Boris Johnson aimed to unite both leave and remain camps over Brexit but his speech, which was filled with nationalist, British Empire rhetoric, only fuelled the divisions further. He retained the leave campaign battle cries of ‘sovereignty’, ‘taking back control’ and ‘embracing the world’, because these aren’t notions that existed during our time in the EU. But his role as Foreign Secretary is to represent the country abroad and he has failed in that respect.
If we remove our focus from the speech for an iota of a moment, he put risk to the freedom of British-Iranian, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was imprisoned in Iran 22 months ago.
Yesterday, human rights organisations have asked the UN to step in and get her released.
Brexit means…carrots?
The speech itself was a peculiar mix of waffle and rhetoric, lacking any real substance but he did make a reference to Nigel Farage by saying “That is surely not some reactionary Farageist concept,” who responded on Twitter by claiming 72% of people wanted tighter immigration controls. Where he plucked that percentage from remains 100% confusing to people. But away from the man who once said “In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it." Carrots became an important agenda for Mr Johnson.
This is where we drift into the realms of Armando Iannucci’s ‘The Thick of It’, because he was asked by journalist (reportedly from the Telegraph) about clarity over Brexit.
Except he responded by saying “carrot?” the journalist responded by saying “the clarity” then Johnson proceeded to respond “Clarity! Ok. God. Carrot. Carrot…” then harped on about Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech, even though the only clarification from that speech was the governments inept ability to come up with an actual plan.
Afterwards he got to point where he stated about the Brexit agenda that “I think there is a great a positive agenda and we need to get out there and explain it”, yes, that could be perhaps true and there is a fantastic way to get information to masses of people…speeches.
But the lack of substance was apparent, because after hailing that they need to get out and explain the positivity of Brexit, Mr Johnson the deflected from the lack of content from his speech by talking about how it can be good for carrots, he finished this question (and this is not satire) by saying “you know…promote organic carrots”.
