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Boris Johnson is “an inveterate and unrepentant liar” who feels he is not bound by the same rules as everyone else, says Sylvie Bermann, a former French ambassador to the UK during the Brexit vote, in a new book.
He also claims that some Brexit supporters are consumed by hatred of Germany and seize the myth that they liberated Europe on their own, describing Brexit as a triumph of emotion over reason, won by a campaign full of lies in the that negative attitudes toward migration were exploited by figures like Johnson and Michael Gove.
Bermann, who served as French ambassador to the United Kingdom from 2014 to 2017 and has been one of the highest ranking diplomats in the French diplomatic service, including as ambassador to China and Russia, assesses Britain’s handling of the Covid pandemic. as one of the worst in the world along with that of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. She predicts that Johnson will seek to use Covid to mask the true economic cost of Brexit on the UK economy.
Johnson, he says, comes from a class at Eton and Oxford University who believe they have a right to use language to provoke. Describing him as intelligent and charming, he says that he uses “lies to embellish reality, as a game and as an instrument of power. The end justifies the means. It has no rules. “
When asked at a Royal United Services Institute think tank event about his description of him as an unrepentant liar, he said: “He would not object to being called that. You know you are a liar. He has always played with it. He was fired from his first position for that reason.
In his book Goodbye Britannia, he seeks to define the psyche that led to Brexit. She describes “Brexiters reciting a story in which the UK is never defeated, never invaded.” It suggests a country that believes it won World War II without help, liberating the continent and deserving of gratitude.
Referring to the more than 22 million Russians who died in the war, he says that “this does not disturb the discourse of the Brexiters who traffic in the myth that the United Kingdom liberated Europe alone and does not need anyone.”
He adds that France does owe a debt of gratitude to the British, but “it is fair to remember that they were not alone and you cannot live with a history that stopped in June 1944”.
“The corollary of England saving Europe,” he adds, “is hatred for Germany and contempt for cowardice; the term is often used for those who let themselves be occupied, not to mention that they collaborated.
The British account of World War II, conveyed in films like Dunkirk, he says, led to a loss of confidence in the EU as an instrument of peace.
He admits that he did not believe that David Cameron’s government lost the referendum on Brexit, noting that both sides of the debate had told him the same thing. In retrospect, he saw the defeat as the first crisis of electoral democracy and the harbinger of populism that has been followed in the United States and Europe.
“David Cameron always told other heads of government that he would win and refused any help from the EU countries,” he told Rusi. She said that if Cameron had warned the EU that it was going to lose, Europe would have come up with a new offer on migration. British ministers told him they could win with up to 60% of the vote.
In the book he asks: “How this country whose influence had been decisive in Brussels, which insolently rolled out the red carpet for French businessmen and which Xi Jinping had chosen in October 2015 as the gateway to Europe, at the dawn of a period How have you promised to sink? “
She predicts: “Boris Johnson’s temptation will be to hide the Brexit bill under the Covid rug, valued at over £ 200 billion by 2020, almost as much as the UK’s total contribution to the European Union since its accession in 1973. , which was 215 billion pounds. “
She says it is inevitable that the UK will now struggle to find influence outside the EU, and has a Scottish independence referendum on its head.
She says she believes the EU would feel compelled to enter into talks with Scotland should a referendum vote to leave the UK, but that is not the official EU position, partly due to pressure from Spain. Madrid fears the knock-on shock among Catalan separatists if an independent Scotland were allowed to join the EU.
