Boris Johnson has described men who go to fight with Islamic State as “literally wankers” who watch porn because they can’t meet women.

Citing a report from MI5 on the profile of jihadis, the mayor of London said: “If you look at all the psychological profiling about bombers, they typically will look at porn. They are literally wankers. Severe onanists.”



Johnson described British jihadis as “tortured” and “very badly adjusted in their relations with women”, something he said was a symptom of “their feeling of being a failure and that the world is against them”.

“They are not making it with girls and so they turn to other forms of spiritual comfort – which of course is no comfort.”

He continued: “They are just young men in desperate need of self-esteem who do not have a particular mission in life, who feel that they are losers and this thing makes them feel strong – like winners.”



Johnson, who is one of the leading candidates to be the next Tory leader, made the comments in an interview with the Sun newspaper a week after he visited the Kurdish regional capital of Irbil to see the Peshmerga fighters who are pushing back against the Isis insurgency in Iraq. The visit, during which he posed for pictures with an AK47, was interpreted as an attempt to demonstrate his credentials as an international statesman.

Speaking on Sky News later on Friday, Johnson defended his comments, saying they weren’t “remotely controversial”.

He argued that there was plenty of evidence to support his point: “The crucial thing is that these are young men, principally young men who are growing up without much sense of success in their lives, without a feeling that the world holds much for them and … their problems need addressing in all sorts of ways.”



Johnson, who is likely to return to the Commons in May as MP for the safe Tory seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, said the best solution to the problem of young men becoming radicalised was to provide them with jobs. London had much lower youth unemployment than Paris, where 12 were killed in an attack by Islamic fundamentalists at the beginning of January, he added.



“The whole thing is ludicrous,” said Charlie Winter from the Quilliam Foundation, an organisation set up by ex-Islamists to challenge and counter extremism.

He said it was “completely unquantifiable” to try to second guess whether a jihadist was suffering from isolation and loneliness.

“To imply that they don’t have social skills is again a generalisation … that has no evidence behind it. They are integrated, many of them are very well educated.”

Mohammed Khaliel, director of the community cohesion organisation Islamix, said: “These are the type of comments you’d expect from the EDL, the BNP and possibly Ukip.

“Somebody in a position of responsibility should be making responsible comments,” he said. “For somebody allegedly aspiring to be prime minister of the country, is this really the style and level of comments that he should be making?



“He’s trying for election in Uxbridge and he thinks any publicity is good publicity, but he doesn’t care about the discord that it causes in the community.”



A spokesman for David Cameron said Johnson had an “ever lovely turn of phrase”, but declined to say whether the prime minister endorsed the comments. “You’ve heard the prime minister talk a great deal around the terror threat,” he said.



The chancellor, George Osborne, said during a visit to Portsmouth on Friday that while Johnson’s remarks were colourful he was “right not to be nice about these people”.

Johnson has provoked controversy in the past with comments on Islamic extremism. Writing in his column in the Daily Telegraph last August, the mayor said that jihadist men, such as the member of Isis dubbed Jihadi John who killed the American journalist James Foley, are told that they will be welcomed in heaven by 72 virgins if they die in battle.

Johnson wrote: “I suspect most of us don’t give a monkey’s what happens to this prat in heaven, whether he meets virgins or raisins – we just want someone to come along with a bunker buster and effect an introduction as fast as possible.”



Referring to Johnson’s interview in the Sun, the Conservative party chairman, Grant Shapps, said he could use all sorts of words to describe “any Brit who leaves and fights against this country’s interests like that”.



“I think the mood has decisively shifted in favour of people saying: ‘This country will give all of us our education for free, it will give all of us our health for free, but don’t expect to go off and fight against this country’s interests and expect to swan back in’. I think Boris’s comments will have been driven by that.”

The government’s counter-terror and security bill, which is currently passing through parliament, would create extra powers to block some terrorist suspects from returning to Britain from Syria and Iraq. The bill’s terms allow a person’s passport to be invalidated for up to two years, preventing them from returning to the UK during that time.

In the Sun interview, Johnson agreed with comments made by the culture secretary, Sajid Javid, that Muslim communities face a special burden to help to track down Islamist extremists. Johnson said clerics had not been “persuasive in the right way with these people”.

He said he wanted to hear a “proper angry Islamic theological denunciation of what is going wrong”.



“We won’t succeed if western politicians just go around bashing and blaming Islam; that is hopeless … This problem can only be addressed if Muslim authorities and clerics find a powerful and compelling way of setting up an alternative narrative for young people that makes this seem irrelevant.”