Deranged is right..

Boris Johnson: Chequers plan is ‘deranged’

‘Unlike the prime minister, I campaigned for Brexit,’ former foreign secretary says.

By SAIM SAEED

Former British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit proposals “entirely preposterous” and “deranged” in his first newspaper interview since quitting the U.K. Cabinet in July.

Speaking to the Sunday Times in a curtain-raiser for this week’s Conservative Party conference, Johnson said: “The idea that we could ask customs officers in Dubrovnik and Santander to charge British-only tariffs is deranged, and nobody thinks it can work.”

Part of Theresa May’s proposal is to have customs officials collect different tariffs on products depending on whether their destination is the EU or the U.K., which Johnson warned may cause “economic and political damage to the U.K. … It surrenders control.”

Johnson also said May has politically mismanaged the debate about the Irish border in Brexit negotiations.

The U.K. agreed an Irish border “backstop” agreement with the EU in December 2017, as a last resort to avoid a “hard border” between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland after Brexit. Johnson said May never believed in the backstop, and also failed to implement a border plan of her own.

“I remember going in to see the PM and her advisers and being absolutely reassured that this was just a form of words that was necessary to float the negotiations off the rocks,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s interview comes on the back of a 4,500 word essay in the Telegraph on his Brexit plans. May gave her own interview to the Times, announcing a crackdown on foreign home buyers in U.K. and a plan for a festival to celebrate post-Brexit Britain.

Johnson is scheduled to speak to conference delegates on Tuesday, followed by Theresa May on Wednesday.

In the interview, Johnson painted himself as a Brexiteer encouraging the prime minister to deliver on the British public’s desire to quit the union. “I am like a loyal and faithful labrador that is relentlessly returning to her an object that she has mistakenly chucked away in the form of her own first instincts about how to do this.”

“Unlike the prime minister, I campaigned for Brexit. Unlike the prime minister, I fought for this, I believe in it,” Johnson said.

Johnson proposed delaying the high-speed rail project, known as HS2, which connects the north and south of Great Britain in favor of an east-west line that connects northern regions. The former foreign secretary also proposed building a bridge between Ireland and Great Britain. “Why don’t we? Why don’t we?” Johnson said.

One possible reason is Beaufort’s Dyke, a trench in the Irish Sea between Scotland and Northern Ireland, which the British government has used as a munitions dump for around 100 years. The BBC reported in 2004 that the U.K. Ministry of Defence dumped more than 1 million tons of weapons there and in nearby shallow coastal waters.

“There is so much more we can do, and what grieves me about the current approach to Brexit is that we are just in danger of not believing in ourselves, not believing in Britain,” Johnson said.