Pity Boris Johnson. The fabled bon vivant has not had many opportunities to entertain in recent months. The pandemic has meant that foreign visitors have been thin on the ground. That changed last Friday when Johnson hosted Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.
Orbán was just the second EU leader invited to Downing Street since Brexit – and he’s not exactly an obvious choice for a powwow. A fierce critic of US president Joe Biden, an ally of China, Russia and Belarus and a proponent of the far-Right ‘great replacement’ theory, Orbán is hardly a mainstream European leader. The party he leads, Fidesz, has been kicked out of the centre-right grouping in the European Parliament.
So why invite Orbán to Downing Street at all? Some suggested Johnson hoped to learn some populist tricks from a man who has described migrants as “a poison” and waged a lengthy, high profile campaign against George Soros that reeks of anti-Semitism.
