Timeline
Boris Johnson - three decades of sackings and giving offence
1987
Fired by the Times after landing a job at the newspaper through his family connections. In an article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace, Johnson allegedly invented a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas.
1990
Discussed plans to have a tabloid journalist beaten up with his fellow Old Etonian Darius Guppy. Johnson said he would try to obtain personal details of the News of the World journalist Stuart Collier. Guppy talked of hiring a contact from south London to assault Collier.
January 2002
In a Telegraph column he predicted that when Tony Blair arrived in Congo “the tribal warriors” would “all break out in watermelon smiles”. He added that the Queen loved the Commonwealth “partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies”. It was written the year after he became an MP.
June 2002
Compared same-sex marriage to polygamy and bestiality in his debut book, Friends, Voters, Countrymen. “If gay marriage was OK – and I was uncertain on the issue – then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog,” said Johnson. Four years before, Johnson described gay men as “tank-topped bumboys” in his Telegraph column.
October 2004
Condemned for publishing an article as editor of the Spectator in which Liverpool fans were blamed for the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. While the article says the event was “undeniably” a tragedy, it added: “That is no excuse for Liverpool’s failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon.” It also claimed that people in Liverpool “wallow” in their “victim status”.
November 2004
Fired by the then Tory leader, Michael Howard, from positions as shadow arts minister and party vice-chairman for lying about his extramarital affair with Spectator columnist Petronella Wyatt. When it transpired that tabloid reports, which Johnson had dismissed as an “inverted pyramid of piffle”, were true, he had refused to resign.
July 2013
Suggested that a rise in the number of Malaysian women attending university was down to their desire to find a husband.
April 2016
Suggested the “part-Kenyan” US president Barack Obama had an “ancestral dislike” of the UK.
May 2016
Won “most offensive Erdoğan poem” competition, two months before he was appointed foreign secretary. The limerick, for which he was handed £1,000 by the Spectator, described the Turkish president having sex with a goat.
January 2017
Caught on camera reciting a colonial-era poem by Rudyard Kipling in front of local dignitaries while on an official trip to Myanmar. Johnson, who was accused of “incredible insensitivity”, had been inside the sacred Buddhist site the Shwedagon Pagoda when he began murmuring the first verse of Mandalay, a later verse of which includes the line: “Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud, wot they called the Great Gawd Budd”.
November 2017
Criticised for making incorrect statement that the jailed British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been “teaching people journalism” rather than being on holiday in Iran. The then foreign secretary condemned her conviction for spying but his comments were later cited as proof by Iran that she was engaged in “propaganda against the regime”.
August 2018
Came under fire for describing Muslim women in burqas as looking like “bank robbers” and “letter boxes”. Making the comments in his Telegraph column, Johnson also called the garments “oppressive” but added that Britain should not follow other countries in banning them in public.
June 2019
Media firestorm ensued after a neighbour recorded a loud altercation at the home Johnson shared with his partner, Carrie Symonds. Johnson refused to answer questions about the circumstances of the tape, which featured screaming, shouting and banging. A picture of the couple posing happily subsequently appeared in the media, but Johnson repeatedly refused to say who had taken or released the photograph, or whether it was an old picture.
24 September 2019
The UK's Supreme court rules that the advice prime minister
Boris Johnson gave to the Queen over proroguing parliament was "unlawful, void, and of no effect" as it rules that his decision to prorogue parliament was unlawful.
