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Boris Johnson claims moon landing proves he can deliver Brexit

'If they could use hand-knitted computer code to make a frictionless re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere in 1969, we can solve the problem of frictionless trade at the Northern Irish border', claims likely next PM

Benjamin Kentish

Political Correspondent

Monday 22 July 2019 07:51 BST

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Boris Johnson in profile

Boris Johnson has claimed that the 1969 moon landing proves that he will be able to deliver Brexit by 31 October.

The frontrunner to take over from Theresa May this week said a "sense of mission" akin to that of the Nasa project was all that was needed to take Britain out of the EU on time.

He also launched an attack on "pessimist" Tories after two current cabinet ministers, chancellor Philip Hammond and justice secretary David Gauke, said they would resign before Mr Johnson takes office.

The result of the Tory leadership contest between Mr Johnson and Jeremy Hunt will be announced on Tuesday, with Mr Johnson seen as all but certain to emerge victorious.

The next prime minister will then take over from Theresa May after she steps down on Wednesday.

Writing in what is expected to be his last column in the Daily Telegraph before he enters No10, Mr Johnson said the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, which fell on Sunday, showed why he will be able to deliver Brexit by the 31 October deadline.

He wrote: "If they could use hand-knitted computer code to make a frictionless re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere in 1969, we can solve the problem of frictionless trade at the Northern Irish border.

"There is no task so simple that government cannot overcomplicate if it doesn’t want to do it. And there are few tasks so complex that humanity cannot solve if we have a real sense of mission to pull them off.

"It is time this country recovered some its can-do spirit. We can come out of the EU on October 31, and yes, we certainly have the technology to do so. What we need now is the will and the drive."

Mr Johnson claimed the solution to the Brexit impasse must be "technical and logistical".

Insisting that the issue of how to keep the Northern Ireland border open could be solved through technology, he denounced "technological pessimists...some of them apparently in London" who think such a solution is "impossible".

Boris Johnson's famous relatives

Show all 11

1/11Boris Johnson's famous relatives

Boris Johnson's famous relatives

1. King George II of Great Britain and Ireland, Elector of Hanover (1683 to 1760)

Boris Johnson is a Hanoverian, and, thus distantly related to the Queen, David Cameron (via William IV) and Danny Dyer (via Edward III), among others. Boris's paternal grandmother, Yvonne Eileen Williams, known in the family as "Granny Butter" and whose family name was de Pfeffel, was a descendant of Prince Paul Von Wurttemberg. The German prince was, in turn, a direct descendant of George II. Discovered by genealogists f other BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are, Johnson commented, in 2008: "I felt I was the product of newcomers to Britain so it is totally bizarre, surreal in fact, to be told that in fact my Great x 8 Granddad is George II. But don't neglect the point that he shares that distinction with 1,023 others – there must be several thousand other people out there in the same position.”

National Portrait Gallery

Boris Johnson's famous relatives

2. The “Mummy of Basel”, Anna Catharina Bischoff (1719 to 1787)

Last year, scientists in the Swiss city of Basel solved a decades-old mystery over the identity of a mummified woman. DNA extracted from the mummy’s gig toe indicates that the female is a great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother of Boris Johnson. The body was uncovered in 1975 while renovations were being done on Basel's Barfüsser Church, and was buried at the altar, wearing fine clothes, indicating she was at least well-to-do if not nobility. High levels of mercury in her remains suggested she had been treated for syphilis (the metal also helped preserve her).

National Gallery of Basel

Boris Johnson's famous relatives

3. Ali Kemal (1867 to 1922)

(Pictured with wife Winifred Brun) For a man who made so much capital in the 2016 referendum on the prospect of Turkey joining the EU and its 80 million citizens thus enjoying free movement to the UK, Boris Johnson sometimes makes a surprisingly big deal of his Turkish Muslim great-grandfather on his father’s side, who he claims was an asylum seeker. Ali Kemal, according to his famous descendant, came to Britain because it was “a beacon of generosity and openness”. I t might be overstating it, but he did live in exile in England for a time.

Unknown

Boris Johnson's famous relatives

4. George Williams (1821 to 1905)

Sir George, as he became, is the great (x4) grandfather of Boris Johnson, and was one of the founders of the Young Men’s Christian Association or YMCA, in 1841. An evangelical apostle of “muscular Christianity”, George took it upon himself to organise some fellow drapers and establish a safe place for young men where they could be shielded from the debauchery and the temptations of the flesh and the grape. No sofas would suffer red wine stains in the hostel. Since then it has gone global, today assisting 58 million people across 119 countries, which is almost as many as Boris helps. A social visionary of his time, George was knighted for his works by Queen Victoria in 1894.

National Portrait Gallery

Boris Johnson's famous relatives

6. King Friedrich of Wurttemberg (1754 to 1816)

Though stocky of build, and handy in a game of rugger, Boris Johnson is not especially heavy or tall. This ancestor was. King Friedrich stood 6 foot 11 inches, and weighed 31 stone (2.12 metres/200 kilograms). Napoleon remarked that God had created the Prince to demonstrate the utmost extent to which the human skin could be stretched without bursting. There are rumours that he was bisexual and enjoyed the close companionship of young noblemen. This added to the strains on his marriage to Augusta, who was the granddaughter of King George II. One of their four children, Prince Paul is the link to the Johnsons, via an illegitimate daughter he fathered in Paris with an actor named Friederike Margrethe Porth.

