Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks about the relationship between New Zealand and the UK ahead of his New Zealand travels. Video / NZ Herald
Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson helped negotiate the original Aukus deal.
Johnson was Prime Minister when New Zealand concluded a Free Trade Agreement with the UK.
He resigned in 2022 following a wave of ministerial resignations.
Boris Johnson is suitably late and suitably scruffy when he enters the Zoom window stage left.
He apologises with a battery of round vowels (“SOHry, GEE’Day, GOOD DAy!”) and blames the traffic and the fact he’s been occupied with “doggy daycare” for his tardiness. The dog, referred to onlyas “dog” is an unseen presence, known only to me by Johnson’s occasional out-of-frame glances.
His electrostatic mop and uneven tie, which runs parallel to rather than above his placket, leads one to question who has been caring for whom.
Johnson lives his life in a hurricane, and to spend any amount of time with him is to venture into the hurricane yourself. In 25 minutes we discuss the war in Ukraine, Donald Trump, his support for Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke’s Parliamentary Haka, what he thought of Jacinda Ardern’s Covid strategy, and why lockdowns are a bit like women’s face cream.
We begin with Aukus, coequal with the Free Trade Agreements Johnson negotiated with New Zealand and Australia as his greatest legacy in this part of the world. The deal is often glibly assumed to be a deal between a sub-hungry client Australia and its American patron, with the UK acting as the spare partner. It’s not true; as Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s eye wandered from the sub deal his predecessor had agreed with the French, the UK was the first power to which his eye wandered, and it was Johnson who managed to rope Joe Biden into the deal.
Johnson pays due tribute to the New Zealander who got the subatomic particles rolling on the deal, Ernest Rutherford, whose Cavendish Lab exploits a century ago, Johnson notes, were the primordial ancestor of the future Aukus submarines’ nuclear propulsion system.
“Although we split the atom with the help of a New Zealander,” Johnson says, “we share the technology with Washington, going right way back to the tube lines in the 1940s”.
“So we had to talk to Joe Biden about whether this would work, and it was out of that really that Aukus was born,” Johnson says.
Johnson’s proud of just how far his creation Aukus has come, morphing from a submarine procurement deal into something much bigger, even if it’s not always clear what that something is.
Announcing the Aukus deal, United States President Joe Biden was joined virtually by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, right on screen, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Photo / AP
“It’s gone way beyond sharing nuclear technology, it’s now a fully fledged technological defensive alliance,” Johnson says, using the ‘A’ word that’ll intrude like fingers running down a chalkboard in London, Canberra, and Washington DC whose leaders and diplomats have so studiously avoided the term.
Should China, the country most offended by any Aukus “alliance” be concerned?
“There was a lot of anxiety in Beijing and there was a lot of pushback, but it’s not meant to be adversarial, certainly not inimical towards anybody,” Johnson says.
“It’s about strengthening our alliance and there’s no reason why, you know, New Zealand shouldn’t be involved as well,” he says, anticipating my next question: should New Zealand be invited and should it join?
New Zealand and the Aukus three have been toying with New Zealand joining the non-nuclear pillar 2 part of the deal, almost since it was announced in 2021. That debate has become increasingly fraught with Beijing in no mood to heed Johnson or anyone else’s testimony that the deal is not an anti-China alliance.
“New Zealand is a very, very significant player in Five Eyes with us. New Zealand is like-minded with the UK on many key issues, not least Ukraine, where New Zealand’s played a very distinguished role.
“So, of course, I think there’s a there’s an obvious fit,” he says.
In fact, following the signing of the NZ-UK Free-Trade Agreement, which Johnson oversaw as Prime Minister, he thinks that defence and security are the strands of the relationship that have the greatest potential for growth
“We’re already very, very closely allied on Five Eyes and all that – but where do we go? Is there more to explore on the technology side, on the military side and in the sort of Aukus space?”
The pair crossed paths when they were both Foreign Ministers. He remembers that Peters was always a Brexit believer, even before the referendum in 2016.
“There weren’t many global supporters of this historic initiative … there was always an anxiety about change, but Winston was right behind it, and it must be said Donald Trump, were two notable supporters,” Johnson says.
Does he have any advice on dealing with Trump, whose presidency spanned part of Johnson’s time as Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister?
“I’m sure Winston will have spotted this point, that it’s not what he says, it’s what he does.
“When you look at what he actually does, from the point of view of liberal internationalism, you know, which I basically happen to believe in, he’s very sound.
“He was much tougher, you could say, with the Russians over Ukraine, than the previous Democrat administration. He gave the Ukrainians javelin missiles.
“When it came to Syria, he was much tougher than the, than [Barack] Obama had been. He actually bombed the hell out of [Bashir Al-]Assad’s bases after he used chemical weapons against his own people, and Assad never did it again, right?” Johnson says.
“He says a lot of the stuff about global warming that makes liberal internationalists kind of freak out, but on the other hand, he’s got Elon Musk who’s probably done more to decarbonise motor vehicles than anybody else.”
