Boris Johnson quoted from the Lion King to No 10 staff on Friday morning, telling them “change is good” amid mass resignations.
The prime minister channelled the sage figure of Rafiki the mandrill as he attempted to boost morale, his spokesperson confirmed.
“As Rafiki in The Lion King says, change is good, and change is necessary even though it’s tough,” Johnson said..
It comes amid a wholesale clearout of Downing Street, sparked by the resignation on Thursday of policy chief Munira Mirza – an ally of 14 years – who criticised Johnson for his “scurrilous” Jimmy Savile attacks on the Labour leader, Keir Starmer.
After Mirza’s departure, resignations of four aides followed: Dan Rosenfield, chief of staff, Martin Reynolds, Johnson’s principal private secretary, Jack Doyle, director of communications, and Elena Narozanski, a No 10 policy unit member.
The Lion King comments mark another children’s story reference entering Johnson’s oeuvre of bizarre quotations, from Peppa Pig to James Bond to Kermit the Frog.
Peppa Pig
During a speech widely criticised as “rambling” and lacking seriousness, Johnson stunned the British business community by expounding the benefits of Peppa Pig World – and its mass transport system.
“Yesterday I went, as we all must, to Peppa Pig World. Hands up if you’ve been to Peppa Pig World,” Johnson asked the Confederation of British Industry in November.
“I loved it. Peppa Pig World is very much my kind of place,” he went on. “It has very safe streets, discipline in schools, heavy emphasis on new mass transit systems. Even if they’re a bit stereotypical about Daddy Pig.”
Kermit the Frog
Ahead of the UN Cop26 summit in Glasgow in November, Johnson was called a “clown” after referencing Kermit the Frog when making the case for going green.
“When Kermit the Frog sang It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green I want you to know he was wrong,” Johnson said. “It’s not only easy, it’s lucrative and it’s right to be green – and he was also unnecessarily rude to Miss Piggy, I thought.”
Rudyard Kipling
The prime minister was criticised for “incredible insensitivity” after reciting a poem by Rudyard Kipling, author of pro-empire work such as The White Man’s Burden, during a trip to Myanmar in 2017.
Johnson, then foreign secretary, recited the opening verse to The Road to Mandalay, including the line: “The temple bells they say / Come you back you English soldier.”
The British Empire ruled Myanmar – then called Burma – from 1824 to 1948.
The UK ambassador to Myanmar, Andrew Patrick, intervened, telling Johnson: “No. Not appropriate.”
James Bond
At Cop26, Johnson used James Bond to welcome world leaders to the UK.
“Welcome to Glasgow, and to Scotland, whose most globally famous fictional son is almost certainly a man called James Bond – who generally comes to the climax of his highly lucrative films strapped to a doomsday device desperately trying to work out which coloured wire to pull to turn it off,” he said.
“A red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a detonation that will end human life as we know it, and we are in roughly the same position, my fellow global leaders, as James Bond today.
“Except that the tragedy is this is not a movie, and the doomsday device is real.”
Johnson seemed to flout climate activist Greta Thunberg’s advice during Cop26: “No more blah blah blah.”
