James O'Brien's Brutal Assessment Of Boris Johnson's Part In Brexit Shambles
9 July 2018, 15:30
This is James O'Brien's stinging analysis of Boris Johnson's role in the Brexit shambles.
Mr Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary this afternoon following the agreement in Chequers, which he is believed to have described as "polishing a turd".
James insists that Mr Johnson is the man at the centre of the decision to leave the EU - even though he doesn't even believe in it.
Speaking on LBC, he said: "A ludicrous, nation-damaging conceit that was framed and Eton in the 1980s by two egotists who never ever buried the hatchet of their rivalry in the ensuing 20 or 30 years.
"Make no mistake about Brexit, Boris Johnson was the reason why it happened and Boris Johnson decided on the Leave side because he thought it would advance his career. There is no integrity, there is no honesty, no reason.
"There's an astonishing Twitter account based on things Boris Johnson wrote and said prior to coming out for the Leave campaign which demonstrate a degree of pro-EU thinking and feeling that I believe was in place even when he was throwing his grenades back from Brussels to make the colonels reading the Daily Telegraph chuckle over breakfast about bent bananas.
"And then 30 years later, you talk to decent people, decent people about why they are so so persuaded that we've got to leave and you chip and chip and chip at the questions and you pull away the slogans until you leave them naked, talking about bananas. And that is it.
"People are going to lose their jobs because Boris Johnson persuaded them that the shape, the curvature of their banana was politically significant.
"And still, still the charlatans, the shysters, the snake oil salesmen, the spivs and the pantomime toffs, still they persist in insisting that there's something good, that the light of the end of the tunnel is not, as most of us now recognise, the light of an oncoming train."
