top, first in journalism and then in politics.
** Chris Patten, former chairman of the Conservative Party, writing in an opinion column entitled "Is Britain Becoming a Failed State?" (20 August 2019).
* The Prime Minister's advice to Her Majesty was unlawful, void and of no effect.
** Statement by Brenda Marjorie Hale, then President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, on Boris Johnson's prorogation of Parliament (24 September 2019).
* Feel a bit sick at Jo's name being used in this way.
** Brendan Cox on Johnson's assertion that getting Brexit done would honour the memory of his murdered wife (25 September 2019).
* My brother is using words like surrender and capitulation as if the people standing in the way of the blessed will of the people as defined by 17.4m votes in 2016 should be hung, drawn, quartered, tarred and feathered. I think that is highly reprehensible language to use.
** Rachel Johnson speaking on Sky News (26 September 2019).
* The thing about the greased piglet is that he manages to slip through other people’s hands where mere mortals fail.
** David Cameron 'Greased piglet' Boris Johnson could pass deal, says David Cameron The Guardian (17 October 2019).
* The Prime Minister of our nation will, at times, have to stand up to President Trump, President Putin, President Xi of China. So it is surely not expecting too much that he spend half an hour standing up to me.
** "General election 2019: Andrew Neil issues interview challenge to Johnson" (5 December 2019).
* Look what happens when the Labour party moves so, so far to the left. It comes up with ideas that are not able to be contained within a rational basis quickly. You're also going to see people saying, my God, Boris Johnson, who is kind of a physical and emotional clone of the president, is able to win.
** Joe Biden speaking at a campaign fundraiser in San Francisco (14 December 2019).
* The Boris Johnson government's initial response to COVID-19 was the now discredited policy of "herd immunity" — the strategy of letting the virus rip through the population, infecting up to 40 million people, most of whom would recover and then supposedly be immune to the virus. The only problem was that this would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths — a prospect the Tories had to abandon in the face of expert denunciation and widespread public outrage. Johnson's change of tack was to move finally towards lockdown, advising against mass gatherings and urging people to avoid clubs, pubs, and restaurants — and most travel — as well as advising older people to self isolate.
** Neil Faulkner, ""Mass Deaths, Mass Poverty, Mass Repression" co-written with Phil Hearse (20 March 2020) Mutiny
* According to the Director-General of the WHO, the choice to abandon systematic testing and contract tracing, which were effective in Korea and Taiwan, was a major mistake that contributed to the spread of the virus in virtually every country. The ultimate cause of this alarming delay were strategic choices. [...] Other countries waited far too long to react, largely on the basis of the fatalist and crypto-Darwinian strategy of "herd immunity." Boris Johnson's United Kingdom was entirely passive in its initial approach.
** Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot, The pandemic as political trial: the case for a global commons (28 March 2020), ROAR Magazine.
* What I would say to people is, the prime minister's got very, very difficult choices to make, and I would encourage all members of the public and MPs to listen extremely carefully to what the prime minister says today and over coming days
** Steve Baker according to "Coronavirus: Boris Johnson to announce month-long lockdown across England, Sky News understands" Sky News (31 October 2020).
* The most accomplished liar in public life — perhaps the best liar ever to serve as prime minister.
* He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie – which may inadvertently be true. And because he has been so famous for this skill for so long, he can use his reputation to ascend to new levels of playful paradox.
** Rory Stewart "Lord of misrule" The Times Literary Supplement (6 November 2020), in a review of Tom Bower Boris Johnson: The Gambler (WH Allen); quote also reproduced in "UK coronavirus: Sweden and Germany put on quarantine list; Johnson raises Christmas hopes - as it happened" The Guardian (5 November 2020)
* Calling Johnson’s radicalism “hard right” might sound overdrawn. He did not set out to lead the party further to the right or, indeed, to lead it anywhere. His primary aim was to lead the party. Finding a label for his outlook is accordingly in one way pointless. Like Trump, he has no settled outlook. Nor is he unique in that regard among British Conservatives. Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Thatcherism, the Conservative Party has had no clear viewpoint. Anti-Europeanism, which appeared to fill the gap, was negative and temporary. Lacking aims or content of its own, Johnson’s radicalism lies in his forceful, hard-right style, with its disregard for familiar liberal-democratic norms and its claims to speak for “the people” against the elites and institutions. As a superbly skilled “trimmer,” Johnson is suited to improvisation by character and driven to it by predicament. Britain’s divided hard right, which he took over and found himself having to manage, promised implausibly to please both global-minded business and voters fed up with neglected public services, insecure work, and lack of housing.
