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BORIS Johnson's appointment as Foreign Secretary has raised a few eyebrows after he blazed a trail of high-profile gaffes and controversies on the international stage.

It is just a few months since the blond Brexiteer-in-chief was criticised for describing US president Barack Obama as a "part-Kenyan" who harboured an "ancestral dislike" of Britain after he came out in favour of the Remain campaign.

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(Image: Getty)

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Watch: Who else has joined Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet so far?

Labour MP Chuka Umunna, whose father was Nigerian, tweeted after Mr Johnson's new role was revealed:

If Hilary Clinton takes over from Obama that meeting could prove tetchy too after Johnson previously described the democratic candidate as having "a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital".

(Image: Reuters)

Relations with Turkey are also going to prove difficult after Johnson won £1,000 in a competition run by the Spectator magazine for the 'most offensive Erdogan poem'.

In his poem Johnson had described Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan having sex with a goat and called him a "w***erer".

Large parts of the Middle East could be off limits too.

Last November local officials called off a visit to Palestine on safety grounds after the then London mayor told an audience in Tel Aviv that a trade boycott of Israeli goods was "completely crazy".

(Image: Getty)

The month previously he had made a more light-hearted gaffe when he was filmed wiping out a 10-year-old Japanese schoolboy during a game of street rugby on a visit to Tokyo.

In 2008 he apologised for a Daily Telegraph column in which he described the Queen being greeted in Commonwealth countries by "flag-waving piccaninnies" - a derogatory term for black children.

The same column mentioned then Prime Minister Tony Blair being greeted by "tribal warriors who will all break out in watermelon smiles" on an upcoming visit to the Congo.

The same year he offended his hosts while visiting the Beijing Olympics, when he said it was a misconception that table tennis had been invented by the Chinese and had in fact developed from a Victorian English game called "whiff-whaff".