Boris Johnson has won a £1,000 prize for a rude poem about the Turkish president having sex with a goat, The Guardian reports.
The former mayor of London’s limerick, published by the Spectator as a rebuff to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s efforts to prosecute a German comedian’s offensive poem, also calls the president a “wankerer”.
Johnson, a former editor of the magazine, won the Spectator’s “President Erdogan offensive poetry competition.” The prize money has been donated by a reader.
The limerick was written off-the-cuff by the Conservative MP during an interview with the Swiss weekly magazine Die Weltwoche.
Johnson – whose great-grandfather was Turkish – called it “a scandal” that a German court had granted an injunction to prevent comedian Jan Böhmermann repeating his offensive skit about the Turkish president.
“If somebody wants to make a joke about the love that flowers between the Turkish president and a goat, he should be able to do so, in any European country, including Turkey,” Johnson told interviewer Nicholas Farrell, who then challenged him to enter the Spectator’s poetry prize.
