This would be our new Prime Minister?

[Denzil_DC]

12. You don't have a problem at all with terms like "piccaninnies" and "watermelon smiles"

being applied to black people?

Good grief.

Here's the full quote from Johnson's 2002 article where he said that, in context, which doesn't make it any better:

It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness. They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in Watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.

He did apologize for it later. Six years later.