![\"Boris](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1_Screenshot-2026-07-19-105329.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe former Tory chief Boris Johnson – who was turfed out of office in scandal – appeared to blame remain-voting civil servants for a spike in migration post-Brexit<\/p>\n
11:18, 19 Jul 2026Updated 12:26, 19 Jul 2026<\/p>\n
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Boris Johnson was turfed out of office by his own party in 2022<\/p>\n
Boris Johnson has been accused of being \u201cdelusional\u201d after he appeared to blame remain-voting civil servants for a spike in migration post-Brexit.<\/p>\n
The former Tory chief – who was turfed out of office in scandal – said people at the time were claiming people were going to \u201cflee the UK\u201d after Britain\u2019s exit from the EU.<\/p>\n
While net migration has fallen in recent years – to 171,000 in the year ending December 2025 – it reached a high of 944,000 in the year ending March 2023, figures show. The spike has previously been nicknamed by the former Prime Minister\u2019s critics as the \u2018Boriswave\u2019.<\/p>\n
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Johnson claimed: \u201cPeople were saying – nice, well-meaning liberal people were saying – Brexit<\/a> is going to turn us into a leper colony and people are going to flee the UK.\u201d<\/p>\n Boris Johnson also claimed the Partygate scandal was ‘nonsense’ – despite being fined by police<\/p>\n He added: \u201cI actually think that sort of rhetoric was taken seriously by Whitehall – you had a lot of good, nice, remain civil servants. And I think that they thought that we did need to get people in to do social care and to do things like that.<\/p>\n \u201cBut as soon as we realised the numbers we used our powers, our legal powers to turn it off. And if I had a complaint, it was after I left office that wasn’t done fast enough.\u201d<\/p>\n The Labour<\/a> peer and broadcaster Ayesha Hazarika responded minutes later, saying: \u201cHe\u2019s so delusional – particularly about immigration. You rightly said the numbers have gone up, he was having absolutely none of it.<\/p>\n “The fact he was trying to blame everybody else for this – it\u2019s like the guy who kind of sets fire to your house and then criticising your choice of fire alarm. It\u2019s delusional.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr Johnson also bizarrely attempted to label Partygate as \u201cnonsense\u201d on Sunday – despite being fined by the police and forced out of No10 after the scandal. “You know what I think about the so-called Partygate nonsense. It was nonsense,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The scandal of lockdown-busting parties in No10 \u2014 exposed by The Mirror<\/a> – led to a Commons report which found Mr Johnson repeatedly misled MPs over the fiasco. It had recommended an unprecedented 90-day suspension from the Commons – but Mr Johnson had just days earlier quit as an MP.<\/p>\n Mr Johnson also used his interview on Sunday to urge the incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham<\/a> to be \u201ceven more resolute in support\u201d of Ukraine<\/a> in its fight against Putin\u2019s Russia<\/a>. He said: “You ask about the new UK government or Andy Burnham or whatever, what we’ve got to do is get this thing over.<\/p>\n “One of the reasons it isn’t over is that Putin doesn’t really know from the West what we want, and we won’t declare that we really, really want Ukraine as part of the western committee of nations, so, a group of countries, so NATO, for instance, is the crucial thing. As long as Putin thinks that there’s an ambiguity…he’ll keep attacking.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The former Tory chief Boris Johnson – who was turfed out of office in scandal – appeared to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1098870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5226],"tags":[5109,802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,285,16,15],"class_list":["post-1098869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brexit","tag-boris-johnson","tag-brexit","tag-britain","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-european-union","tag-great-britain","tag-politics","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116947143984445878","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1098869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1098870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1098869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1098869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1098869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Boris](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2_Screenshot-2026-07-19-105158.jpg\")
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