UK’s Shrinking Role in Balkans Will Vanish Under Johnson

But he did not have to choose the two-day Balkan summit to resign, and his no-show at the meeting, some said, spoke volumes about his seeming indifference to a region in which Britain was once an influential player.

Now as Prime Minister, having dethroned May as Conservative Party leader, Balkan leaders may be wondering whether Britain under his stewardship (however long that lasts) plans to play any part in the region's affairs at all.

Unlike May, a moderate Remainer who became a moderate Brexiteer after the 2016 referendum, Johnson has for years held the view that the EU was an essentially bad organisation - with an inbuilt instinct for waste, domination and undemocratic decision-making.

Getting out of this (in his view) prison-like club, and demolishing its reputation in Britain has been his guiding motif ever since he went to Brussels in 1989 as correspondent for the right-wing Daily Telegraph.

Obsessed with uncovering scandalous waste at the heart of the EU project in Brussels, the affairs of the Balkans unsurprisingly preoccupied him very little.

In 1999, now editing the right-wing Spectator magazine, he gained some fans in Serbia for criticising the NATO bombardment, claiming - wrongly, it turned out - that air strikes would not stop Serbia from continuing to ethnically cleanse Kosovo.

Leaders of the Western Balkans at the 2018 summit in London, with then British PM Theresa May (first row, C-L) and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel posing for a 'family photo' with them. Photo: EPA/LUKE MACGREGOR/POOL

But Serbs who saw Johnson as a sympathiser with their cause, in Kosovo or anywhere else, were wrong. He was merely one a platoon of right-wing columnists who were bitterly opposed to Tony Blair's...