US President Donald Trump’s strong leadership and Elon Musk’s mission to slash government spending perceived as wasteful are lessons to be learnt in European democracies, former British prime minister Boris Johnson said at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Wednesday.
The former leader of the UK Conservatives spoke of the challenges in bringing peace to the Middle East and ending the Ukraine-Russia war, as well as those he now faces in a life away from frontline politics. As political exile continues for Mr Johnson, he refused to rule out a return to leadership, but warned against the rising tide of far-right sentiment.
“I'm sympathetic to many of the things Donald Trump is trying to do, I think that the world is on the whole better when America is providing strong leadership,” Mr Johnson said at the summit on Wednesday.
“You certainly couldn't say that he wasn’t delivering action. It's not for me to try to analyse what the President is suggesting [with proposals to displace million of Palestinians while Gaza is rebuilt]. Gaza is in law, right now, owned and occupied by people who have a right to be there.
"Trump is inviting everybody to say, 'well, look, this place clearly does have great potential'. It does have a wonderful location. But Gaza is a failure of governance, that is the tragedy of Gaza in my view, to put it mildly.”
Leadership scandals
Mr Johnson served as UK prime minister from July 2019 until his resignation in September 2022, after a mass revolt by his ministers resulting from a series of scandals and questions over his leadership. He was also embroiled in a row over gatherings being held behind closed doors during Covid-19 lockdowns.
During his time in office, Mr Johnson visited Ukraine several times and said the Ukraine-Russia war had greater chance of a resolution with Mr Trump in the White House.
“To say Ukraine could be Russian again, you might as well say America could return to the British Empire, it's just not going to happen,” Mr Johnson said. “So far, what's happened with the new administration in Washington has been encouraging. There hasn't been an instant capitulation to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, which would have been a disaster.
“Any kind of solution to the disaster in Ukraine that involves Putin keeping some territory, freezing the conflict but not giving the Ukrainians the security guarantees they need represents a success for Putin – Donald Trump is not going to want that.
“He's being very clever and thinking very hard about how to deliver the right result for the West, for America and for himself. It’s a battle of wills between Putin and Trump.”
Under his leadership, the Conservatives won a landslide victory in the 2019 general election with a huge 80-seat parliamentary majority. Since then, the party has capitulated and conceded power to a Labour government. However, a defiant Mr Johnson said criticism of his time in office was “water off a duck’s back” and hit back at claims the Brexit deal he helped secure, with Britain leaving the EU, was failing.
Cost-cutting support
However, he did support the idea of governments cutting overseas costs to prioritise domestic reform, in similar fashion to Elon Musk as head of the Department of Government Efficiencies aiming to overhaul US spending.
“We did make a lot of change and one of the things we did was take back control of our government, of our national independence, our laws, our borders and our money,” said Mr Johnson, who admitted to being more concerned with building a new kitchen than world affairs.
“As in the US, we need to have a recognition in European democracies, and the UK, that we are spending far too much taxpayers' money without achieving the objectives we promise. To go through budgets line-by-line and take out waste is completely right. If you look at the polls on Donald Trump, they love the fact he's doing what he said he was going to do.
“What Elon Musk has said rang a bell with me – we do have a problem in democracies. The way to defeat the far right is to listen carefully to what people are saying, to answer their concerns and give people what they want. People vote for change. Unless they get that change, they will vote for more extreme parties."
