LONDON — A furious Boris Johnson once privately described Emmanuel Macron as “Putin’s lickspittle” and promised to “punch his lights out,” a key aide to the former U.K. prime minister claimed.
Detailing his experience of Johnson’s chaotic premiership in a new podcast, former Downing Street director of communications Guto Harri said Johnson launched into a tirade about Macron in the months following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — and after the French president criticized the U.K.’s response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis.
“At our morning meeting, I think with a small gang of us, he just launched into a violent attack on Emmanuel Macron,” Harri said. “Basically, saying ‘He’s a four-letter word that begins with C, he’s a weirdo, he’s Putin’s lickspittle.’”
According to Harri, Johnson apparently then referenced a desire to damage Macron — and deployed an anti-French slur while he was at it.
Johnson, Harri said, continued: “‘We need to go studs up on this one’ — a rugby term that basically means, gloves off — ‘We need an orgy of frog bashing. I’m going to have to punch his lights out.’”
A spokesperson for Johnson said he did not recognize Harri’s account of the meeting and played no part in his former official’s tell-all podcast.
Johnson had a troubled relationship with Macron during his time in No. 10. Paris and London were often at odds over post-Brexit trade, while the pair fell out after Macron publicly criticized the U.K.’s AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine.
“The truth is that Macron doesn’t like Boris Johnson at all,” Charles Grant, the director of the Centre for European Reform think tank, told POLITICO in 2022.
“There were tensions early on when people like Emmanuel Macron of France went to Moscow to talk to Putin,” Harri said, referring to Macron’s visit to Moscow in the weeks preceding the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“I think Boris described it privately as ‘nauseating,’” Harri added.
Despite apparently threatening to inflict harm on Marcon, Harri said the two men managed to bury the hatchet soon afterwards.
“Weeks later, of course, they had patched it up. They got on really well. They actually went for a whisky together at the G7 summit,” Harri said.
