Boris Johnson ‘clarifies’ Starmer smear. Apology still awaited
Boris Johnson’s trademark is to make outrageous remarks and then apologise if they annoyed anyone.
On 3rd February after Keir Starmer had pointed out in the Commons that Johnson’s claim that he failed while DPP to prosecute Jimmy Savile was taken from far right social media sites (it was also a lie) Johnson issued a clarification:
I want to be very clear about this because a lot of people have got very hot under the collar, and I understand why.
Let’s be absolutely clear, I’m talking not about the leader of the opposition’s personal record when he was DPP and I totally understand that he had nothing to do personally with those decisions.
I was making a point about his responsibility for the organisation as a whole. And I think people can see that. And I really do want to clarify that because it is important.
Guardian
It’s a start but where is that apology? Most recently Johnson offered a ‘heartfelt apology’ to the Commons for his participation in a Downing St garden party on 20th May 2020 which he claimed he thought was a work event. Johnson’s career is littered with apologies but they are invariably for the impact what he has done is on himself rather than what he actually did.
As Sonia Purnell notes in her biography of the current PM Just Boris he has become an almost habitual apologiser for ‘any offence’ that his earlier words, often racist, have caused.
Johnson has a long standing history of racist comments and of dismissing reports that highlight the role racism had and has in British society, to go along with his history of apologising for these when called to account.
One example is the 1999 Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence that found institutionalise racism in the Met Police. Johnson dismissed the findings as ‘Orwellian’ ‘weird’ and ‘crazy’.
Purnell points out that following discussions with his then wife, prominent lawyer Marina Wheeler, by 2001 he was prepared to concede that Macpherson may have had a point. Not of course that when he later became Mayor of London he did anything about this.
More recently Johnson made a speech about ‘levelling up’ on 15th July 2021. Afterwards he was asked by the Independent if he would disown earlier comments about Muslim women he said:
‘The best thing I can say is that I’ve obviously apologised in the past for the things that I’ve said that have caused offence and continue to apologise for them’.
So carry on apologising and carry on making the remarks and causing offence too, and now it seems clarifying as well.
It appears that the situation was too much for Johnson’s Head of Policy who has been with him since his days as London Mayor (from 2008) Munira Mirza. She is the likely architect of Johnson’s apology policy and is clearly fed up he has failed to deploy it here:
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