The road to Brexit was paved with Boris Johnson’s Euromyths

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For many in EU circles the former London mayor’s reputation for mendacity pre-dates the referendum campaign. Nobody has forgotten his activities as a journalist in Brussels, where he was correspondent for the Daily Telegraph between 1989 and 1994. The French tend to mythologise “Anglo-Saxon” journalism as the pinnacle of ethics and rigour, but Johnson was the incarnation of the gutter-press dictum: never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Indeed, this is what a grinning Johnson often remarked to his foreign counterparts when they protested about his exaggerated stories.

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He had grasped the fact that some of his compatriots had a taste for conspiracy theories, and he could provide them – with a political scapegoat that was incapable of defending itself. The EU, unlike its member states, lacks an unquestionable political authority, so any reaction from the Brussels commission could immediately be dismissed as “interference” in the internal affairs of the nation state. Attempts to rebut the myths could be easily batted away as a case of no smoke without fire.

Even worse, Johnson created a school of EU reporting: the entire British press, to varying degrees, began peddling Euromyths, fuelling the kind of Europhobia that no UK politician dared to stand up to, and which ultimately has now led to Brexit.

Johnson as politician applied similar methods: so despite a previous ambiguity about the wisdom of Britain leaving the EU, he became head of the leave campaign, never hesitating to lie or insult Britain’s EU partners if it furthered the cause. And, just as when he was a journalist, he had no problem admitting his own lies the day after the referendum victory.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/15/brexit-boris-johnson-euromyths-telegraph-brussels