Boris Johnson has proven once and for all that he is not fit for office over his Libya ‘dead bodies’ gag

Theresa May’s desire to keep her enemies close has meant that the Foreign Secretary has avoided the sack – but it’s getting embarrassing

A pixelated Boris Johnson, recognisable by his broad frame and shock of white hair, was caught last night on a smartphone camera, appeared in the news today saying at a fringe event at the Conservative conference that Libya would become a wonderful tourist destination, ripe for investment, once “all the dead bodies” had been cleared away. Nothing is more offputting than a bloated cadaver popping up in the background of your four-star resort Instagram pic, after all.

“There’s a group of UK business people, wonderful guys who want to invest in Sirte… The only thing they’ve got to do is clear the dead bodies away and then they’ll be there,” said the Foreign Secretary to a room that responded with nervous laughter.

You might suspect that this is exactly the sort of thing that goes on behind closed doors at Conservative party fringe events: politicians scheming with private entrepreneurs, with little regard for humanity or empathy. But there’s nothing furtive about Johnson’s comments – and we’ll call him Johnson, not Boris, as he is a politician in office, not a TV personality – and there’s a consistency to his insensitivity. Not a useful character quirk in a man who is employed to be the very definition of diplomatic, specifically in foreign countries.

Last year Johnson wrote a limerick about the Turkey’s President Erdogan having sex with a goat; in 2008 he told China that it was, in fact, the UK which had invented its national sport of ping-pong. He’s also accused President Obama of being anti-Brexit because of his “part-Kenyan... ancestral dislike” of Britain and called black people in nations once colonised by Britain “cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”. This year he’s praised the virtues of reduced tariffs for whiskey in a Sikh temple and quoted a Kipling poem about empire on a visit to a temple in Myanmar. Simply, he isn’t fit for office.

Johnson appears to be a man picked for the post less as a result of his competence than as a means to be kept an eye on. Theresa May’s desire to keep her enemies close following her post-election vulnerability means that she has refused to sack him over his betrayal of Cabinet collective responsibility.

His very public criticism of her management of Brexit negotiations, in both The Telegraph and The Sun, was literally laughed off by May on The Andrew Marr Show. Johnson has been sacked for less in the past – in 1988 the young journalist was sacked from The Times for fabricating a quote in an article, and in 2004 he was “relieved of his duties” as shadow arts minister of the Conservative party for allegedly lying about an extramarital affair. This latest gaffe, in its severity, has made the situation unbearably embarrassing for the Prime Minister.

Despite calls from three Tory MPs for his resignation, Number 10 kept schtum. It’s a strategy not without reason – if May doesn’t sack him she looks weak; if she does he will become a backbench Brexit martyr and cause chaos behind the scenes, using it as a launchpad for his leadership bid before 2019.

May would do with having more confidence in her own MPs – they are the ones responsible for drawing up the two-person shortlist for any leadership election, and he’s not doing well in the Conservative popularity polls. In a party known for its lauding of loyalty, would you trust a man with no conviction other than his own career prospects? As mentioned by my colleague Andrew Grice earlier in the week, he is top of the ConservativeHome leadership poll among party members at 21 per cent – but anyone but Boris comes in at 19 per cent.

If May won’t do it, perhaps Home Secretary Amber Rudd will. She’s recently hired attack-dog campaigner Lynton Crosby to manage what is suspected to be her own 2019 campaign, and Boris Johnson is a target that has stockpiled enough self-manufactured ammo for his enemies to use throughout several leadership campaigns.