A terrifying list of Boris Johnson quotes that everyone should read

Boris Johnson's tenure as Prime Minister of the UK has been mired in controversy and recent comments made about Jimmy Saville during PMQs towards Keir Starmer have been widely criticised.

Not only that, but past questionable comments have also come back to haunt the PM.

Johnson's slow and incredibly public rise to the UK political top spot has, from the off, not been without criticism as his past repeatedly comes back to haunt him. Whether it's the casually racist phrases he's used when speaking about minorities, to moments where he's been caught in the midst of a barefaced lie, it's safe to say that whenever the PM opens his mouth things are eventful.

Previously during the Tory Leadership contest Johnson's critics were incredibly vocal regularly citing his past comments about Muslim women, false claims he made about Brexit and his diplomatic blunders as reasons why he should not be Prime Minister.

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The leader came under fire following comments he made into two separate articles, one of which regards single mothers and their children and another which is laden with racist stereotypes and undertones.

In the forme,r he moans that the children of a single mother are “ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate”, and bemoans "the single mother's desire to procreate independently of men." In the latter article when speaking of young people he claims they have an "almost Nigerian interest in money and gadgets of all kinds."

Here is a list of controversial comments made by the Prime Minister in the past.

1.On Muslim women, Daily Telegraph, 2018.

In a column for the Daily Telegraph, Johnson compared women wearing burqas to "letter boxes".

In the £275,000-a-year column he wrote it was "absolutely ridiculous" that "people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes".

He wrote: “If a constituent came to my MP’s surgery with her face obscured, I should feel fully entitled… 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.

2. Libya “dead bodies” comment, 2017.

At the Conservative party conference in October 2017, Johnson was criticised after claiming the Libyan city of Sirte would have a successful future as a luxury resort once investors “cleared the dead bodies away".

3. Disrupting Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s appeal process, 2017.

Johnson was accused of disrupting the appeal process for British citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release from an Iran prison after he said she had been teaching journalists in Iran when she was detained, contradicting her statement that she had been on holiday at the time.

Her family, including her husband who is currently on hunger strike in order to get the government to take another look at her case, blame Boris for her continued incarceration.

A few days after he made the remarks, Nazanin was summed before an Iranian judge and faced charges of engaging in propaganda against the regime.

4. On Bashar Al-Assad, Telegraph, March 2016

Hooray, I say. Bravo – and keep going.

5. On the EU and the Nazis, The Sunday Telegraph, 2016.

Johnson claimed that the past 2,000 years had seen failed attempts to recreate the "golden age" of the Roman Empire.

Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.

6. That £350million Brexit claim.

During the Brexit referendum in 2016, Johnson controversially supported the claim that the UK sends £350million to the EU every week.

The figure appeared on the infamous Brexit bus and led to a campaign to prosecute him, which was recently unsuccessful.

7. On Turkish president Tayyip Erdoğan, The Spectator, May 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.

8. On Malaysian women attending university, 2013.

At the World Islamic Economic Forum, Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak said that 68 per cent of women were going to be attending university, to which Johnson quipped:

[Female students went to university because they] have got to find men to marry.

9. On Hillary Clinton, Telegraph, 2007.

She's got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.

10. On black people, 2010.

What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England. It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies.

11. On his time as editor of The Spectator.

Johnson was heavily criticised back in 2008 about a Spectator article which was published when he was editor of the publication. Ken Livingston and a black lawyer accused him of condoning racism after he allowed an article to be published which said:

Orientals ... have larger brains and higher IQ scores. Blacks are at the other pole.

12. On Barack Obama, The Sun, April 2006.

The part-Kenyan president [has an] ancestral dislike of the British empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.

13. On Eurosceptics.

I can hardly condemn Ukip as a bunch of boss-eyed, foam-flecked euro hysterics, when I have been sometimes not far short of boss-eyed, foam-flecked hysteria myself.

14. On voting Conservative.

Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.

15. On single mothers.

In a column written for The Spectator, the Tory leader said it was:

Outrageous that married couples should pay for ‘the single mothers’ desire to procreate independently of men.

He also suggested that it was “feeble” for a man to be unable or unwilling to “take control of his woman” whilst arguing Britain needed to “restore women’s desire to be married”.

With regard to the children of single parents the prime minister wrote:

Ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children who in theory will be paying for our pensions.

16. On young people.

All the young people I know – ie those under 30 – are just as avaricious as we flinty Thatcherite yuppies of the 1980s in fact, they have an almost Nigerian interest in money and gadgets of all kinds.

17. On Jimmy Saville and Keir Starmer, 2022

Johnson was heavily criticised for comments made during PMQs in which he appeared to suggest Keir Starmer was responsible for not prosecuting paedophile Jimmy Saville. Fact-checking organisation Full Fact found that Starmer was head of the CPS when the decision was made, but he was not the reviewing lawyer for the case.

Instead this leader of the opposition, a former director of public prosecution – who used his time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, as far as I can see – he chose to use this moment to continually pre-judge a police inquiry.

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