Boris Johnson wants us to understand how brave he is. As the former British prime minister recently recounted a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin in early February last year – around three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine – he made sure to mention how the Russian president had (allegedly) casually threatened to kill him.
“He threatened me at one point,” Johnson recalls in an interview for a new BBC documentary Putin vs the West. “He said, ‘You know, Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with a missile it would only take a minute,’ or something like that.” He pauses, half-smiling, apparently impressed with his own anecdote. “You know… jolly.”
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