Boris Johnson branded Sir Keir Starmer the ‘orange ball-chewing manacled gimp of Brussels’ and said the Prime Minister’s ‘hopelessly one-sided’ deal with the EU should not be signed.
In a furious blast, the former Tory leader branded the agreement struck by his Labour rival an ‘appalling sell-out’ and accused him of breaking his promise not to go back on Brexit.
He said it would make the UK the ‘non-voting punk’ of the European Commission as the country will have to accept Brussels’ edicts without having any say on them.
Mr Johnson, who as PM fulfilled his pledge at the 2019 election to ‘get Brexit done’, also attacked the pact signed at London’s Lancaster House for taking away the UK’s freedom to innovate and agree new trade deals.
He wrote on X/Twitter: ‘Two-tier Keir is the orange ball-chewing manacled gimp of Brussels.’
Listing the areas where he said the PM had given away Brexit freedoms, he wrote: ‘He has sacrificed UK fishing interests, handing over our seas to be plundered again – when under the current Brexit agreement we are on the point of taking back full legal control, next year, of every fish in our waters.
‘He is clearly bent on signing up to a deal on free movement which could give 80 million younger EU nationals the right to come to this country. He appears from this document to be preparing to allow the EU to regain control of UK policy on state aids and competition.’
And he went on: ‘Most bizarrely of all he has agreed that Britain will once again be paying countless millions of pounds into EU coffers – for the privilege of becoming the non-voting punk of the EU Commission!’
In a message posted on X, former prime minister Boris Johnson branded Sir Keir Starmer the ‘orange ball-chewing manacled gimp of Brussels’ and said the prime minister’s ‘hopelessly one-sided’ deal with the EU should not be signed
Boris Johnson during the 2019 general election, which he won by promising to ‘get Brexit done’
Mr Johnson said Sir Keir had ‘sacrificed UK fishing interests, handing over our seas to be plundered again – when under the current Brexit agreement we are on the point of taking back full legal control, next year, of every fish in our waters’
He said under the ‘appalling sell-out of a deal’ the UK will have to accept EU law on a ‘host of measures from food standards to emissions trading’ as well as ‘the rulings of the European Court of Justice in the definition and enforcement of those laws’.
In return for the concessions, Mr Johnson said Britain had only obtained ‘wishy washy EU promises to get rid of some of the vexatious and unnecessary bureaucracy that they have been using against British travellers and business’.
And he warned Sir Keir had not obtained any ‘real guarantees that this will be enforced and above all no real guarantee on frictionless trade between GB and Northern Ireland, which should be entirely a matter for the UK and not the EU’.
‘This deal is hopelessly one-sided,’ Mr Johnson said.
He said it combined the ‘vassalage’ of Theresa May’s Chequers plan, which led to him quitting her Cabinet, with the ‘surrenderism’ of Labour’s giveaway of the Chagos islands to Mauritius.
‘Starmer promised at the election that he would not go back on Brexit. He has broken that promise as he broke his promise on tax.’
Mr Johnson urged: ‘This deal should not be signed, should not be ratified and should never come into force and if it is the next Conservative government should kick it out forthwith.’
Sir Keir Starmer announcing what he insisted was a ‘win-win’ in his new deal with the EU
The Prime Minister and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen arriving at HMS Sunderland after attending the UK-EU summit in London
Boris Johnson in the garden of 10 Downing Street when he was Prime Minister in 2021
Sir Keir Starmer and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the UK-EU summit in London’s Lancaster House
The Prime Minister and the European Commission chief share a joke as European Council President Antonio Costa looks on as they arrive at the Lancaster House summit
He continued his attack in an interview with GB News, saying: ‘I think it’s a complete and deliberate betrayal of Brexit, and it goes against what the Prime Minister said he was going to do.
‘At the election in 2024, he said he wouldn’t go back on Brexit, on the freedoms that the British people won in that referendum. He’s done the absolute reverse.’
Mr Johnson insisted the ‘hard fought’ transitional fishing plan his government had agreed, which was due to end next year, was ‘taking back control of our fisheries’.
He went on: ‘This is why the EU was so panic-stricken. That’s why they wanted this, this so-called reset, because they knew that from January next year, every, as I say, every halibut, every cod, every mackerel in our waters, was going to revert completely to UK control.
‘And the disaster is that Starmer, the Labour Prime Minister, has thrown away that massive negotiating advantage for absolutely nothing in return. It’s a completely the wrong thing for UK fisheries.’
He asked: ‘Why is Starmer taking us back into the sweaty embrace of Brussels when it’s massively uncompetitive, low growth and low productivity? It’s totally the wrong thing for us to do.’
