Boris Johnson slams ‘freaky’ Tucker Carlson following Nick Fuentes interview

Johnson went on to discuss how, in his opinion, a desire to appeal to Muslim voters has adversely influenced decisions taken by the Labour Party: “I think that on the left, there's a slightly different phenomenon going on, where you've got a lot of people thinking about the big Muslim constituencies in in the metropolitan area. In the UK, you can see that in the in the Labour Party. I think that has affected, sadly, some of the decisions that the Labour government has taken.

Johnson made the comments when speaking to reporters at the annual European Jewish Association (EJA) conference in Krakow, where he was honoured with the organisation’s 2025 King David Award.

The prize is awarded “to leaders who show courage and moral clarity in moments when both are most needed. It honours those who defend truth stand in our communities and refuse to stay silent when hatred shows its face,” said EJA general secretary David Lega.

Lega hailed Johnson as “a steadfast friend of the Jewish people, always standing up for Jewish communities and for the state of Israel and defending both against antisemitism wherever it appears”.

Accepting the accolade, Johnson joked that he had accepted the invitation to address EJA’s conference “before there was a suggestion I was going to be given an award”, adding that he was “deeply honoured and touched” to receive the prize.

The former prime minister also hit out at the world’s response to October 7, saying: “It was the first big test of humanity to see whether we've learned the awful lessons. And, my friends, I think that we failed that test, and we're still failing, because the October 7 massacres, the murder of 1,200 people, the rapes, the tortures, the killing of wholly innocent women and children, was a moment that surely demanded nothing but complete emotional simplicity. It was a time to stand with Israel against barbarism.”

Instead, he said, “before Israel had launched so much as a raid to find the culprits, before the IDF had even gone into Gaza in the hope of finding the poor hostages, there were chanting mobs on the streets of Western cities, and they weren't denouncing Hamas … they were denouncing Israel. And instead of condemning a theocratic Islamic fascist death cult, they were calling for Israel to be wiped out.”

Johnson also criticised the failure of some leaders “to call out the lies and the false moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel”, and elements of the media coverage of the conflict in Gaza.

Politicians need to “expose the nonsense that you see on the BBC about campaigns of starvation or the targeting of hospitals. We need publishers willing to tell it like it is,” he said, attacking the “absurdity” of what he called “the media and the whole liberal intelligencia’s treatment of Hamas”.

He went on: “Remember how Hamas celebrated the ceasefire? What was the first thing they did? They went out and shot various members of the families that were opposing them in public, on TV. Did you see anybody go out, clad in their keffiyeh, to demonstrate in favour of the lives of those people shot in cold blood by Hamas on the streets of European cities? Did you see anybody protecting? Did you read any commentaries about the barbarity of Hamas? Of course you didn’t. We have to act to expose these double standards.”

Yesterday, as part of the EJA delegation, Johnson visited Auschwitz for the first time. Speaking to the JC, he said the visit drove home for him the need to stamp out Holocaust denial and that society could not afford to ignore antisemitism in our time.