Foreign Office minister risks fresh Tory row by saying Boris Johnson needs publicity ‘like cocaine’
3 min read
A Government minister has risked a fresh row ahead of the Conservative party conference after he blasted Boris Johnson, saying he craved publicity like others do cocaine.
In an astonishing attack, Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan said his former boss needs a “regular fix” of media attention, but that he fails to recognise his status as an asset is “waning”.
The intervention comes after the ex-former foreign secretary mounted another incendiary attack on Theresa May’s Chequers Brexit plan.
In a 4,000 word article for the Daily Telegraph, Mr Johnson challenged the Prime Minister to show she has the "guts" to deliver Brexit, before urging her to seek a so-called "Super Canada" free trade deal.
But in an interview with The Spectator, Mr Duncan criticised Mr Johnson for equating publicity with “political power and authority and respect”.
“Well, let’s just talk about Boris for a minute. My view when I worked with him as Foreign Secretary was to be loyal to Boris, loyal to Theresa, and stay out of the news," he said.
“There was only room for one showman in the Foreign Office. I get on with the diplomacy. But for Boris? Publicity is his cocaine. He needs a regular fix.
“And he equates getting publicity with having political power and authority and respect.
“But I think what he doesn’t realise is that whereas he used to be an electoral asset, that is now waning.
He also criticised Mr Johnson as running his former department in a way that would boost his publicity, but insisted he did not stand a chance of being “the new Trump”.
When asked what it was like to work alongside him, Mr Duncan told the magazine: “Always convivial and fun. Never dull. Not deeply inquisitive, and actually, not at all collegiate.
“He’d run it with his special advisers for publicity, not for ministers as his team. He was not a team player at all. The danger is that his personality becomes his politics.
“But if he thinks he’s gonna to be the new Trump, it’s not gonna fly."
He added that people “exaggerate” Mr Johnson's level of support and said the idea that he is the clear frontrunner to take over from Mrs May was “a fiction of journalistic imagination”.
“And it’s simply not true,” he added. “It’s just not borne out amongst any colleagues you talk to, when they sort of talk to the activists. It’s just a total myth.
His comments come weeks after he attacked Mr Johnson’s comparison between the Chequers plan and a “suicide vest” as “disgusting” before vowing to make sure the incident would be the “political end” of the former Cabinet minister.
Elsewhere Mr Duncan criticised the arch-Brexiteers of the European Research Group as risking turning the Tories “into the mutant child of UKIP” with its hardline stance.
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