Boris Johnson's Hollande gaffe distracts from PM's Brexit speech
The Foreign Secretary's imaginative description of Francois Hollande is an awkward sideshow after Mrs May's confident speech.
Thursday 19 January 2017 11:22, UK
After delivering a difficult message, delicately and diplomatically, pretty much the last thing the PM would have wanted is an offensive gaffe from her top diplomat.
So Number 10 spent part of the post-Prime Minister's Questions briefing - who compared French President Francois Hollande to someone "who wants to administer punishment beatings to anyone who chooses to escape in the manner of some WW2 movie".
Downing Street said the Foreign Secretary's "theatrical" comparison "was in no way suggesting that anyone was a Nazi", pointing to the reaction to Mr Johnson as an example of what Theresa May had criticised yesterday as a "hyped-up media report".
Mr Johnson had, during the referendum debate, made a Nazi analogy in relation to the EU, causing widespread consternation in European capitals.
Mentioning World War Two is almost diametrically the opposite of where the PM wants her negotiations to go. European capitals see the EU as a method through which wars on the continent have been avoided.
Yesterday's speech did much to repair some of the damage caused across Europe by the tone of speeches at the Conservative Party conference.
The row over Mr Johnson's comments also distracted from a confident performance from the PM after her historic speech on leaving the single market.
Theresa May knew what she was getting when she appointed her brief rival for the Tory leadership as Foreign Secretary.
At her campaign launch she joked that Boris' last negotiation in Germany (as London Mayor) was for two unused water cannon.
Things have come along way since then. Mr Johnson injected his trademark "positivity" into her Single Market speech.
Number 10 said it has "full confidence" in the Foreign Secretary, and that he was doing good work in India.
There has been no response from the Elysee Palace so far.
The EU Parliament's current negotiator, Guy Verhofstadt, said his comments were "abhorrent and deeply unhelpful" and called on Mrs May to condemn them. She did not.
Against a backdrop of elections in France, such interventions risk raising already high temperatures over Brexit that Mrs May appeared to be cooling.
But right now Number 10 have got bigger issues to worry about.