Thread by @stuartmillar159

Boris Johnson Is Favourite To Become The UK’s Next Prime Minister. This Is What The World Thought Of Him As Foreign Secretary.

Fantastic deep dive from @albertonardelli on Johnson’s performance in the only senior ministerial job he’s held

buzzfeed.com/albertonardell…

@BuzzFeedNews interviewed seven senior US, European and UK diplomats and officials from the highest levels of government with direct experience of Johnson.

Their views:”woefully unprepared”, “form over substance”, “liked but not respected”

buzzfeed.com/albertonardell…

A UK diplomat said they’d felt embarrassed about representing the UK for the first time in their career after a trip with Johnson to South East Asia because of his lack of basic knowledge on the issues, and his lack of sensitivity towards local cultures

buzzfeed.com/albertonardell…

Among the Johnson gaffes unearthed by @AlbertoNardelli, this one sticks out:

At a dinner in London days before Trump took office, he presented outgoing US Secretary of State John Kerry with a “Make America Great Again” hat, a jape that did not go down well with his guests

Episodes like this may be dismissed by Johnson supporters as “Boris being Boris”, but others involved matters of life and death, such as his disastrous error in the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

That led a furious senior Whitehall mandarin to call him a “fucking moron”

On Yemen, one of the most serious foreign policy issues on his desk, officials were deeply critical of Johnson

“We were shocked by how little he knew,” one told us “He never seemed to have done basic preparation, including on issues he was leading.”

buzzfeed.com/albertonardell…

On Iraq, a foreign minister from another country told how Johnson asked in a meeting whether the Iraqi PM was Sunni or Shia

“It’s not a crazy question for someone in a pub. But you would expect a UK foreign minister to know at least that much about Iraq. It was distressing.”