After speech attacking PM, ex-minister claims he ‘didn’t say anything about Turkey’ in 2016

Boris Johnson has wrongly claimed that he “didn’t make any remarks about Turkey, mate” during the EU referendum campaign, in comments that overshadowed a speech in Staffordshire intended to burnish his leadership credentials.

The former foreign secretary’s clumsy attempt to rewrite history eclipsed a speech highly critical of Theresa May’s Brexit negotiating strategy, and earned him criticism for his refusal to disown or even recognise what he once said.

While taking questions after his speech, Johnson was asked about his views on immigration and why he and the Vote Leave campaign he fronted had pushed so heavily the potential impact on immigration of Turkey being allowed to join the European Union.

Johnson initially said: “I didn’t say anything about Turkey in the referendum campaign. I didn’t say a thing about Turkey,” and began to argue that he was “in the camp” of those who supported the principle of immigration.

Asked to disown the idea of Turkish EU membership as a threat or scare tactic, Johnson said he had nothing to apologise for. “Since I made no remarks, I can’t disown them,” he said. Pressed again, he added: “I didn’t make any remarks about Turkey, mate.”

However, during the 2016 referendum campaign, Johnson repeatedly raised the idea that Turkey – whose application to join the EU had stalled – could eventually become an EU member and its citizens would eventually able to migrate to the UK.

A week before referendum day in June 2016, Johnson and Michael Gove wrote a joint letter to David Cameron claiming that the government supported the idea of Turkish membership of the EU. “The public will draw the reasonable conclusion that the only way to avoid having common borders with Turkey is to vote leave and take back control on 23 June,” the letter stated.

And during the BBC’s EU referendum debate, two days before the poll, Johnson said: “It’s government policy to accelerate Turkish accession.” A couple of weeks earlier, interviewed on the Andrew Marr Show, he said: “Frankly, I don’t mind whether Turkey joins the EU, provided the UK leaves the EU.”

Warnings about the consequences of a possible Turkish accession to the EU were a core message in the campaign run by Vote Leave, alongside the discredited claim that Brexit would allow an extra £350m a week to be spent on the NHS.

Johnson was the figurehead of Vote Leave, easily its most popular political backer. But despite his central role in the campaign, Johnson tried to claim on Friday that he was somewhat peripheral.

“You do me too much honour. I was happy to support leave, and I do and I did,” he said after the speech, given at the headquarters of JCB, the digger and tractor maker, which is owned by a Vote Leave and Conservative donor, Anthony Bamford.

Unlike Johnson, Gove has partially apologised for Vote Leave’s tactics. When asked, for a political book published in the summer, if he had been happy making appeals to “some very low sentiments”, Gove replied: “If it had been left entirely to me, the leave campaign would have a slightly different feel.”

Turkey’s EU membership talks have been in the deep-freeze for years, with no imminent prospect of change. Relations worsened in 2016 after the country’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, cracked down on his opponents after a failed coup. Every EU member state holds a veto over Turkey’s EU membership, contrary to the claims of Brexit supporters during the referendum.

Johnson has some Turkish ancestry, but this has not stopped him from getting into trouble when talking about the country. He once called Erdoğan a “wankerer” in an offensive limerick that won him a competition organised by the Spectator magazine, of which he was formerly the editor.

Ditch Brexit, German leaders urge UK in paean to ale and milky tea Read more

The row about Johnson and Vote Leave’s use of the Turkey issue to persuade the public to vote in favour of Brexit overshadowed an undisguised leadership pitch in which Johnson accused May of “wasting our time” trying to get MPs to change their minds about her “ex-deal”.

He said: “I fear that at present we are facing the wrong direction and trying to change the wrong bit of the landscape, and if we spend the next few weeks hydraulically straining to move MPs from one camp to the other, pointlessly trying to get Corbyn to parley at No 10, we will be wasting our time.”

Pointedly reminding his audience that “the prime minister’s deal was thrown out by a record 230 votes, the largest majority in parliamentary history”, Johnson argued that May should go back the EU “fortified with the emphatic and conclusive mandate of parliament and demand real change to that backstop”.

The former minister, who resigned last summer unhappy with the drift of May’s negotiating strategy, said the UK should hold back “at least half of the £39bn” that the prime minister had agreed to pay Brussels until it agreed to a deal on revised terms.

May has been meeting some party leaders and Tory backbenchers as she tries to work out how to resolve the Brexit impasse. Allies of Johnson said he was not on the invite list. Few believe the EU will concede on the Irish backstop.

Boris Johnson and Turkey: what he said

“I am very pro-Turkish, but what I certainly can’t imagine is a situation in which 77 million [his estimate] of my fellow Turks and those of Turkish origin can come here without any checks at all. That is really mad” – Daily Express, 18 April 2016

“Frankly, I don’t mind whether Turkey joins the EU, provided the UK leaves the EU” – BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, 5 June 2016

“The public will draw the reasonable conclusion that the only way to avoid having common borders with Turkey is to vote leave and take back control on 23 June” – letter with Michael Gove to David Cameron, 16 June 2016

“It’s government policy to accelerate Turkish accession” – BBC EU referendum debate, 21 June 2016

What Dominic Cummings, Vote Leave’s campaign director, said on 9 January 2017: “If Boris, Gove and Gisela [Stuart, Vote Leave’s chair] had not supported us and picked up the baseball bat marked ‘Turkey/NHS/£350m’ with five weeks to go, then 650,000 votes might have been lost.”