Boris Johnson declares for Out - and backlash soon follows
We’re going to close this live blog down now. The day’s major EU referendum news is that the mayor of London Boris Johnson has announced he will campaign for Britain to leave the 28-nation bloc.
While he has insisted he will not take a leading role, his declaration was billed as a major shot in the arm for the Leave campaign and as a play for the Tory leadership, should the prime minister be forced to resign in the event of a vote to leave.
Soon after, came the recriminations. The former deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine called Johnson’s decision “illogical”, while a Remain camp source went further, calling it the “most nakedly self-serving piece of political positioning in years”.
Meanwhile, my colleague Nicholas Watt has written an analysis of what he says was a heavily choreographed announcement by Boris Johnson this afternoon.
A conventional politician with a major announcement to make at short notice would summon one television crew for a “sit down” interview which would then be “pooled” by all the broadcasters who would run it at an agreed time. That would never do for Johnson, who always likes to ensure an element of unpredictability about his interventions. His communications team set in motion the conditions for a media scrum shortly before 5pm after deciding that a traditional television interview, in which he would explain the thinking in his Daily Telegraph column on Monday, would not suffice. The scrum was meant to look spontaneous but was in fact engineered to within an inch of its life.
Boris Johnson’s father Stanley, who worked in the European Commission in the 1970s, tells Sky News he believes his son has come to the wrong conclusion on the European Union.
Stanley Johnson said he was proud of his son and respected his view but said his own position on the issue differs. And he called suggestions that Boris’ decision was a play for the Tory party leadership “odd”.
Already, there are signs of the Cameron operation closing ranks against Boris. No 10 has a semi-official vengeance policy: ministers with a long-standing opposition to the EU will be forgiven for backing “out”. The implication is that there will be no forgiveness for Boris, who has waited until now to declare his support for Brexit. “The last thing I wanted was to go against David Cameron,” said Boris yesterday. Quite true: what he wants is to come after him – and he is, as of last night, the bookmakers’ favourite to do just that.
Labour’s shadow Europe minister Pat Glass is also seeking to frame Boris Johnson’s decision as one that “says more about the Tory leadership contest and Boris’ own positioning than what is in the best interests of Britain”.
My colleague Caroline Davies was in the crowd of journalists, onlookers and animals who turned up to hear Boris Johnson announce his decision. She writes:
A dog on a lead, whose owner had joined the scrum, whimpered quietly, perhaps in expectation. Peering down on BoJo’s flaxen crown, his neighbours had taken up poll position hanging out of an upstairs window.
“Let me tell you where I’ve got to ... which is, um, I am, um ... I’ve made up my mind,” he pronounced, brightly.
There was a collective intake of breath. But, no. Johnson, who has kept his party waiting, and waiting, was not ready to relinquish quite yet.
Boris Johnson mentioned the political might he felt would be ranged against him after his announcement this afternoon. And it seems it only took about an hour for the backlash to begin.
The Tory grandee Lord Heseltine has just issued a statement.
Given that Boris has spent so long agonising over this decision, his decision is illogical. If it takes you this long to make up your mind about something so fundamental and you still have questions, then surely the right option is to stay with what you know, rather than risk our economy and security with a leap in the dark.
If he were to be successful in his ambition to cut us off from Europe, the flags would fly in Frankfurt and Paris in his honour.
At a stroke, he would have blown away the safeguards for our financial services industry that the prime minister has just secured.
That is to risk countless jobs across our country from Edinburgh in the north to Bournemouth in the south and, of course, London itself.
And the noises from the Remain camp are even more menacing. A source said:
This is the most nakedly self-serving piece of political positioning in years.
Everybody in Westminster knows that Boris doesn’t really believe in Out. He’s putting his personal ambition before the national interest.
It says a lot about Boris’s priorities that his last act as Mayor of London is to betray this great city by turning his back on the needs of the City of London and the views of the majority of Londoners.
And Will Straw, the executive director of Britain Stronger In Europe, said:
Boris might be a big personality but he highlights the Out campaigns’ biggest weakness – they have no consistency or clarity on what leaving Europe means for Britain and how our economy can be protected from the outside.
He’s previously supported remaining in and has never been able to answer difficult questions on the economic implications of leaving. He’s going to have to now.
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