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Boris Johnson told aides that he wanted to indulge in “an orgy of frog bashing” at some point last year, after Emmanuel Macron, the French president, criticised the British response to the refugee crisis, Guto Harri has revealed.
Harri was working at Johnson’s communication chief at the time and he made the revelation in the latest edition of Unprecedented, his podcast about his time at No 10. Harri says:
There were tensions early on when people like Emmanuel Macron of France went to Moscow to talk to Putin. I think Boris described it privately as ‘nauseating’. And meanwhile, I think Macron was feeling the tension from Boris seemingly doing the running with helping Ukraine militarily. So, when the British press was giving the British government a hard time over our response to the refugee crisis, Macron turbocharged it by criticising Boris pretty directly and his words were all over the front page of The Guardian on a Friday, I think.
And much as Boris is not prone to getting really cross, nor using particularly strong language, this was one where he really flipped and at our morning meeting, I think with a small gang of us he just launched into a violent attack on Emmanuel Macron. Basically, saying ‘He’s a four-letter word that begins with C, he’s a weirdo, he’s Putin’s lickspittle. We need to go studs up on this one’ – a rugby term that basically means, gloves off – ‘We need an orgy of frog bashing. I’m going to have to punch his lights out.’ Pretty strong stuff. And I’m pleased to say weeks later, of course, they had patched it up. They got on really well. They actually went for a whisky together at the G7 summit.
