Boris Johnson has claimed US president Joe Biden, who publicly plays up his Irish roots, privately told him that his family origins were not really Irish at all, but English.
In his new book, Unleashed, the former UK prime minister recalls meeting Mr Biden for the first time as US president at a G7 summit in Cornwall in June 2021, which was one of the Democrat’s first foreign trips after he beat Donald Trump in the election the previous November.
Mr Johnson refers to fears in Britain at that time that the US president would be “more aloof, more sceptical about Brexit” because he “made a big thing of being Irish by extraction”. However, he said all his “anxieties melted away” when he met Mr Biden at the Carbis Bay hotel on the first day of the summit.
“He [Biden] defied the urgings of the European Union and, I believe, of some of his own officials – and pointedly refused to weigh in on the [Brexit border] row over Northern Ireland,” Mr Johnson writes.
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He quotes Mr Biden as reassuring him over Northern Ireland by saying: “I would not dream of telling a friend and ally how to run his own country.”
He adds: “In fact, he disarmed me completely by saying that his family origins were not really Irish at all, and that the Bidens were an old seafaring family from Kent (which seems plausible, since -den is a common Kentish termination).
“I suppose he may say something else when in Dublin. But never mind!”
Mr Johnson writes in Unleashed of his belief that the EU used the Irish border and the “fear of renewed IRA activity” to try to “trap” the UK in the single market and customs union.
While foreign secretary in Theresa May’s government, he says he was sceptical about warnings over Brexit’s potential impact on peace in the North, which he felt were “chimerical”. He was also sceptical that customs posts would have to be placed on the Border, raising the risk of Irish republicans attacking the posts or killing “innocent members of the Garda”.
Mr Johnson says the then Irish government, under taoiseach Enda Kenny, had in 2016 “smartly foreseen” the problems Brexit could create when it came to customs and the North and had already come up with workable solutions..
But, he says, anti-Brexit forces in London and Brussels “escalated the problem, sacralised it and instrumentalised it: to stop Brexit”. He says Ms May’s proposed Northern Ireland “backstop” arrangement to keep Britain aligned with certain EU rules until the Border issues were solved would have turned Britain into the “orange ball-chomping gimp of the EU”.
Mr Johnson also suggests in his book that former taoiseach Leo Varadkar was in favour of a “time limited” arrangement to temporarily deal with Brexit issues in the North, and that this was the basis for a 2019 agreement between the two leaders struck in the Wirral near Liverpool, which paved the way for Britain’s formal exit the following year.
The former Conservative Party leader claims it was always understood that the deal to align Northern Ireland with some EU regulations “would be time limited and it would have to be actively reaffirmed by the people of Northern Ireland”, as per the principle of consent.
“The EU didn’t like this at all,” he writes. “They didn’t like the time limit, and they didn’t like the idea of consent. But the Irish did. That was the essence of the deal we did with the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at Thornton Manor near Liverpool.”
Mr Johnson also says he in 2022 asked then-chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, if he would cut UK corporation tax “right down below Irish levels” to 10 per cent. “That would show them,” he says. However, Mr Sunak refused.
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