BILLY Bragg has revealed what it was like to be at Glastonbury with Boris Johnson when the Prime Minister attended the music festival in 2000.
The folk singer, who organised the festival’s Left Field tent, said he has not been in contact with Johnson since giving him a documented tour of Glastonbury 22 years ago.
He said he thought Johnson was “relatively harmless” but also warned “you have to be careful who you elevate to positions of celebrity.”
Speaking to the Glastonbury Free Press, Bragg said: “I tell people it was just a bad trip and I don’t know how it ended up on YouTube.
“I thought it was just some bad magic mushrooms but actually it must have really happened. In my defence, he was relatively harmless at the time.
“It just goes to show you have to be careful who you elevate to positions of celebrity. Then, he was that guy off Have I Got News For You.”
In the video, Bragg welcomes Johnson, who is wearing a cream suit with a blue shirt, to Castle Cary train station after he missed his stop on the train – putting it down to “being in a trance".
While driving the politician to Glastonbury, the pair discuss the correct way to say Glastonbury before asking punters on their arrival.
Bragg added: “Everybody was really pleased to see him. I can’t imagine if I walked around with him now he’d have the same reaction.”
In the video, Johnson is introduced to naked activists, and is heard to say: “I fully support your right to be naked.”
He also visits the famous stone circle and delves into a discussion about economics, branding the festival a “capitalist extravaganza.”
Bragg continued: “I think he’s someone who has lived all his life without taking any responsibility for anything: professionally, personally or politically.
“Boris is someone who acts with impunity and to have someone like that running the country is downright dangerous.”
In 2016, the singer voiced his support for then-Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn when he manned the phones at a campaigning event in London and defended the politician when he was facing a barrage of negative attacks.
A year later, Corbyn would appear on the famous Pyramid Stage which resulted in chants of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” to the tune of The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army.
Asked whether Sir Keir Starmer would garner the same response, Bragg said: “I don’t know if Keir is a festival kind of person.
“To some people it’s absolutely anathema, the idea of wading around in a muddy field on a rainy June afternoon.”
