Conservative leadership hopeful Boris Johnson has defended his infamous description of black people in Africa bearing “watermelon smiles” as satire.

The frontrunner to be Britain’s next prime minister was asked about a 2002 column for The Daily Telegraph in which he used the racist phrase.

When reminded of his remark on Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday, the Tory candidate said he had used the term “in a wholly satirical way”.

Asked whether he would “say anything to get a laugh”, Mr Johnson responded: “If you look at each and every one of those columns and articles, you’ll find the quotations have been wrenched out of context, in many cases made to mean the opposite of what was intended.”

Mr Johnson’s notorious column – in which he also used the racist term “piccaninnies” – was an attempt to attack then-prime minister Tony Blair and his apparent ability to charm foreign leaders on trips abroad.

Biggest lies told by Boris Johnson Show all 5 1 /5 Biggest lies told by Boris Johnson Biggest lies told by Boris Johnson Made-up quote for The Times Johnson was sacked from The Times newspaper in the late 1980s after he fabricated a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas, for a front-page article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace. “The trouble was that somewhere in my copy I managed to attribute to Colin the view that Edward II and Piers Gaveston would have been cavorting together in the Rose Palace,” he claimed. Alas, Gaveston was executed 13 years before the palace was built. “It was very nasty,” Mr Johnson added, before attempting to downplay it as nothing more than a schoolboy blunder. PA Biggest lies told by Boris Johnson Sacked from cabinet over cheating lie Michael Howard gave Boris Johnson two new jobs after becoming leader of the Conservatives in 2003 – party vice-chairman and shadow arts minister. He was sacked from both positions in November 2004 after assuring Mr Howard that tabloid reports of his affair with Spectator columnist Petronella Wyatt were false and an “inverted pyramid of piffle”. When the story was found to be true, he refused to resign. PA Biggest lies told by Boris Johnson Broken promise to boss In 1999 Johnson was offered editorship of The Spectator by owner Conrad Black on the condition that he would not stand as an MP while in the post. In 2001 he stood - and was elected - MP for Henley, though Black did allow him to continue as editor despite calling "ineffably duplicitous" PA Biggest lies told by Boris Johnson Misrepresenting the people of Liverpool As editor of The Spectator, he was forced to apologise for an article in the magazine which blamed drunken Liverpool fans for the 1989 Hillsborough disaster and suggested that the people of the city were wallowing in their victim status. “Anyone, journalist or politician, should say sorry to the people of Liverpool – as I do – for misrepresenting what happened at Hillsborough,” he said. PA Biggest lies told by Boris Johnson ‘I didn’t say anything about Turkey’ Johnson claimed in January, that he did not mention Turkey during the EU referendum campaign. In fact, he co-signed a letter stating that “the only way to avoid having common borders with Turkey is to vote Leave and take back control”. The Vote Leave campaign also produced a poster reading: “Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU”

Writing about a prospective trip by Mr Blair to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mr Johnson stated: “No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.”

The same column includes the line: “It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies.”

Following his claim his remarks were satirical, Dawn Butler MP, Labour’s shadow women and equalities secretary, said: “Boris Johnson’s defence of his racist and homophobic comments is despicable and disappointing … He is not fit to be prime minister of our country.”

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Mr Johnson previously apologised for the 2002 comments while running for mayor of London in 2008. Without claiming then that he had been attempting satire, he did claim his words had been taken out of context.

“I do feel very sad that people have been so offended by these words and I’m sorry that I’ve caused this offence,” he said. “But if you look at the article as written they really do not bear the construction that you’re putting on them.”

Last year Mr Johnson was cleared of breaching the Conservative Party’s code of conduct by comparing veiled Muslim women to letter boxes and bank robbers.

Describing the veil as “oppressive”, Mr Johnson wrote in an August 2018 Telegraph column that it was “absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes”.

An independent panel investigating the comments decided he had been “respectful and tolerant” and was entitled to use “satire” in his articles.

The panel found that his language could be considered “provocative” but claimed it would be “unwise to censor excessively the language of party representatives or the use of satire to emphasise a viewpoint, particularly a viewpoint that is not subject to criticism”.

In the same Sunday morning interview, Mr Johnson admitted he feels a “deep sense of anguish” over the case of jailed British-Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, but said responsibility lies with the Iranian revolutionary guard.