From the time she became PM:
But those same people she was trying to reach out to are unlikely to forget quickly that May was a ‘Remain’ supporter during the campaign.
Theresa May wasn’t one of the most vocal figures of the debate, but she stuck to the government line: that Britain would be better off remaining part of the European Union. As a high level cabinet Minister (May was the longest serving Home Secretary for over a century), this is not surprising.
She warned UK voters that Brexit could have seriously damaging effects on the economy, the security, and even the current form of the United Kingdom.
Though often quiet during the campaign, May said that leaving the EU would be “fatal for the Union with Scotland”, as the Scottish National Party (SNP) would most likely try again for independence if Scotland voted to remain while the UK as a whole voted to leave.
http://www.euronews.com/2016/07/12/what-is-theresa-may-s-view-on-brexitJohnson was the most influential journalist in building up anti-EU feeling, before he got elected, and has used Brexit as central to his attempt to become PM.
For many in EU circles the former London mayor’s reputation for mendacity pre-dates the referendum campaign. Nobody has forgotten his activities as a journalist in Brussels, where he was correspondent for the Daily Telegraph between 1989 and 1994. The French tend to mythologise “Anglo-Saxon” journalism as the pinnacle of ethics and rigour, but Johnson was the incarnation of the gutter-press dictum: never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Indeed, this is what a grinning Johnson often remarked to his foreign counterparts when they protested about his exaggerated stories.
I observed his methods when I was posted as a journalist to Brussels in 1992. One day he wrote a story claiming that Jacques Delors’ spokesman was so well-paid (as all of these incompetent Eurocrats, of course, had to be in Johnson’s narrative), that he lived in an immense chateau on the outskirts of Brussels. This was vehemently denied at a press briefing, to the hilarity of Johnson.
The story arguably had a grain of truth: Bruno Dethomas, the spokesman, lived in a large 19th-century house that had a turret on the outside, an architectural folly typical of the period in which it was built. “You see, it’s a castle!” Johnson laughed when I challenged him on the accuracy of his reporting.
Johnson can scarcely have believed what he himself wrote, but he kept churning it out. It was a game, a big laugh, especially as his fiercely anti-European newspaper lapped up these stories and gasped for more.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/15/brexit-boris-johnson-euromyths-telegraph-brusselsThe foreign secretary Boris Johnson made a speech on Wednesday in praise of optimism, confidence and a liberal Brexit. It was rich in rhetorical flourish and almost empty of detail. It was the speech of a politician whose only credibility is as the tribune of the leave campaign, a shameless piece of oration that fell back on his old journalistic trick of describing an EU that does not exist in order to justify his determination to get out. It was billed as an overture to the 48% who wanted to stay in the EU and a definitive speech about the shape of Britain’s future relationships outside it. But it was singularly free of the kind of irksome detail needed to understand a world beyond Europe.
It was rich in what Whitehall describes as optimism bias, “an estimate for a project’s costs, benefits and duration [made] in the absence of robust primary evidence”. It was a Valentine’s Day card to himself and his ambition to be the next Tory leader, an ambition he betrayed with his incoherent answer to a question about whether he would rule out resigning this year.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/14/the-guardian-view-of-boris-johnsons-brexit-vision-all-about-me
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