Prime Minister Boris Johnson has blamed President Donald Trump for violence in the American capital by some of his supporters, saying he was “completely wrong” to dispute the results of “a free and fair election”.
“All my life America has stood for some very important things. An idea of freedom, an idea of democracy,” proclaimed Johnson, who was himself born in Manhattan, New York, and only renounced his U.S. citizenship around 2017.
“[I]nsofar as he encouraged people to storm the Capitol, and in so far as the President has consistently cast doubt on the outcome of a free and fair election, I believe that was completely wrong,” the Tory leader told BBC political correspondent Alex Forsyth.
“I believe what President Trump has been saying about that has been completely wrong and I unreservedly condemn encouraging people to behave in the disgraceful way that they did in the Capitol,” he added.
Home Secretary Priti Patel, whose department is responsible, broadly speaking, for immigration, border security, and law and order in the United Kingdom, also laid the blame for the disorder in D.C. at the President’s feet.
“He basically has made a number of comments yesterday that helped to fuel that violence and he didn’t actually do anything to de-escalate that whatsoever,” she alleged.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, perhaps less surprisingly, also condemned the U.S. leader, with the knee-taking left-liberal saying the breach of the Capitol was the “culmination of years of the politics of hate and division”.
While Prime Minister Johnson is often portrayed as something of a British counterpart to President Trump, due to their shared support for Brexit and a number of more superficial characteristics, such as a reputation for colourful turns of phrase and striking hairstyles, the two are not particularly close politically.
Indeed, Johnson is a long-time supporter of large-scale legal immigration and amnesty for illegal aliens, and condemned Trump as “out of his mind” and “unfit to hold the office of President of the United States” in 2015, when he was a candidate running for the Republican party nomination.
Quizzed on remarks the future POTUS has made on Islamic immigration in the wake of several terror attacks and no-go zones in London, where Johnson was mayor, the Briton said: “I would invite him to come and see the whole of London and take him round the city except that I wouldn’t want to expose Londoners to any unnecessary risk of meeting Donald Trump.”
Such views are not particularly uncommon among Britain’s establishment right. One Conservative party parliamentarian who has blamed Trump the Capitol breach, Lucy Farris, is even a former Hillary Clinton staffer.