LONDON, Jul 23 During a career as a journalist and politician, Britain 's next prime minister Boris Johnson has courted plenty of controversy.Here are some of the most contentious episodes in the life of the bombastic 55-year-old former foreign secretary and London mayor, who was named as Theresa May''s successor on Tuesday:Fired for lying - After graduating from Oxford University, Johnson landed a trainee reporter job at The Times newspaper in 1987. He was dismissed within a year for concocting a quote in an article about king Edward II and the monarch''s suspected gay lover. "Get that lie off your bus," he was told by a rival during a TV debate. Johnson has nonetheless stood by the claim, telling a 2017 radio phone-in that it "represents the total sum that we do not control every week that is spent by Brussels".Diplomatic maelstrom - Johnson's 2016 to 2018 tenure as foreign secretary featured a number of gaffes -- the most high-profile of which jeopardised the case of a British-Iranian woman, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who is being held in a Tehran jail.The dual citizen, who worked for the Thomson Reuters Foundation -- the media group''s philanthropic arm -- was detained in 2016 as she left Tehran after taking her infant daughter to visit her family.She was later jailed for five years for alleged sedition. She vehemently denies the charges.During a 2017 hearing in the British parliament, Johnson stated that Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been training journalists in Iran, in what he later described as a "slip of the tongue".Iran's judiciary promptly seized on the comments as proving that she was not on holiday, and Johnson was forced to call his Iranian counterpart to try to clarify the remarks.He apologised in Britain's parliament, retracting "any suggestion she was there in a professional capacity", but resisted calls to resign over the error.

Source: Economic Times July 23, 2019 12:11 UTC