Former British Prime Minister David Cameron criticized Boris Johnson in a recent interview, accusing the current prime minister of behaving “appallingly” during the Brexit campaign that effectively ended Cameron’s time in office.
Cameron granted a rare interview to The Times in the run-up to the release of his new memoir, For the Record. Cameron has all but disappeared from public life after he resigned from office in 2016 following an unsuccessful campaign to convince British voters to stay in the European Union.
Cameron blasted Johnson to The Times, accusing him of fear mongering and spreading false information during the campaign. At the time of the Brexit campaign, Johnson served as London’s mayor. He had turned down an offer by Cameron to serve in the then-prime minister’s cabinet in exchange for backing the remain campaign.
“It turned into this terrible Tory psychodrama and I couldn’t seem to get through,” Cameron said. “What Boris and Michael Gove were doing was more exciting than the issues I was trying to get across.”
Gove, who campaigned with Johnson to leave the EU, was an MP serving in Cameron’s cabinet at the time. Cameron said Johnson and Gove behaved “appallingly” and scapegoated Turkey while pushing to leave the EU.
Johnson’s hard-line position in the Brexit campaign also caught Cameron by surprise as Johnson had not advocated to leave the EU before Cameron called a referendum for the British people to decide.
“I say in the book: Boris had never argued for leaving the EU, right? Michael was a very strong Eurosceptic, but someone whom I’d known as this liberal, compassionate, rational Conservative ended up making arguments about Turkey [joining] and being swamped [with immigrants] and what have you. They were trashing the government of which they were a part, effectively,” Cameron said.