** Edmund Fawcett Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition (2020), p. 349

### 2021–2022

* From the start Johnson has been a clown, but a useful clown. Now and then he has to be sacked, but he is always taken back, perhaps with a mock sigh. He has never quite equalled the stream of lies that he manufactured as Daily Telegraph correspondent in Brussels in the early 1990s: that the EU wanted to ban prawn cocktail crisps and British sausages, and to standardise the size of condoms because Italians had smaller penises. Week after week, he produced juicy fibs which had news editors on other papers demanding similar stuff from their own reporters in Brussels. Conrad Black, then the owner of the Telegraph and himself on the receiving end of several Johnson lies, was delighted. When Johnson was about to become prime minister in the summer of 2019, Black saluted his old employee, who "was such an effective correspondent for us in Brussels that he greatly influenced British opinion on this country's relations with Europe".
** Ferdinand Mount "Ruthless and Truthless", London Review of Books 43:9 (6 May 2021)
* [Response to Q1109] Fundamentally, the reason for all these problems was bad policy, bad decisions, bad planning and bad operational capability. It doesn't matter that you have great people doing communications if the Prime Minister changes his mind 10 times a day, and then calls up the media and contradicts his own policy, day after day after day. You are going to have a communications disaster zone. Few things are discussed more inaccurately than communications
* [Response to Q1126] nobody could find a way around the problem of the Prime Minister just, like a shopping trolley, smashing from one side of the aisle into the other.
* [Response to Q1194] The heart of the problem was fundamentally I regarded him as unfit for the job.
** Dominic Cummings, as cited in Oral evidence to the Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees of the House of Commons (26 May 2021).
* The culture wars suit the Johnson way of doing things [...] He's good at things that involve short, memorable slogans and showmanship. Is he good at test and trace? Not conspicuously so. Is he good at PPE? No. Is he good at lockdown timing? Absolutely not. But the thing that he's quite good at is spotting a dividing line.
** Matthew d'Ancona "Everything you wanted to know about the culture wars – but were afraid to ask", The Observer (13 June 2021)
* He rewrites reality in his mind afresh according to the moment’s demands. He lies — so blatantly, so naturally, so regularly — that there is no real distinction possible with him, as there is with normal people, between truth and lies.
* He [Johnson] is totally untrusted by anybody in No 10 yet has a superpower for making people feel sorry for him — "I feel sorry for him like my old dead-beat boyfriend, I hate myself for it but I can’t help it," said one in despair after a particularly dreadful meeting.
** Dominic Cummings' newsletter, as cited in "When Boris Johnson needs friends, he’ll be alone", The Times (8 July 2021)
* His natural instinct is not to be open, not to be transparent, not to be accountable, but narcissitically to think 'what suits me, how can I extricate myself from this awkward situation, by what means can I arrogate blame somewhere else?'
** John Bercow Good Morning Britain (10 December 2021).
* I expect my leaders to shoulder the responsibility for the actions they take. Yesterday, he did the opposite of that. So I'll remind him of a quotation, altogether too familiar to him, of Leo Amery to Neville Chamberlain, "You have sat there too long, for all the good you have done, in the name of God go."
** David Davis, addressing Johnson at Prime Minister's Questions (19 January 2022).
* Most politicians, as far as I can work out, are pretty incompetent, and then have a veneer of competence, you do seem to do it the other way around.
* Right now a visit of Boris Johnson in Kyiv started from one-on-one meeting with President Zelenskyy
** Andriy Sybiha, deputy head of Ukraine’s president office, said on Facebook Ukraine latest: Boris Johnson visits Kyiv to discuss more aid with Zelenskyy (9 April 2022).
