Former prime minister Boris Johnson has likened antisemitism to a virus in and condemned the reaction by some in the UK, US and Australia to the atrocities experienced by Israel on October 7.

In an interview with Sky News Australia on Friday, Johnson, who served as the UK’s prime minister between 2019-2022, was asked his reaction to scenes of pro-Palestine protests on the streets of London, some of which, the interviewer observed, had taken place before Israel's response had even started.

In response, he said that “in all our societies … there is a virus of antisemitism, the spores of which lurk beneath the floorboards and that comes out” and added that it was “weird to see demonstrations the day after that massacre, effectively in favour of Hamas”.

Johnson, who visited Israel in November last year alongside former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison and witnessed the aftermath of Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel, took issue with how the conflict was being perceived.

“1,200 people were massacred and tortured … innocent Jewish people,” he said. “What I find amazing now is that people can't focus on the reality that Israel is legitimately trying to prevent that type of massacre from happening again” given that terrorist groups like Hamas “want to eradicate Israel entirely and not just Israel but every Jewish person in the world”.

The former prime minister said: “Any democratic leader is entitled to try to protect his or her country from that that sort of madness”, adding “I'm firmly with Israel in their in their right to self-protection and I wish everybody had had a bit more moral clarity about this”.

On his visit to Israel last November, Johnson, who also served as Mayor of London between 2008-2016, also took a swipe at the BBC’s refusal explicitly to call Hamas a terrorist organisation. “No one looking at the charnel house of that kibbutz could be in any doubt that this was terror”, he said after a visit to kibbutz Kfar Aza.

That same month, he was one of several politicians to take part in the near 105,000-strong march against antisemitism in London, organised by the Campaign Against Antisemitism to protest against the rise against antisemitism in the aftermath in the UK in the aftermath of October 7.