Race out of the closet

Doreen Lawrence, mother of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager murdered in 1993, has launched a broadside against Boris Johnson, citing a 2002 article in which he refers to ‘flag-waving piccaninnies’ (a pejorative term for black children) and suggesting that when Tony Blair visited the Congo, ‘the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief’. According to Lawrence, ‘This is the most offensive language of the colonial past and it shows that the Tory party is riddled with racial prejudice. No one with such views can be the mayor of a city with the largest black population in Britain.’

Have Lawrence, or the MPs Diane Abbot and Dawn Butler who have jumped on this bandwagon, even read the article? The Telegraph op-ed piece is actually an attack on the British political elite – not black people. Johnson suggests the Queen travels to the Commonwealth so often because it’s the only place she can attract large crowds of flag-waving kids – which is arguably true. More substantively, he lambastes Tony Blair for his constant jet-setting around the world’s troubled hotspots with his arrogant conviction that he can bring peace – while ignoring problems at home such as transport, healthcare and education. It is in fact a perfectly reasonable article that uses the ‘offensive language of the colonial past’ to ridicule Blair’s liberal imperialism and his disconnection from the ordinary people who elected him to solve their problems – not gallivant around the world dispensing his own brand of messianic wisdom. The failure of the ‘liberal’ media to explain this in their reports means Johnson’s enemies can slur with impunity.

It seems pretty obvious that Lawrence has been put up to this by Ken Livingstone’s office. On Radio 4’s Today programme last week, he said he was half-way through reading Johnson’s old columns to dredge up muck against him. Very likely the quotations in this article were fed to Lawrence so she could use her apparently apolitical position to attack Johnson as a racist. These are smear tactics of the worst kind, playing on the iconic status of a 14-year-old murder (the police’s role in which, incidentally, Boris recognised – despite his broadsides against political correctness – was marred by ‘racialist’ attitudes) to score cheap political points.

If this is the best evidence they could dig up to ‘prove’ Johnson is a racist, their case is pretty weak and reflects the Labour party’s own desperation – its tactics of trying to discredit Tories by suggesting they’re all closet racists is wearing decidedly thin. Moreover, Lawrence’s attack reveals the regulatory thought-policing that is commonplace among supposedly ‘liberal’ opinion today. In another article, Johnson slammed proposals to make racist speech in private illegal, noting that ‘not even under the law of Ceausescu’s Romania could you be prosecuted for what you said in your own kitchen’. Lawrence refused to accept this, saying: ‘clearly it can never be acceptable to hold those views. Anyway, what is said in private normally manifests itself out in public’. Since Johnson’s enemies are apparently woefully unable to find any public ‘manifestation’ of his supposed racism, perhaps their next call will be for MI6 to bug his kitchen.

Lee Jones