LONDON (Reuters) - Boris Johnson, elected leader of Britain’s governing Conservative Party on Tuesday and who will take over as prime minister on Wednesday, was the face of the official campaign to leave the European Union.
But he has made contradictory statements in the past about the relationship he wants Britain to have with the world’s largest trading bloc.
Here are some of the comments:
- On why Britain should stay in the EU: What “always just about clinches it for me is that we would lose influence in the designing of the continent. And it has been the object of 500 years of British diplomacy to ensure that continental Europe is not united against our interests,” he said in book “Friends, Voters, Countrymen” in 2001.
- Describing himself as a fan of the EU: “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,” Johnson told parliament in 2003.
- On why quitting the EU won’t solve Britain’s problems: “We would have to recognize 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,” he said in Daily Telegraph column in 2013.
- On why he was going to support Britain remaining in the EU before the referendum in 2016: “This is a market on our doorstep, ready for further exploitation by British firms,” Johnson wrote in an unpublished column in the Daily Telegraph in February 2016, according to the book “All Out War”.
“The membership fee seems rather small for all that access. Why are we so determined to turn our back on it?”
- On why he eventually supported leaving the EU during the referendum: “We are seeing a slow and invisible process of legal colonization, as the EU infiltrates just about every area of public policy,” Johnson wrote in his Daily Telegraph column in February 2016.
“Sometimes these EU rules sound simply ludicrous, like the rule that you can’t recycle a teabag, or that children under eight cannot blow up balloons, or the limits on the power of vacuum cleaners.”
- On the relationship he wants with the EU: “I’m rather pro-European, actually. I certainly want a European community where one can go and scoff croissants, drink delicious coffee, learn foreign languages and generally make love to foreign women,” he said in his Daily Telegraph column in February 2016.
- On how the EU has created the longest period of peace since the Roman era: “The European Community, now Union, has helped to deliver a period of peace and prosperity for its people as long as any since the days of the Antonine emperors,” he said in his biography of Winston Churchill “The Churchill Factor” published in 2014.
- On why the EU resembles Nazi Germany: “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,” he told the Daily Telegraph in May 2016. “But fundamentally what is lacking is the eternal problem, which is that there is no underlying loyalty to the idea of Europe.”
- Johnson’s views on Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal: “We are volunteering for economic vassalage,” he told parliament in July 2018. “It is absolute nonsense to imagine, as I fear some of my colleagues do, that we can somehow afford to make a botched treaty now and then break and reset the bone later on.”
- On why he was reluctantly supporting May’s Brexit deal: “We have a choice to make now, and that means choosing between options that actually exist,” Johnson said on Twitter in March. “It is very painful to vote for this deal. But I hope we can now work together to remedy its defects.”
- On the euro: “The euro is a calamitous project, it will limp on with sclerotic growth rates,” Johnson said at a Thomson Reuters Newsmaker event in 2012. “It will eventually blow up but I wouldn’t care to bet when.”
- On what relationship Britain should have: “Boil it down to the single market, that’s the great achievement of the European Union, I think we could easily scrap the social chapter, the fisheries policy.”
- On why Britain should pursue a so-called hard Brexit: “The grimmer the warnings, and the more systematic the efforts to make their flesh creep, the greater has been [people’s] indifference and their resolve,” he wrote in Daily Telegraph column in January. “It is no deal, or WTO terms, that actually corresponds to their idea of coming out.”
- “I always thought it was extraordinary that we should agree to write that entire cheque before having a final deal. In getting a good deal, money is a great solvent and a great lubricant,” he told the Sunday Times last month.
- “On Brexit, we will of course be pushing our plan into action, and getting ready to come out on October 31st, come what may… do or die, come what may,” he told TalkRadio last month.
- “I think that MPs on both sides of the House also understand that they will face mortal retribution from the electorate unless we get on and do it,” he told the BBC last month.
- “It is vital that we are prepared for a no-deal outcome if we are going to get the deal that we need. I don’t think that is where we are going to end up, I think it is a million-to-one against,” he said at a campaign hustings last month.
Reporting By Andrew MacAskill; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Janet Lawrence
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