BORIS Johnson has warned that British troops may have to be deployed in Ukraine to defend Europe if Russia gains the upper hand in the conflict.

The stark warning was delivered in an in-depth interview with GB News’ Patrick Christys last night. The former PM also said:

Republicans supporting Putin are “bonkers”
He backed Trump’s plans for the mass deportation of illegal migrants
The Tories got unnecessarily “hammered” on immigration during the election
Suggested Britain’s reputation for free speech has been put at risk by Labour
That Labour is wrong to ignore nuclear power in the race to meet net zero
The story about the late Queen Elizabeth calling him an idiot is “tittle-tattle”

Explaining why spending on Ukraine was an “investment” against future expansionism by Russia and China, he told Patrick Christys Tonight: “Let me give the financial argument for why that’s a good investment of public funds, why protecting democracy in Ukraine is actually a sensible investment. And the answer is very simple.

“If Ukraine goes down, then we face an even bigger threat on our borders, the borders of the European continent wherever the democracies butt up against Russia.

“So, it’ll be the Baltic states. It’ll be in Georgia. You’ll see the impact of a Ukrainian defeat in the Pacific theatre. You’ll see it in the South China Sea.

“What I’m saying is for people watching, thinking ‘why are we supporting the Ukrainians?’

“It’s because otherwise our collective security will be really degraded by a resurgent Russia threatening all sorts of parts of Europe, and we will then have to pay to send British troops to help defend Ukraine.”

He added: “You know, Donald Trump has lots of different voices in his ears and…there’s a front of the Republican Party, quite a lot of them actually, who take the wrong line on Ukraine and who are, frankly, a bit entranced by Vladimir Putin and they have a kind of weird sort of fanboy thing about Putin.

“You know, taking his shirt off. And it’s creepy, It’s bonkers, it’s wrong. But there’s some…there’s a group of Republicans that are on the wrong track on Ukraine and on Russia.

“He’s listening to some of those people…he’s hearing all that. On the other hand, this is the same Trump who made a huge difference to the fortunes of Ukraine when he authorised the supply of the javelin shoulder launched anti-tank weapons.

“If Trump hadn’t done that, then the battle for Kyiv might have been very, very different.”

He said some parts of the media have underestimated Trump’s support among voters: “I think they simply misunderstood what was happening in America and what they got wrong was the, you know, it’s the economy, right?

“And like I said right at the beginning, a lot of people looked back to the time of Donald Trump and remembered that things were not only stable, but also quite prosperous and he had a clear and incredible economic message about growth, about tax cuts, about deregulation.”

Asked if the UK should emulate Trump’s plan to deport illegal immigrants, he said: “I agree, and I looked at that and I thought we should. We’ll see how he gets on because, be in no doubt, the lawyers will be all over it, as they were all over our various projects.

“It’s like I said in April 2022, when I launched the Rwanda scheme, you’ve got to get the legal ducks in a row. And I said to the people, I said to the country that when we launched, that it would only work if we could get the lawyers to back down.

“We live under the rule of law, and we try to protect human rights, but sometimes that protection of rights is done in such a way as to be, I think, unreasonable and against the clear manifesto commitments that the government has.”

He added: “We’ve got ourselves into a situation where it is very difficult to deport even people who patently should be deported…my party, the Conservative Party, did have a perfectly good agenda. The Rwanda plan is a good one.

“Rob Jenrick was making a very interesting point when he said that it might be time to review the ECHR, the European Convention on Human Rights, because I think sometimes it is being applied in a way that is anti-democratic, and that is that is stopping the removal of people who plainly need to be removed.

“So anyway, I look at some of the things that Trump is now saying about that issue, and I can understand why he’s saying it. I think that in a democracy, we need to have a way of doing it.”

On antisemitism and the attacks on Israelis in Amsterdam, he said: “Winston Churchill was a very strong supporter of Israel and of the Jewish people. And I think that he would have been appalled by some of the obvious racism and antisemitism that we’re now seeing. I think he would have been absolutely horrified.”

He added: “I really worry that antisemitism is sprouting up again around the world. And you’ve got to think, anti-Semitism has been around for hundreds of years, thousands of years, really.

“And it’s kind of like a virus under the floorboards, or like a spore, or some disease in that it suddenly gets potentiated, suddenly comes alive again because of certain events in European history. And it’s alive now.

“And you see it on the streets of London, you see it in Australia, you see it in America. You see it in other parts and Holland, tragically, is no exception.

“I thought the Dutch King spoke very well about the subject, and I think he was right. Because the tragedy is that it’s a huge blot on all of European history. Our own country historically has not been immune. There have been pogroms against Jewish people in, I’m sad to say, in the Middle Ages in England as well.”

He defended the Conservatives’ record on immigration but conceded the numbers became too high and appeared to blame Rishi Sunak for losing the General Election over the issue.

Johnson said: “You don’t remember spiralling double digit inflation and wage, price inflation just chasing each other up. And that’s a vice to which I’m afraid our country has been prone to in the past and we had to sort out those labour market problems.

“Now you can say that the numbers were too high, and I’d accept that, but never forget it was we who controlled it, because we took back control with Brexit. And in future years, we can say no, we can say we’ve got enough, we don’t need any.

“So that’s, by the way, what I would have said during the election campaign, where we got hammered on immigration and we didn’t need to.”

He added: “I’m a mongrel made up of all sorts of immigrants. But the point about immigration is that people will wear it, they’ll understand it, they’ll accept it, if they feel it’s controlled.

“The problem with the illegals, particularly the people who come so visibly across the channel in the dinghies, coracles, and so on, is that they undermine the people who are coming here legally, and they seem to be getting an unfair advantage.”

Johnson also said Britain’s reputation for speech has been put at risk by the government’s response to the recent riots: “When you’re locking someone up for quite a long time, some you know, mother, grandmother, who’s never had a criminal record before, for something she said in the spur of the moment on Twitter, and you’re simultaneously letting people out of prison who are really quite serious offenders.

“There are people around the world who look up to Britain [as] a great beacon of free speech, right? And they do worry about that, because it does seem to be disproportionate.”

He also criticised the Government’s energy policies: “Labour, when they were in power for 13 years, did nothing about nuclear power, which is what this country needs and I green-lighted loads of nuclear power stations.

“I’m different in this sense that I don’t have the sort of completely hysterical objection to using hydrocarbons, which this country possesses, during the transition.

“As it happens, I think it’s mad to be importing coal from Australia or wherever, literally when we have it in the UK and we could use it sparingly.”

He also dismissed a story about the late Queen being relieved after he resigned, because he would not be organising her funeral and was “an idiot”.

Johnson said: “I think it’s highly unlikely that she said that because, of course, no Prime Minister organises the monarch’s funeral. It’s done by the DCMS.

“I think it’s possible that there’s malicious tittle tattle.”