Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson was forced to deliver a squirming account of his failure to take the UK out of the EU on 31st October yesterday.
Appearing on Sky’s Sophie Ridge on Sunday, Johnson was asked: ‘When we last spoke and you were pitching for the leadership of the Conservative Party and to be Prime Minister, you were talking about your promise to leave on 31st October.
‘You said that if it doesn’t happen “I think that what we’ll face is a political extinction and the Conservative Party will suffer very considerably from an electorate that feels they can’t trust politicians to deliver on their promises.”
‘You are now one of those politicians that people can’t trust to deliver on their promises.’
Johnson answered: ‘What we faced was the Surrender Act, which was a constitutional innovation. Nobody had ever seen any kind of law like that before.
‘What it required was the government of the UK to go against its will, to break its promises, as you’ve rightly identified and to allow the EU to decide how long we had to remain in the EU ourselves. That was a total constitutional abomination. It was an innovation.
‘It was not something that I could …’ He did not complete that sentence.
He went on: ‘Believe me, when they came to me and said: “I’m afraid you’ve got no choice Prime Minister. The Benn Act, the Surrender Act, means that you’ve got to extend.”
‘Of course I didn’t want to do it. There’s no way I wanted to do it, any more than I want to have an election now.’
He added: ‘I love being Prime Minister. I would love not to… I don’t want an election at all. I want to get on with this job. I want to get on with doing all the things I believe in.’
He went on to attack Labour, claiming: ‘The risk is, if you go for Corbyn you will have a guy who will seriously trash our economy.
‘He will put up taxes and wreck businesses and our economy and embark on a programme of huge wealth redistribution, taxation and spending that will destroy businesses in this country.’