* Now think of Boris Johnson. All of these feelings will apply to him. He is going to be Heath with jokes added in, and Thatcher with consistency taken out, all rolled into a bundle of resentment, denial, attention-seeking and attempted vindication that will be a permanent nightmare for the new prime minister. That he wants revenge on Rishi Sunak is already apparent, but if Liz Truss is elected, she will face the identical problem. The chances of her loyalty to him being repaid are close to zero. Boris lives his life as a performance, and he will want the next act to fill every seat in the theatre of British political life. The Conservative Party had no choice but to remove Johnson from office. His standards of governance and veracity had fallen below what reasonable people could defend. The downside is that the party will always have the problem of what he will say next.
** William Hague, "Tories must beware Boris the incredible sulk" The Times (25 July 2022)
* Q: You have supported a Prime Minister that has continually lied to the Queen, Parliament and the entire United Kingdom, therefore does this not bring into question your own personal integrity and honesty? A: I don't agree with that. Boris Johnson has been an excellent prime minister. He delivered on Brexit. He delivered on the Covid vaccine and he delivered on standing up to Vladimir Putin and backing the Ukrainians. I am proud of what he did.
** Liz Truss, Question to Liz Truss in Conservative leadership election hustings in Belfast, as quoted by The Telegraph (17 August 2022)
* In some sense, him running is the dream [...] Droning on about how they need a sensible, serious person to fix the mess they’ve made then that honking pudding turns up with his travelling circus trailing behind. ... Is he a greased piglet any more? He became deeply unpopular with the public because the joke wore thin, he got humiliatingly booted out as PM and he set the Tories on a path to ruin. He was booed at the Queen’s Jubilee. The public tolerance for him would be so, so thin.
** "Sir Keir Starmer: Labour ready for election to end this chaos" The Times (21 October 2022)
** Speculation on a possible return to the office of Prime Minister following the resignation of successor Liz Truss after six weeks. Comments attributed to a "senior Labour source" in the article
* There are several very good potential candidates for Conservative leader. But choosing Boris now would be — and I say this advisedly — an absolutely catastrophic decision.
** Jesse Norman MP quoted in "Ben Wallace rules himself out for PM and suggests he would back Johnson" The Guardian (21 October 2022)

### 2023–present

* In his resignation speech, Boris Johnson showed no awareness of any personal failings that had led his party to turn on him. "When the herd moves, it moves," he complained, without apparent thought as to what might have provoked the herd into stampeding. He later complained the rules had been changed halfway through the relay race that the premiership had become. There had indeed been no rule against No 10 parties, but by the time they happened in lockdown it was against the law. There was no rule that a PM must resign if more than 50 of their ministers quit, but since being able to form a government that commands a Commons majority is the basis for being in power it should hardly need saying that these are circumstances that make resignation inevitable. Boris tried to break rules that no one had previously thought it necessary to state.
** William Hague "Boris Johnson and Liz Truss should fess up to failure" The Times (6 February 2023)
* Johnson and I really loathed each other. It was obvious. We really never spoke behind the scenes very much.
* [Sir Keir Starmer on being referred to as Sir Crasheroonie Snoozefest by Johnson.] It doesn’t matter — because I really couldn't give a toss and, you know, I really loathed him. He didn't stand for anything, he had no principles, he had no integrity, he lied through his teeth and he brings everybody down with him. Is there anybody who's had any relationship with Johnson — in any sense of the word — who hasn't ended up in the gutter?
** Starmer speaking on the Political Party podcast with Matt Forde, as cited in "Sir Keir Starmer: I loathed unprincipled, lying Boris Johnson" The Times (21 February 2023)
* We have to hope that the Johnson era is going to come to be perceived in the years ahead as a sort of dreadful aberration, as something that the British people realised was a disaster, and that the Conservative Party now has the courage to realise was disaster and to send Boris Johnson back where he belongs to the music halls [...] He is a brilliant journalist. He's a brilliant entertainer. He had no place in British public life.
** Max Hastings interviewed by Andrew Marr, as cited in "'You can't write off Boris until he's buried at a crossroads with a stake in his heart', former boss Max Hastings says" LBC (22 March 2023)
* [H]is inner emptiness made it imperative for him always to be the centre of attention, craving affirmation and breaking truth and convention to achieve it.