Ludwigsburg Castle Archive

Boris Johnson's famous relatives

7. Professor Elias Lowe (1879 to 1969)

Elias is Boris Johnson’s mother Charlotte’s great grandfather. The distinguished Princeton scholar and student of ancient scriptures (palaeographer) , Elias arrived in the United States as a refugee from Lithuania in 1891, and was affine of Albert Einstein. Jewish, Lowe came for a line of revered rabbis. Although he cannot be counted Hallachially Jewish, the Jewish Chronicle makes him 5 per cent Jewish on their reckoning.

Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences

Boris Johnson's famous relatives

8. Helen Lowe-Porter (1876 to 1963)

Helen Tracey Lowe-Porter. is Boris Johnson's mother Charlotte’s great grandmother. An American, she married the Lithuanian-born academic Elisa Lowe, and is said to have been probably the most prominent literary translator in the English-speaking world working from German to English in the twentieth century. However, not necessarily the best and in such circles her reputation is contested. In any event, she retained for 50 years the exclusive rights to translate the works of her friend Thomas Mann. Her and Elias’ daughter Beatrice is Charlotte Johnson (nee Fawcett’s) mother.

Lowe-Porter family

Boris Johnson's famous relatives

9. Sir Henry Fawcett MP (1833 to 1884)

Before Boris and Jo Johnson became MPs and minsters, there was Sir Henry Fawcett – Britain’s first blind MP. He was the husband of the famous suffragette Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and thus an ancestor of Boris on his mother’s side - though the family tree isn’t clear on how close they are related.

Glasgow University

Boris Johnson's famous relatives

10. Prince Paul of Wurttemberg (1785 to 1852)

Odd looking, an amusing womaniser (remind you of anyone?), this minor German aristocrat was the progenitor of the Johnson’s posh pedigree, such as it is. His affair with an actress is Paris, Fredericke Porth, gave rise to a daughter (out of wedlock as they used to say) provided the link back to the royal families of Wurttemberg and Hanover, and thus of Great Britain. By the same token it means that Stanley, Boris, Rachel, Leo and Jo, and the rest of them along that branch of the tree, are also distantly related to most of the royal families of Europe including the Russian Romanovs – Johnson stands connected, albeit tenuously, to the Belgian, Danish, Dutch, Luxembourg, Norwegian and Swedish families, plus the German Kaiser. Paul had five declared children, and two illegitimate ones, at least that are known about.

National Archive Holland

Boris Johnson's famous relatives

11. Fredericke Porth (1777 to 1860)

When, on the BBC show Who Do You Think You Are? Boris Johnson discovered the identity of his 4x Great Grandmother, Fredericke, he was just a touch chauvinist: “An actress, could be a euphemism we may be about to turn up a prostitute here. Not that I mind. I want you to know they can get up to anything, my ancestors, they have carte blanche to commit whatever acts of fornication they want as far as I am concerned, but I want to know”. It seems Fredericke Margarethe was indeed an actress for most of her life, and was widowed by the time her illegitimate daughter, the product of her affair with Prince Paul of Wurttemberg was born, in 1805. Born Porth, Fredericke was married to a man named Vohs until 1804, and, in 1818, remarried to a man named Werdy. She was described as a “Royal Saxon Court-Actress”.

Alamy Stock Photo

Boris Johnson's famous relatives

12. Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847 to 1929)

Disappointingly, the ancestor who is sometimes mentioned as a stands as a standing genealogical reproach to Boris Johnson may not be a related at all. As a pioneering feminist and suffragette, she’d surely disapprove of Boris’ attitudes towards womankind. As President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the largest component of the suffragette movement, she did as much as anyone to get women into the political life of the nation, and the Fawcett Society, still fighting for equal human rights, is named in her honour. Millicent lived just long enough to see the vote being granted on an equal basis to all women, and said this when it was finally enacted in 1928: “It is almost exactly 61 years ago since I heard John Stuart Mill introduce his suffrage amendment to the Reform Bill on May 20th, 1867. So I have had extraordinary good luck in having seen the struggle from the beginning.”

Bain News Service/Elliott & Fry

His comparison between Brexit and the Apollo moon landing was mocked by Tony Blair, who said: "The two things are, obviously, rather technically different."

The former prime minister told BBC Radio 4's Today that it was "a very Boris Johnson approach to things, which is to say 'never mind the detail, if we only believe in ourselves we can do it'".

And Tom Brake, the Liberal Democrats' Brexit spokesperson, said: “Considering Boris seems to know as much about frictionless trade as he does space exploration, perhaps we should send Boris on a one way trip to the moon for a fact-finding mission.”

Mr Blair had earlier urged Mr Johnson not to call an early general election.

Writing in The Times, he said the next prime minister would "fail" at securing a new Brexit deal and would be left with a choice between trying to force no deal through parliament, holding a second referendum or calling a general election.

He wrote: "Johnson may be tempted to go for a general election because of the weakness of Labour. This would be unacceptable and deeply damaging for the country.

"Brexit stands on its own. We decided to leave in a single-issue referendum and we should decide whether to have no-deal on the same basis - not mix it up with the normal business of politics."

He added: "Brexit would be the reason for the election but of course it would be fought across the range of issues on which the Tories would fancy themselves against Labour.

"Such a ploy would be completely unjustifiable and would shake politics to its roots with consequences neither Johnson nor the rest of us can predict. Resolve Brexit first."

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