Yahoo News Theresa May too weak to sack Boris Johnson over Brexit blueprint, Ken Clarke suggests
Theresa May is too weak to sack Boris Johnson over his Brexit blueprint, Ken Clarke has suggested as he claimed the Foreign Secretary would have been fired in “normal circumstances”.
The former Conservative cabinet minister and Europhile launched an astonishing attack on Mr Johnson’s decision to set out his own vision for the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.
He said the Foreign Secretary’s 4,000 word plan for Brexit, published by the Daily Telegraph on Saturday, was an “irrelevant nuisance” and “totally unhelpful”.
Mr Clarke suggested that Mrs May would have sacked Mr Johnson “instantly” if she was in charge of a majority government.
The former Tory chancellor accused Mr Johnson of seeking to “exploit” Mrs May’s failure to win a majority at the last general election.
Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme what Mrs May should do about Mr Johnson, he said: “They should tell him that if he wants to be Foreign secretary he should actually make some more serious contributions on wider foreign policy, give his views on the Brexit deal privately as ministers have always been supposed to do and remember that there are rules called collective responsibility.
“Sounding off personally in this way is totally unhelpful and he shouldn’t exploit the fact that she hasn’t got a majority in Parliament and he knows perfectly well that normally a foreign secretary would be sacked instantly for doing that.
“She unfortunately after the general election is not in a position easily to sack him which he should stop exploiting.”
Asked if he believed that Mr Johnson should be sacked but that Mrs May was too weak to do so, he added: “In any normal circumstances he would have been sacked the day after.”
His decision to restate a controversial claim from the EU referendum that up to £350 million could be made available to fund the NHS after Brexit prompted a furious row between the Foreign Secretary and the head of UK Statistics Authority.
Sir David Norgrove said he was “surprised and disappointed” that the figure had been revived while Mr Johnson accused him of “wilfully distorting” his words.
Mr Clarke described the figure as “dishonest”.
He said: “Personal publicity and campaigning by the Foreign Secretary is actually just an irrelevant nuisance and I think people have already said quite enough about somebody who is the Foreign Secretary just joining in a few days before and repeating one of the more simplistic and dishonest arguments of the hard line leavers during the referendum campaign.
“They use the money because it appeals to the public who don’t, I think, follow very closely the details of what Parliament and negotiations are engaged in, modern trading deals are extremely complicated, you tell people we are giving money to foreigners and quite a lot of the public say they are against it.”
