Boris Johnson was not at all pleased by the interview that Tucker Carlson conducted in the Kremlin with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
According to the former British prime minister, the American presenter “betrayed” journalism and audiences worldwide by not asking Putin difficult questions throughout the two-hour conversation.
“When Tucker Carlson went to the Kremlin, he had a function well known to history. He was to be the stooge of the tyrant, the dictaphone to the dictator and a traitor to journalism,” Johnson wrote in a column for the Daily Mail tabloid.
“In his fawning, guffawing, slack-jawed happiness at having a ‘scoop,’ he betrayed his viewers and listeners around the world,” the British Conservative leader continued.
“He didn’t ask tough questions. He didn’t ask Putin why even now he is using the most brutal means of modern warfare to maim and murder innocent Ukrainian civilians,” he added. “He didn’t take him to task for the torture, the rapes, the blowing up of kindergartens — all of it wholly unnecessary and unprovoked. Not once did he even try to dam the flow of lies from Putin.”
Johnson later criticized Carlson for letting Putin speak for half an hour at the beginning of the interview when the Russian president gave an extensive historical review to justify his claims about Ukraine’s nonexistence as a state.
“Instead, he gasped fanboyishly at Putin’s alleged erudition, boneheadedly accepting the Russian leader’s mixture of semi-masticated Wikipedia and outright falsehood — such as the bizarre (and ominous) suggestion that Poland was somehow responsible for her own partition and destruction in 1939 — as if Russia had had no part in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,” wrote Johnson, who also questioned the American presenter for failure to refute the claim that the United Kingdom pushed Ukraine to fight and avoid a supposed peace agreement with Russia.
“He did not challenge the ludicrous suggestion that the UK government persuaded the Ukrainians to fight on, rather than surrender to Putin’s tender mercies, in the spring of 2022,” the conservative politician said.
Carlson’s interview with Putin is a historic milestone in the history of X (Twitter), with 162 million views in just 24 hours. However, this number still falls short of the more than 400 million views of the interview between Carlson and Argentine President Javier Milei.
Ep. 73 The Vladimir Putin Interview pic.twitter.com/67YuZRkfLL
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 8, 2024