* The damage that Johnson has done to the country is beyond measure. Has any prime minister done so much harm? Covid-19 was the most serious crisis to hit Britain since the Second World War. He ran the government as if he were the wayward manager of an amateur theatre company, full of histrionics, changes of mind and cliques.
** Anthony Seldon "The damage Boris Johnson has done is beyond measure" The Sunday Times (11 June 2023)
* Much as Boris is not prone to getting really cross, nor using particularly strong language, this was one [time] where he really flipped. At our morning meeting, with a small gang of us, he just launched into a violent attack on Emmanuel Macron. And basically saying: "He’s a four-letter word that begins with 'c'’, he's a weirdo, he's Putin's lickspittle, we need to go studs up on this one" – a rugby term that basically means gloves off - "we need an orgy of frog-bashing, I’m going to have to punch his lights out"... Pretty strong stuff.
** From Unprecedented (second LBC podcast in a series) by Guto Harri, as cited in "Boris Johnson's foul-mouthed tirade about 'lickspittle' Emmanuel Macron" The Telegraph (18 May 2023). Johnson is reported not to accept the veracity of this account. In "Humour secured his bond with Zelensky" The Times (18 May 2023)), Harri wrote that Johnson did not carry out his threat.
* [In 1964 or 1965] There was her baby, Alexander, a few months old, lying naked on a bath mat, kicking his feet in the air, round, pink and fat, with a remarkable shock of electrically bright blond hair. As I gazed at him, I didn't find that baby at all appealing, too pink and too noisy.
* That baby on the bath mat, who so decisively put me off the idea of teen motherhood, grew up to be the most disgraced prime minister under his ludicrously changed name of Boris: he looks much the same.
* As for Boris Johnson, I look back with a morbid incredulity at what that baby grew up to be. It’s a not particularly good joke to surprise people with the fact that I am one of the many women to have seen him naked.
** From an edited extract of Polly Toynbee's An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals (Atlantic Books, 2023), as reproduced in "Polly Toynbee: what my privileged start in life taught me about the British class system" The Guardian (20 May 2023)
** An account of Toynbee's meeting with her then boyfriend's sister, Charlotte Johnson (later Charlotte Johnson Wahl), and her baby.
* He can continue to cause damage to the party as he has done so conspicuously in recent years, because he retains a following in the country. That will be exploited by his friends in the popular press. But his real legacy is Brexit, the biggest historic mistake this country has made in peacetime.
** Michael Heseltine "Boris Johnson’s legacy? He has ruined Britain’s place in the world" The Observer (11 June 2023)
* He's not a Tory, he’s somebody who used the Tory party ... he attacks what he calls the Westminster elite but he is so Westminster elite at heart - he’s wealthy, socially liberal, believes in animal rights, carbon net zero - he is not some Lee Anderson.
* [T]he interesting thing about him is that he has persecution mania. And people with persecution mania think that it's all a conspiracy and everybody's out to get them - that isn’t the case. The fact is with Boris he arouses ... such uncontrollable irritation that you just want him to go away. He brings everything on himself, he's not this victim.
** Petronella Wyatt interviewed by Andrew Marr on LBC (15 June 2023), as cited in "'He used the Conservatives!': Boris Johnson's ex-girlfriend Petronella Wyatt claims ex-PM has 'never had a Tory idea'" LBC (15 June 2023)
* Carrie Johnson, in the caption of an Instagram post with a picture of her holding the newborn, joked: "Welcome to the world Frank Alfred Odysseus Johnson born 5th July at 9.15am. (Can you guess which name my husband chose?!)" The former prime minister Boris Johnson is keen to be thought of as a scholar of the classics. In Greek mythology, Odysseus leaves behind his wife and child to seek adventure, encountering many other women along the way.
** Kevin Rawlinson "Carrie and Boris Johnson announce birth of baby boy named Frank" The Guardian (11 July 2023)

## External links

* 2021 CNN interview by Amanpour
* ↑ Norgrove, David (17 September 2017). Letter from Sir David Norgrove to Foreign Secretary. UK Statistics Authority.