Former Liverpool star Jamie Carragher gave Boris Johnson and Michael Gove the red card for recklessly using the ‘shambles’ of Brexit to further their own careers at the expense of the country.
The former Liverpool FC Vice-Captain warned Tory leadership hopeful Boris Johnson that if he becomes Prime Minister he’d be unable to visit the Liverpool – because of his previous comments about Hillsborough.
He also said Boris Johnson is a ”phoney” and described Brexit as a “shambles”.
Jamie who played at Champions League winners Liverpool FC for his entire 17 year career as a defender said: “The thing that pisses me off is that, I think people have jumped on this bandwagon of Brexit, for their own, basically to become Prime Minister.
“Gove and Johnson, Johnson didn’t even want to leave, they jumped on the back of it because they knew Cameron would have to go if he lost it.
“Gove then back-stabs Johnson, to try and get it [PM] but doesn’t get it.
“If he [Johnson] gets in, there was stuff I was reading about him the other day about stuff he’s said about Hillsborough, saying self pity city, like that, I’m just thinking that he wouldn’t be able to visit the city [Liverpool].”
The comments that Boris Johnson was forced to apologise to the city of Liverpool for were published in the right wing Spectator magazine he edited.
An inquest into the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, concluded 96 football fans who died were unlawfully killed.
But in an editorial column in 2004, the Spectator argued that the murder of Kenneth Bigley by terrorists in Iraq, was down to him being from Liverpool and blamed the victims of the football disaster for their own fate.
The editorial, which Johnson denied penning himself when editor, said: “The extreme reaction to Mr Bigley’s murder is fed by the fact that he was a Liverpudlian. Liverpool is a handsome city with a tribal sense of community. A combination of economic misfortune — its docks were, fundamentally, on the wrong side of England when Britain entered what is now the European Union — and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians.
“They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it. Part of this flawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, there by deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society.
“The deaths of more than 50 Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough in 1989 was undeniably a greater tragedy than the single death, however horrible, of Mr Bigley; but that is no excuse for Liverpool’s failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon. The police became a convenient scapegoat, and the Sun newspaper a whipping-boy for daring, albeit in a tasteless fashion, to hint at the wider causes of the incident.”
Johnson apologised for the editorial in 2012, insisting: “I was very, very sorry in 2004 that the Spectator did carry an editorial that partially repeated those allegations, I apologised then and I apologise now.”
Jamie Carragher made his blistering comments about the contender to replace Theresa May as PM in a podcast with Alistair Campbell, the ex-Downing Street Press Secretary, and his daughter Grace, a comedian and activist.
The podcast, titled Football, Feminism and Everything in Between, is available tomorrow.
Jamie who made his 737th appearance for Liverpool in all competitions on 19 May 2013, also said: “The two biggest managers for me in my career were Gerard Houllier for six years and Rafa Benitez for six years.
“So for 12 years of my career there were those two managers, the two biggest influences on me, love them, great respect for them, but I always say the man who come into Liverpool who I was so impressed with was not the man who left.
“The job had killed them, it had broken them, they were different men, paranoid at the end, doing strange decisions, things they would come with in the press, you were sat at home thinking “oh my god no”.
“You know they’re just not the same person, and I just think it’s what the job does to them.”
Jamie also added that women know as much about football as men but he ”doesn’t see a woman premier league manager in the next 10 years”.
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