LONDON (AP) – U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson refused Tuesday to apologize for the withering one-liners he’s made about world leaders in the past but won the support of Britain’s closest ally as the country navigates its difficult path out of the European Union.
Johnson, who was hosting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in London, said people are “free to rake over” his past comments but that it would “take too long” to apologize to all those who might have been offended in the past by his “rich thesaurus” of comments.
He says now he’s focusing on dealing with issues like the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Syria and the troubles in Yemen.
“Those to my mind are far more important than any obiter dicta that you may dis-infer (from) 30 years of journalism,” Johnson said, referring to a term used in law to denote an incidental remark.
The 52-year-old Johnson once described Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton as “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.” He’s also mocked President Barack Obama’s ancestry and once wrote an extremely vulgar limerick about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.