Actually, it’s not a joke. Johnson, the clownish, comb-shy
former London mayor is now in charge of the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth
Office, a job which also puts him in charge of the British secret intelligence
service, MI6.
Johnson was in fact quite a good mayor of London. The
famous zip-wire incident, which saw him stuck, dangling, meters from the
ground, wearing a blue safety helmet and waving a Union flag in each hand, was
a perfect comic advertisement for the successful London Olympics in 2012, which
were held under his watch.
His bumbling manner, permanently tousled blond hair,
and love of peppering his speech with classical allusions is also endearing to
some.
But foreign minister material he is most definitely not.
“Et hoc probatur (and this has been proved),” as
Johnson himself might quip.
For a start, there is his character: French Foreign
Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault branded Johnson a liar following the
announcement of Johnson’s appointment, probably referring to the mendacious
“Leave” referendum campaign that Johnson led and won, and which will see the UK
exit from the European Union in the coming years.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier,
reacting to the news, called Johnson “an irresponsible politician,” while Dutch
diplomat and European Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans, writing
on Facebook, alluding to Johnson but not naming him, noted that “our job (of
diplomacy) is not a game.”
And you don’t have to look far to find more
reasons why Johnson is unsuitable for his new job. As a journalist, in the
early 1990s he filed an entirely false report with UK broadsheet The Times that
the then European Community’s headquarters in Brussels was to be blown up
because it was riddled with asbestos. The building stands to this day.
In his writing, he has referred to black Africans as
“piccaninnies,” an offensive term for black children, and obliquely supported
British colonialism. In a recent gaffe, he declared the “part-Kenyan” U.S.
President Barack Obama might have an “ancestral dislike of the British Empire.”
In 2007, he said the possible next U.S. president, Hillary Clinton, had “dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a
steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.”
But Ukrainians should
be most concerned by Johnson’s past statements concerning Russia’s illegal
annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, and its fomenting of a fake
civil conflict in the country’s eastern Donbas region.
In May, while answering journalists’ questions,
Johnson accused the European Union of conducting “policymaking on the hoof”
with regard to Ukraine. “Look what has happened in Ukraine,” he said.
That a British Foreign Secretary should imply that the
EU was somehow responsible for the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine is
deeply troubling. Firstly, because it indicates that Johnson has a distorted
understanding of the causes of the Ukraine Crisis, and secondly because it
casts doubts on the UK government’s continued, sold backing of the government
in Kyiv.
Ukraine needs that solid backing if it is to fend off
future Russian aggression.
Johnson made his comment in the heat of the “Brexit”
referendum campaign, when disparaging comments about the EU were falling easily
from his lips. It could be that he knows he was speaking nonsense, pandering to
an electorate he knew would lap up any lie that catered to their
anti-EU sentiments. But even that does not speak well of his character.
The UK has been Ukraine’s staunchest ally in Europe,
and its influence has kept wavering EU states behind the sanctions regime
imposed to punish the Kremlin for its attack on Ukraine. But that influence has
already been diminished by the UK’s vote to leave the EU, and, as the comments
of the French and German foreign ministers show, it will be diminished still
further by a Foreign Secretary Johnson. He is obviously disliked and mistrusted by his
peers in the EU.
As he takes on his important new job, Johnson, the
scholar of the classics, can console himself with the words of Socrates, who
said: “The only true wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing.”
But it can be no consolation to Ukrainians that a man
who apparently has no correct understanding of the issues of the Donbas and
Crimea is now in charge of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.
