Foreign secretary, who is under fire over his diplomacy, has had several changes of heart on how to deal with Putin and Assad

The day after Boris Johnson was appointed foreign secretary, a Middle East analyst at the thinktank Chatham House pointed out a possible problem: his publicly stated position on Syria appeared different from the government’s.

The primary issue, Tim Eaton noted, was that when Johnson was mayor of London he advocated several times that the UK should work with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and Russia to defeat Islamic State.

This is one of several apparent changes of opinion by Johnson – who is facing questions about his handling of the UK’s diplomatic affairs – on the issue. Here we look at some of them:

December 2015: a ‘deal with the devil’

The then mayor was writing in the Daily Telegraph after a vote in the House of Commons to support airstrikes in Syria against Isis.



In a piece headlined “Let’s deal with the devil”, Johnson argued the UK needed to “think much more creatively about the coalition we could build” to bring peace to Syria, and recalled a trip to Paris in which French newspapers pondered the idea of enlisting Russian help.

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“Many French people think the time has come to do a deal with their new friends the Russians – and I think that they are broadly right,” he wrote.



Johnson was at pains to condemn Vladimir Putin as a corrupt kleptocrat who was illegally occupying parts of Ukraine but added: “Does that mean it is morally impossible to work with him? I am not so sure.

“We need to focus on what we are trying to achieve. Our aims – at least, our stated aims – are to degrade and ultimately to destroy Isil [another name for Isis] as a force in Syria and Iraq. That is what it is all about.”

Syrian rebels were not very numerous, and included some Islamist militants, Johnson said. “Who else is there? The answer is obvious. There is Assad, and his army; and the recent signs are that they are making some progress. Thanks at least partly to Russian airstrikes, it looks as if the regime is taking back large parts of Homs. Al-Qaida-affiliated militants are withdrawing from some districts of the city. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so.”

It was, Johnson wrote, “time to set aside our cold war mindset”. He added: “It is just not true that whatever is good for Putin must automatically be bad for the west. We both have a clear and concrete objective – to remove the threat from Isil. Everything else is secondary.”

October 2016: sanctions on Russia

Three months into his job as foreign secretary Johnson was taking a more bullish line than the outgoing US administration of Barack Obama over targeting Russia with sanctions.

Johnson had used talks in London with John Kerry, the then US secretary of state, to push in vain for a no-bombing zone over Syria. And while Kerry did not specify the idea of sanctions against Russia, Johnson pushed for this.

“No option is in principle off the table, but be in no doubt that these so-called military options are extremely difficult and there is, to put it mildly, a lack of political appetite in most European capitals and certainly in the west for that kind of solution at present,” Johnson said.

“So we’ve got to work with the tools we have – the tools we have are diplomatic. I think the most powerful weapon we have at the moment is our ability to make President Putin and the Russians feel the consequences of what they are doing.”

January 2017: let Assad stand for re-election

With a new US president who had, at least at the time, even less appetite for engagement with Syria, Johnson took a new tack, reversing longstanding British policy to indicate Assad should be allowed to run for re-election in the event of a peace settlement.

Speaking before Theresa May’s meeting with Donald Trump in Washington, Johnson reiterated Assad would need to depart at some point.

He told the House of Lords international relations select committee: “But we are open-minded about how that happens and the timescale on which that happens.

“I have to be realistic about how the landscape has changed, and it may be that we will have to think afresh about how we handle this. The old policy, I am afraid to say, does not command much confidence.”

April 2017: new sanctions against Syria and Russia

After last week’s chemical weapons attack in northern Syria, and the retaliatory US missile strike on a Syrian airbase, Johnson returned to the tougher talk now also shared in part by the Trump administration.

He called off planned talks in Moscow with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, and went to the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting publicly calling for fresh sanctions against Russia and Syria.

“I think the Russians need a way out and a way forward,” Johnson told the BBC before the G7 talks. “If you think about the position of Vladimir Putin now, he’s toxifying the reputation of Russia by his continuing association with a government which has flagrantly poisoned its own people.”