The UK’s Conservative Party Prime Minister Boris Johnson once attacked gay people for serving in their country’s armed forces, called LGBTQ people “tank-topped bum boys,” and even supported a claim from foreign dictator Robert Mugabe that the opposing British Labour Party was composed of “gay gangsters.”
“Across the country, there are many Tories who wish their party leadership would speak up more strongly against, say, gays in the military,” Johnson said. “They are, of course, right.”
Prime Minister Johnson, who at times has cozied up to U.S. President Donald Trump, refused to apologize.
Calling his remarks “shocking,” The Daily Mirror reports Johnson “complained the police had been ‘cowed’ by the Macpherson report – which uncovered institutional racism in the force in the wake of Stephen Lawrence’s murder.”
And he said officers were too busy “stuck on racial awareness programmes” or trying to “catch paedophiles in ancient public schools” to investigate the theft of his bike.
The Prime Minister’s remarks were recently unearthed from a 2008 book chronicling his past newspaper columns dating as far back as 2000.
The Mirror adds that Johnson also “made a spirited defence of some of the homophobic, racist and callous views that earned the Conservatives the nickname ‘the nasty party.’”
Last month Prime Minister Johnson refused to apologize for calling LGBTQ people “tank-topped bum boys,” and Muslim women “letterboxes,” The Independent reported, adding he also “wrote that seeing ‘a bunch of black kids’ scared him.”
“I defend my right to speak out,” Johnson recently told reporters.