Boris Johnson’s sensitivity and intelligence are underrated

Boris Johnson's appointment as foreign secretary has brought forth a flood of reminders about just how undiplomatic Britain's new top diplomat can be. In the past few months alone, he wrote an obscene poem insulting Turkey's very touchy president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and suggested that Barack Obama's Kenyan roots made him anti-British.

He has insulted both candidates to succeed Obama, comparing Hillary Clinton to "a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital" and suggesting he would stay away from New York just to avoid meeting Donald Trump. And he wrote of Vladimir Putin that "despite looking a bit like Dobby the House Elf, he is a ruthless and manipulative tyrant".

Teasing

Most of these bon mots first appeared in Johnson’s £5,000 a week

Daily Telegraph

column, in which he followed with gusto the old newspaper columnists’ maxim “simplify and exaggerate”. Johnson first made his name in journalism as that newspaper’s

Brussels

correspondent, insulting the EU elites and teasing them with fanciful stories.

Elsewhere in Johnson's vast output of journalism, however, he has shown himself to be more thoughtful and sensitive in his approach to foreign affairs. And his reporting from Iraq, Israel and Palestine and the former Yugoslavia has shown a sympathy and understanding for the victims of war which is at odds with his better-known bouts of bombast.

A supporter of the Iraq war in 2003, Johnson wrote a number of reports from the country, in which he was unflinching in his description of the consequences of the action and the disastrous post-conflict planning. Visiting Baghdad and Basra two years after the war, he noted that 80 per cent of Iraqis thought the war was a bad thing and 30 per cent wanted Saddam back.

“Was this, my friends, the cause I voted for? Was it for this that we have expended 60 British lives, 1,500 Americans and about 17,000 Iraqi civilians? It seems a pretty poor return so far,” he wrote.

Disgust

“We are trapped in a vicious circle. Life in Iraq is in some respects so bad that it gives the insurgents and recusants the perfect rallying cry for terror: look at what a world the Americans have brought you! Death to the foreigners! And the more terror they inflict on the coalition, the more difficult it is for us to do anything to make their lives better.”

Later, he expressed disgust over the failure to hold senior officers to account over the torture at Abu Ghraib, despite evidence that the senior US commander in Iraq had encouraged interrogators to exploit the Arab fear of dogs. Abu Ghraib fatally undermined the case Johnson had relied on in support of the Iraq war, that it would help to end the persecution of Iraqi citizens.

Johnson called for Osama bin Laden to be put on trial rather than killed, arguing that if there was any point at all to the war on terror, it was a belief in due process and upholding civilisation against barbarism.

Johnson reported from the Serbian capital Belgrade during Nato's aerial bombardment in 1999, documenting the civilian casualties of the western action, including the decapitation of a priest as he crossed a bridge and the killing of a toddler as she sat on her potty.

"Of course this was not intentional, in the sense that some brasshat at Mons did not target this priest or that toddler. But you could say it was intentional in that Nato dropped bombs from 15,000 feet in the surefire knowledge that civilians would be killed," he wrote.

“The reason they fly so high, of course, is that this war is based on a moral calculus which says that the lives of Yugoslav or Albanian civilians are worth very little next to the lives of allied soldiers and airmen.”

Johnson had to cut short a visit to the Palestinian territories last year after he made rude remarks about supporters of a boycott campaign against Israel. He is indeed well-disposed towards Israel but he favours a two-state solution and he has been critical of Israeli conduct in the past. Visiting Israel and the West Bank in 2004 after a Palestinian suicide bombing attack in Haifa, Johnson observed the humiliation of Palestinians living in Nablus.

“As I looked at the Palestinians queuing to get into their own town, waiting to be passed by Israeli troops through the urine-soaked turnstiles, I had an inkling of the frustrations that might produce a cult of suicidal martyrdom . . . It is all about a sense of powerlessness, and rage, and hatred, and a sense of injustice,” he wrote.

We may not have seen the last of his celebrated gaffes and blunders but Johnson has flourished until now in part because he has been underestimated. Beneath the bluster is a man of intelligence and wide learning whose worldview is almost as far from that of a Little Englander as it is possible to be.