MEDIA WATCH: UK’s new diplomat, king of gaffe’s

BORIS JOHNSON is the UK’s new Foreign Secretary following his appointment by Theresa May on Wednesday July 13.

The promotion was greeted with incredulity by many, partly because the MP, who will now be Britain’s top diplomat, is not known for his diplomacy. He is prone to gaffes, however, and appears deliberately to court offence in his journalism writes The Week

A video clip from politics TV channel C-Span, in which the US State Department’s Mark Toner visibly suppresses laughter on being told about the appointment, has already gone viral.

Here are five presidents, nations and young children previously offended by Johnson:

US President Barack Obama: Earlier this year, Johnson provoked a backlash by wondering in The Sun whether the “part-Kenyan president” had removed a bust of Churchill from the White House because of his “ancestral dislike of the British empire”.

Johnson was “hounded” on Twitter for the remarks, but unfairly so, according to Brendan O’Neill, his colleague at The Spectator. The politician had only written the truth, he said, Obama does have Kenyan ancestry and the bust was removed from the Oval Office.

The Palestinian territories: Johnson was forced to cut short a trip to Palestine late last year after making pro-Israel comments during a trip to the Middle East. A meeting with a Palestinian youth group was cancelled over what they called his “inaccurate, misinformed and disrespectful remarks” about a boycott on Israeli goods, which the then London mayor made in Israel just before he travelled to the state, The Guardian reported.

Johnson told an audience in Tel Aviv that a UK boycott was “completely crazy” and supported only by “corduroy-jacketed, snaggletoothed, lefty academics”.

Toki Sekiguchi, aged ten: Last autumn, while visiting Tokyo, Johnson found himself apologising to Japanese schoolboy Toki Sekiguchi after he “bulldozed” him to the ground in what was supposed to be a friendly game of street rugby.

Nine years earlier, Johnson head-butted the German international Maurizio Gaudino during a charity football match, while in 2015, he tripped a small child while playing football in London.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey: This April, Johnson entered a competition in The Spectator to write an obscene and defamatory limerick about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to make a point about freedom of speech.

He won with five lines, which did not actually name Erdogan, but told the story of a “young fellow from Ankara” who made love to a goat. What Johnson did with the £1,000 cash prize has not revealed.

The entire continent of Africa: In a 2002 column for The Spectator, Johnson said of Africa: “The continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that [the British] were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.”

Defending British colonialists from the charge of importing unsuitable crops, he added: “If left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain.”

Johnson quoted an un-named “British official” as telling him: “I’ve been in Africa for ages and there’s one thing I just don’t get. Why are they so brutal to each other? We may treat them like children, but it’s not because of us that they behave like the children in Lord of the Flies.”

The politician concluded: “The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty.”