This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Boris Johnson would have been sacked from the cabinet by now if the Conservatives had a parliamentary majority, a senior Tory has said.

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Ken Clarke warned Johnson to stop taking advantage of the party’s situation after the foreign secretary wrote a newspaper article that some have interpreted as a leadership bid. He used the article to repeat his discredited claim that Britain will claw back £350m a week after leaving the EU.

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“Sounding off personally in this way is totally unhelpful and he shouldn’t exploit the fact that [Theresa May] hasn’t got a majority in parliament,” Clarke said on Tuesday. “And he knows perfectly well that, normally, a foreign secretary would be sacked instantly for doing that.”

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the prime minister was not in a position to sack Johnson, but said the foreign secretary should keep his views on the Brexit negotiations to the confines of private discussions with cabinet colleagues, rather than airing them in public.

Johnson, a prominent figure in the leave campaign during the referendum, set off a fresh row over the government’s approach to Brexit by claiming at the weekend that, “once we have settled our accounts, we will take back control of roughly £350m per week”.

Vote Leave made the claim central to its campaign last year, despite it being discredited then and since.

Q&A What was wrong with the claim that the UK sends the EU £350m a week? Show Hide The claim that Britain “sends the EU £350m a week” is wrong because: The rebate negotiated by Margaret Thatcher is removed before anything is paid ​​to Brussels. In 2014, this meant Britain actually “sent” £276m a week to Brussels; in 2016, the figure was £252m.

Slightly less than half that sum – the money that Britain does send to the EU – either comes back to the UK to be spent mainly on agriculture, regional aid, research and community projects, or gets counted towards ​the country’s international aid target. Regardless of how much the UK “saves” by leaving the EU, the claim that a future government would be able to spend it on the NHS is highly misleading because: It assumes the government would choose to spend on the NHS the money it currently gets back from the EU (£115m a week in 2014), thus cutting f​unding for​ agriculture, regional development and research by that amount.



It assumes​ the UK economy will not be adversely affected by Brexit, which many economists doubt.

The repeated invocation of it led to a public argument between Johnson and the head of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir David Norgrove, who accused the foreign secretary of a “clear misuse of official statistics”. Johnson in turn accused Norgrove of a “wilful distortion of the text of my article”.

A Labour member of the public administration and constitutional affairs committee has since asked that the committee summon Johnson and Norgrove to give evidence over their dispute.

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Johnson was accused of making life more difficult for the UK’s Brexit negotiating team with his 4,000-word article, which was not cleared by Downing Street.



During a visit to Canada on Monday, May dismissed Johnson’s claim and said: “This government is driven from the front, and we’re all going to the same destination.” The home secretary, Amber Rudd, had earlier accused Johnson of “backseat driving”.

Clarke, a prominent remain supporter, accused Johnson of “repeating one of the more simplistic and dishonest arguments of the hardline leavers during the referendum campaign”.

“Personal publicity and campaigning by the foreign secretary is actually just an irrelevant nuisance.”



He said his Tory colleagues had already said enough about Johnson, who published the article less than a week before May’s planned speech on Brexit in Florence on Friday.

Clarke suggested Johnson’s colleagues should encourage him to “make some more serious contributions on wider foreign policy” and to keep his views on Brexit within the privacy of cabinet meetings and conversations with the prime minister.

Referring to claims that Johnson had set out a vision for Brexit in his article, Clarke said: “All this ‘if you jump off the cliff and spread out your arms, you’ll find you’re flying up to the broad blue yonder’, that’s not a policy.

“When you’re foreign secretary, you’re a leading member of a government. The foreign policy you propound is the policy of the government, which you’ve agreed with your colleagues. It’s the only sensible, grownup way to run a government.”

William Hague, the former Tory leader, wrote in the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday that senior ministers lacked coordination on Brexit and it was time they settled on an agreed plan.

If May’s speech in Florence failed to unite the cabinet, Jeremy Corbyn would be prime minister, Lord Hague said.

Johnson said on Monday afternoon that he accepted May was in charge of the negotiations and played down suggestions he was at odds with cabinet colleagues. He said his article had been intended as an “opening drum roll” to May’s speech.

“There is one driver in this car. It’s Theresa. What I am trying to do is sketch out what I think is the incredible exciting landscape of the destination ahead. Let’s not try and find rows when there really aren’t rows,” he said.

Johnson made clear, however, that he stood by his arguments over the transition period for Britain to leave the EU. “It is pretty important that it shouldn’t be too long. We certainly don’t want to be paying in extortionate sums for access to the single market. They wouldn’t pay for access to our market.”