Boris Johnson’s attack on Barack Obama belongs in the gutter

Boris Johnson is a former editor of this newspaper, and as such has the right to be treated with a courtesy Spectator journalists do not normally extend to politicians who do not enjoy his advantages.

I am therefore writing with the caution of a lawyer and the deference of a palace flunkey when I say that Johnson showed this morning that he is a man without principle or shame. He is a braying charlatan, who lacks the courage even to be an honest bastard, for there is a kind of bastardly integrity in showing the world who you really are, but instead uses the tactics of the coward and the tricks of the fraudster to advance his worthless career.

He might have replied to President Obama’s argument that we should stay in the EU with arguments of his own. When Obama said that the EU magnified British influence in the world, Johnson might have shown how our membership diminished us.