Johnson, a key leave campaigner in the 2016 EU referendum, also defended the Brexit deal he delivered as prime minister adding: “There’s no point in doing Brexit unless you’re actually going to take back control.
He acknowledged some of his own concerns, saying: “I worry about the politics sometimes of not being as close to our EU partners as we used to be, and people’s feelings of upset in this country – people were very upset about it. I worry about that”.
He criticised the Conservative government at the time of the referendum, led by David Cameron, for not planning for Brexit.
“What happened was that in June 2016 the then-Prime Minister David Cameron evaporated, whistling, and then we had a devil of a job.”
Challenged on a decision, detailed in his memoir, to present US President Joe Biden with a picture printed out from a Wikipedia image, Johnson said British taxpayers would be “grateful for the fact that we weren’t lavishing money unnecessarily on gifts”.
Asked if he might return to Downing Street as prime minister in the future, he said there was a greater chance of being “blinded by a champagne cork” – a phrase similar to one he used when asked about his political ambitions before getting to Downing Street.
