One of the foremost architects of Britain’s split with the European Union had to be told what the customs union was after spending years campaigning for the UK to opt out of it.
Shocking revelations unveiled on the BBC’s Politics Live show this week suggest that Boris Johnson’s knowledge wasn’t quite up to scratch with how membership of the EU works.
According to Labour MP Barry Gardiner, he was forced to explain the customs union mechanism after the Brexit referendum had already happened.
He claims that, sometime between 2016 and 2018, Johnson stopped him in a corridor in parliament and asked him in his usual bumbling fashion: “Tell me, tell me. What is all this stuff about a customs union?”
When Gardiner claims to have asked Boris what he meant by his question, Boris apparently then asked, “Well what is a customs union?”
Damningly, Gardiner finished off his anecdote by referencing the chaotic Northern Irish backstop Johnson was responsible for negotiating.
“He did not know, as the foreign secretary, what a customs union was, and that explains why we got into the problems that we then got into with Northern Ireland.”
Watch the clip in full below: