A mere 20 years ago, newly-elected Tory leader Boris Johnson, was a relatively obscure Daily Telegraph journalist - now, he’s new British Prime Minister.
Johnson's rise to the highest echelon of UK politics has been extremely public, and he’s frequently made headlines on the basis of his controversial remarks alone.
On Hillary Clinton
- “She's got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.”
On Barack Obama
- “The part-Kenyan President [has an] ancestral dislike of the British empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.”
On Tony Blair
- "It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall."
On Francois Hollande
- “If he wants to administer punishment beatings to anybody who seeks to escape [the EU], in the manner of some World War Two movie, I don’t think that is the way forward, and it’s not in the interests of our friends and partners…It seems absolutely incredible to me member states of the EU should be seriously contemplating the reintroduction of tariffs.”
On Recep Tayyip Erdogan
- “There was a young fellow from Ankara
Who was a terrific wankerer.
Till he sowed his wild oats
With the help of a goat
But he didn’t even stop to thankera.”
On UKIP
- “I can hardly condemn Ukip as a bunch of boss-eyed, foam-flecked euro hysterics, when I have been sometimes not far short of boss-eyed, foam-flecked hysteria myself.”
On the Conservative Party
- “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.”
On Libya
- “It's got real potential and brilliant young people who want to do all sorts of tech. There's a group of UK business people who want to invest in Sirte, near where Gaddafi was actually captured and executed. They have a got brilliant vision to turn Sirte, with the help of the municipality of Sirte, into the next Dubai. The only thing they’ve got to do is clear the dead bodies.”
On Burqas
- “If a female student turned up at school or at a university lecture looking like a bank robber then ditto: those in authority should be allowed to converse openly with those that they are being asked to instruct.”
On Becoming Prime Minister
- “My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive."
On Being Rich
- “We should be helping all those who can to join the ranks of the super-rich, and we should stop any bashing or moaning or preaching or bitching and simply give thanks for the prodigious sums of money they are contributing to the tax revenues of this country, that enable us to look after our sick and our elderly and to build roads, railways and schools.”
On London
- "London is a fantastic creator of jobs - but many of these jobs are going to people who don't originate in this country."
On Journalism
- "It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time."
On Cannabis
- "It was jolly nice. But apparently it is very different these days. Much stronger. I've become very illiberal about it. I don't want my kids to take drugs."
On a ‘United States of Europe’
- “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.”
