The father of the prime minister has reacted to suggestions his son is a liar by insulting the literacy skills of the great British public.
Appearing alongside Joanna Gosling on the Victoria Derbyshire show, family patriarch Stanley Johnson took umbrage when asked about a comment from a viewer likening his son Boris to Pinocchio.
The character is, of course, from Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel, which tells the tale of the wooden puppet whose nose grows longer every time he lies.
Talking over Gosling, the 79-year-old opined: “You know, that requires a degree of literacy which I know the great British public doesn’t necessarily have.”
When asked to explain what he meant by that, Johnson airily replied: “They couldn’t spell Pinocchio, I would have thought,” before bizarrely asking Gosling if she could spell the word.
“Have a go, have a go, have a go,” he urged a shocked-looking Gosling, as she pointed out: “That’s quite a perjorative thing to say about the British public.”
Johnson senior then appeared to change tack, dismissing his comments as humorous before gravely stating: “I think it is utterly absurd and wrong that you can read out, on air, a tweet, coming in from one of your readers, on air, which calls the prime minister a liar. I think it’s amazing you can do that.”
Johnson senior is now backing his eldest son, the prime minister, in his support for leaving the EU.
But he served as a Conservative MEP between 1979 and 1984, and backed Remain in the 2016 referendum.
It was not until the following year that he announced he had switched his support to Leave, saying in a speech: “The time has come to bail out.”
With his children divided on Brexit – earlier this year his youngest son Jo, a Remain backer, stepped down as an MP, and daughter Rachel is an ardent Remainer – the environmentalist claimed wildlife rather than Europe was his priority when his eldest son became prime minister.
He said in a recent Good Morning Britain interview: “I have got to be jolly careful not to keep lobbying him, sending him messages saying: ‘What about the whales, and the sharks and the animals?’”
Stanley competed in the 2017 series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! and frequently appears on TV shows, including Celebrity Gogglebox.