If Brits are falling out of love with Boris Johnson over partygate, there is still hope for him in Turkey. If you were to quiz my fellow Turks on a list of ‘foreign leaders whom Turks find favourable’, there is no doubt Boris would be somewhere at the top of the list. Despite his hand in the Brexit campaign – when the prospect of a possible Turkish invasion was weaponised to convince people not to back remain – Boris remains popular over here.
Boris’s Turkish roots going back to his great-grandfather’s hometown, Orta in Cankiri (a central Anatolian town) are one of the reasons he remains loved. Us Cankiris, at least, are proud of Boris. When he first became PM he was hailed as ‘Boris the Turk’. ‘Ottoman grandson becomes prime minister,’ read a front-page splash in Sozcu, a popular newspaper. While Boris’s expensive education – Eton and Oxford – is sometimes used against him to suggest otherworldly privilege, his ancestral roots in our humble village are there for us Cankirians to see.
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