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

The prosecution of Bo.J.

Allegedly loveable buffoon Boris Johnson has thrown his multicoloured ski-hat into the ring for the race to become London’s mayor. Boris, like the Conservative Party itself, has no actual programme, (replying to a reporter who asked him what his policies would be, “London is a great city”), but the root of his popularity lies not in his political outlook, but his frequent outspoken faux pas, which delight many who see him as an eccentric antidote to the stuffed grey suits who populate political life today.

Boris has taken a swing at many of the worst aspects of contemporary politics, expressing in a fairly bluff and blundering way a perfectly understandable wish for people to be robust and autonomous. In October 2004 he famously criticised Liverpudlians for ‘wallowing’ in their ‘victim status’ following the execution of Ken Bigley by Iraqi insurgents. At the 2006 Conservative Party conference he caused uproar for criticising Jamie Oliver and the government’s insidious regulation of lifestyles, saying ‘if I was in charge, I would get rid of Jamie Oliver and tell people to eat what they like;’ he also stood up for the reviled women who give junk food to their kids at break time: ‘I say let people eat what they like. Why shouldn’t they push pies through the railings?’ In April 2007 he called Portsmouth ‘one of the most depressed towns in southern England,’ being ‘too full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs.’

The reason people warm to Boris is that he dares to say things that mainstream politicians don’t. Indeed, the reactions to his various outbursts (which are invariably described as ‘gaffes’ rather than as legitimate expressions of opinion) show the extent to which free speech is curtailed even for our elected representatives. Michael Howard despatched Boris to Liverpool to do penance, he was made to revoke his comments about Jamie Oliver (while the Conference passed a resolution commending the celebrity chef), Portsmouth LibDem MP Mike Hancock called for Boris to be sacked over his Portsmouth ‘insult’, and Boris also had to apologise to the entire population of Papua New Guinea when its High Commissioner protested against a flippant remark about ‘Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing’ in the Conservative party. He was backed by his party only once, over Portsmouth.

It’s disappointing, but not surprising, that even our elected leaders feel a need to back down, self-censor and apologise for speech that sensitive individuals find insulting. Although I’m pretty sure that Boris couldn’t run a piss-up in a brewery and would be a disastrous mayor of London, he deserves commendation for the sheer (and deliberate) insincerity of his enforced apologies. Over Liverpool (where surely no more than three copies of the Spectator are read annually, in any case), he said, ‘I am a squeezed lemon on this subject’, and his comedic media blitz betrayed both a good sense of humour and his total lack of genuine remorse. Over Jamie Oliver, he recanted in ridiculously fulsome terms, saying Oliver was ‘a national saint’. And over Papua, he said, ‘I meant no insult to the people of Papua New Guinea, who I’m sure lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity in common with the rest of us,’ promising to ‘add Papua New Guinea to my global itinerary of apology.’

Now, if only serious politicians could take a leaf out of Boris’s book, and dare to break, rather than make, taboos.

Lee Jones