Boris Johnson claimed that Vote Leave would lose the EU referendum just minutes before appearing on television to declare his intention to campaign to exit, David Cameron has claimed.
In an interview with ITV News, the former UK prime minister disclosed that Johnson had told him the campaign to leave the EU would be “crushed like a toad under the harrow”. Minutes later, Johnson appeared outside his then family home in Islington, north London, to say he would join the Vote Leave team during the 2016 referendum.
The timing of their exchange will be seized upon as further evidence that Johnson was surprised by the eventual result which brought down Cameron and has finally led to Johnson himself taking over as PM.
Cameron said: “I spoke to him [Johnson] at length about it and I said, ‘Boris you’ve never been in favour of leaving the EU, so why now there’s a better deal on offer, are you in favour of leaving now?’”
“He thought that the Brexit vote would be lost but he didn’t want to give up the chance of being on the romantic, patriotic, nationalistic side of Brexit.
“Minutes before he went out to explain why he was going to be on the side of Brexit, he sent me a text saying, ‘Brexit will be crushed like a toad under the harrow’ but I can only conclude that – he’d never argued for it before – he thought it was going to lose and that’s why he made the choice.”
Cameron believed Johnson thought the Brexit vote would be lost but but backing it would be better for his long-term premiership ambitions.
“He’d never argued for it before and so why argue for it when there’s a better deal on offer – and as I put to him; there will be another treaty; another renegotiation. You might well be the prime minister at the time when that comes about and you can get an even better deal for Britain,” Cameron told ITV.
In the interview which had been planned to coincide with the release of his memoirs, Cameron reiterated he did not think Johnson was right to suspend parliament.
“We’ll wait for what the courts say. I don’t think it was illegal. It looked to me, from the outside, like rather sharp practice of trying to restrict the debate and I thought it was actually from his point of view probably counterproductive.
“In the end, we have to work through parliament, and you can’t deny the arithmetic of parliament and the majorities there are in parliament,” he said.
Cameron repeated his opinion that the 21 Tory MPs who lost the whip after voting against the government in a key Brexit vote last month should be offered a way back into the fold.
“I hope that Boris will get a deal in Brussels, he will come back, try and bring parliament together to back that deal – I don’t see why those 21 people shouldn’t be restored to the Conservative whip. “If they’re not, I really worry about what could happen,” he said.