Then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson at Zealandia, Wellington on an official visit to New Zealand. Photo / Marty Melville
Backing the Parliament haka
No stranger to breaking the rules of Parliament himself (Johnson resigned his seat in the House of Commons after the Privileges Committee stood him down for 50 days for lying to Parliament) Johnson has a particular view of the controversy surrounding Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke’s unsanctioned haka.
Unsurprisingly, Johnson is among the hundreds of millions of people who have seen the video.
“Wonderful – I enjoyed that,” he says.
He’s on the fence as to whether New Zealand’s standing orders committee should change its rules to toughen penalties on haka that breach order, saying it’s ultimately for New Zealand’s Parliament to decide.
However, he’s quick to add that New Zealand’s Parliament isn’t the only chamber with traditions that seem novel and unusual to outsiders.
“In our Parliament, if you want to clear the public gallery and say ‘I spy strangers’,” Johnson says.
“If everyone wants to break off for a while and do a haka, then that is up to Parliament to decide,” he says.
Jacinda Ardern (“not a big gaffe-meister”), Covid-19 and why lockdowns are like women’s face cream
Johnson’s rosy blush briefly fades to a light pink when I bring up the last time he met a New Zealand Prime Minister in office.I happened to be there in July 2022 when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern walked down Downing St as the famous bitumen black door opened and a squinting Johnson emerged into the glaring midsummer light like a mole from a burrow.
Again, a succession of round vowels inconceivable to a New Zealander’s vocal apparatus: “Ahhhhh JAHcinDAH!”
A cockney photographer shattered the merry bonhomie.
“Are you drowning in sleaze Prime Minister?” he yelled as they disappeared through the door.
Two years later, Johnson has dissociated the events of July 2022, when in a cruel inversion of his famous namesake’s dictum that one who is tired of London is tired of life, it became obvious that it was London that had tired of Johnson.
In late June 2022, Johnson’s Government was embroiled in fresh revelations relating to an MP accused of groping. On July 1, Ardern visited Downing St. Just five days later, Johnson lost two of his most senior Cabinet Ministers, triggering the wave of resignations that culminated in his own on July 7.
“It was July 2022,” I remind Johnson of Ardern’s visit.
“Really? Yes! I do dimly remember that yes,” he squeals.
Ardern and Johnson have some history. When Johnson became Prime Minister, Ardern was forced to answer for old tweets that were uncovered (read: Googled) in which she described Johnson as the “gaffe man”.
No one ever knew what Johnson thought of this – until I made the rather cowardly and unpatriotic choice to put the tweet in front of him.
Johnson meeting Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern a week before he announced his resignation. Photo / GC Images
Unsurprisingly, Johnson appears not to mind.
“Gaffes are very important – you’ve got to make a lot of gaffes, they illuminate the truth. When you make a gaffe you say something that everyone finds unacceptable. The next thing they have to do is work out why they find it unacceptable. It’s actually very very helpful in making progress,” he says.
An interesting point. Ardern made it through her premiership with relatively few gaffes, but I guess never managed to accomplish any change like Brexit, for better or worse.
“She’s not a gaffe-meister?” Johnson asks.
“She ran a very tight ship when it came to Covid,” he recalls, and suddenly we’re back in 2020 comparing Covid responses.
“We were pretty much with the European pack on lockdowns… Full credit to New Zealand for doing some great stuff with Covid, and I’m sure whatever you did worked,” he says.
Johnson, who during his time in office spent periods as both a Sweden-style Liberal and an arch-lockdowner, seems to be returning to his liberal roots.
“When I look back at what we had to do, I worry that the, we haven’t properly calculated the benefits of the non-pharmaceutical interventions of the lockdowns by comparison with the damage of loss of education.
“It’s not clear how much the lockdowns actually bent those curves. If you look at the disease, it’s, it’s a Bactrian camel around the world – there’s two humps,” he says.
But Johnson concedes that perhaps the lockdowns were necessary – if only because the public needed to feel some sense of control over their lives in the face of such a deadly virus. It was all about, to use Johnson’s phrase, “taking back control”.
Johnson’s explanation for this linking lockdown to face cream is an exercise in the extremely modern phenomenon of witnessing a man commit cancellation seppuku before your very eyes.
“Frightened people confronted with a disease for which there is no known cure require society to do things even in a ritualistic way that express some sort of control of that disease.
“That’s a very important point about human psychology. Control is the most important thing…
“Why do, why do women buy such prodigious quantities of face cream even though it doesn’t work and it’s extremely expensive – it’s because they want the feeling of control. They want the feeling that in the face of this natural process, wrinkling, which they can’t control, they want to do something and they want to feel agency,” he says.
Despite cracking digital campaigning, Johnson isn’t all that flash on Zoom. He can’t seem to end the call.
“Bye, bye, cheers, cheers, bye-bye – how do I turn this off?
“There I go… I don’t know how I leave... how do I get out?” he pleads.
“It says leave,” he says, pointing to a button.
“It’s always harder to leave than you think,” I say.
Credit to the man (some ex-politicians I know would have given me what for), he squeals with laughter.
Johnson is appearing at the General Capital Long Lunch on December 3 in Auckland
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
