FOREIGN secretary Boris Johnson has been caught on camera reciting a colonial poem in a Burmese temple before being stopped by a panicked ambassador.
Johnson quoted the opening lines of Rudyard Kipling's Mandalay during a visit to the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, the capital of Burma.
The poem is written through the eyes of a retired British serviceman in Burma, also known as Myanmar, which Britain colonised for more than a century.
The footage, to be broadcast by Channel 4 tonight as part of a documentary about Johnson’s fitness to be Prime Minister, emerged yesterday but was filmed in January.
It shows British ambassador Andrew Patrick stopping Johnson mid-flow before he recited the line "Bloomin' idol made o' mud/ Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd" – a reference to Buddha.
Johnson had taken part in a ritual involving pouring water over a golden statue of what he described as “a very big guinea pig”, when he approached a 42-tonne bell, rang it with a wooden stick and spontaneously started reciting Kipling’s poem.
A visibly tense ambassador stood by as Johnson continued: “The wind is in the palm trees and the temple bells they say ...” Then Patrick reminded him: “You’re on mic,” adding: “Probably not a good idea...”
“What?” Johnson replied. “The Road to Mandalay?”
“No,” said the ambassador sternly. “Not appropriate.”
“No?” replied Johnson looking down at his mobile phone. “Good stuff.”
“It is stunning he would do this there,” said Mark Farmaner, director of the Burma Campaign UK. “There is a sensitivity about British colonialism and it is something that people in Burma are still resentful about. British colonial times were seen as a humiliation and an insult.”
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office declined to comment.
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