Boris Johnson has announced that he will back Theresa May’s Brexit deal after the prime minister promised to quit once the UK leaves the EU with her deal.
The former foreign secretary, who walked out of May’s government over her Brexit plan, told a meeting of the eurosceptic European Research Group (ERG) that he would now support the withdrawal agreement, a source confirmed.
His move comes after months of criticising the deal. In August of last year he said May’s Brexit strategy had put the UK constitution in a “suicide vest” and handed the detonator to Brussels’ chief negotiator Michel Barnier, in column for the Mail on Sunday.
The extraordinary comments provoked an immediate backlash from Tory critics, with Sir Alan Duncan calling it “one of the most disgusting moments in modern British politics”.
In the same piece he also said the UK’s alternative backstop and the Chequers plan would both mean “agreeing to take EU rules, with no say on those rules”, leaving the country a “vassal state”.
Though not speaking specifically about the deal, just this week Johnson used his Telegraph newspaper column to blast the prime minister’s “chicken” government and appealed to her to “channel the spirit of Moses” and tell Brussels to “let my people go”.
He wrote: “We are not leaving this Friday because the government has chickened out. For almost three years every Tory MP has chirruped the mantra that no deal would be better than a bad deal,” he wrote.
“I believed that the government was sincere in making that claim, and I believed that the PM genuinely had the 29th of March inscribed in her heart.
“I am afraid I misread the government. We have blinked. We have baulked. We have bottled it completely.”
Johnson’s decision to switch sides is likely to inspire more Tory Brexiteers to fall in line with the PM.
