BRITISH FOREIGN MINISTER Boris Johnson today brushed off as “trivia” an offensive poem he wrote about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, boasting of the strength of Ankara-London ties even after Britain’s vote to leave EU.
Johnson won £1,000 from the Spectator magazine earlier this year when the magazine ran a contest for offensive poems about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
A former editor of the Spectator, Johnson composed the limerick in response to Erdogan’s decision to take legal action over a German comedian’s poem about him.
The poem read:
There was a young fellow from Ankara
Who was a terrific wankerer
Till he sowed his wild oats
With the help of a goat
But he didn’t even stop to thankera.
On his first visit to Turkey as top diplomat, Johnson called for a “jumbo free trade deal” with Ankara that would strengthen economic relations that take in everything from cakes to washing machines.
But he said he was “delighted” the poem had not come up at all during talks since he arrived in Turkey earlier this week.
“As for the trivia that you raised… it has not come up at all,” he said, referring to the poem.
“In fact I am not remotely surprised that it hasn’t come up, that nobody has seen fit to raise it until you did,” he told a journalist at a news conference alongside Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu in Ankara.
Afterwards Johnson met with Erdogan at the president’s palace with any lingering animosity over the poem forgotten.
Cake diplomacy
Underlining the strength of the Britain-Turkey relationship even after the vote to leave the EU, he noted that the iconic Jaffa Cakes biscuits “that I grew up on as a child” were now owned by Turkish confectionary giant Ulker.
“What more visible symbol could there be of our economic partnership than that,” he said, after emphasising the UK’s wish to increase economic ties with Turkey.
Johnson revealed yesterday that he owned a “beautiful, very well-functioning Turkish washing machine”, in a nod to the importance of Turkey’s consumer goods exports.
He called for a “jumbo free trade deal” between the two countries, adding while Britain was leaving the European Union, it was not leaving Europe.
Johnson, whose great-grandfather Ali Kemal was briefly a Turkish minister shortly after World War I, also referred to his personal ties to Turkey.
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