Boris Johnson is at the Covid Inquiry today and he will be offering, indeed has already made, apologies. It is a regular Johnsonian event.
He offered a ‘heartfelt apology’ to the Commons for his participation in a Downing St garden party on 20th May 2020 which he claims he thought was a work event, earlier this year. When he was given a fine for breaking lockdown laws for attending a birthday party (for himself) at No.10 later in 2020 last week, he apologised again.
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 noted 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 pointed 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 he is carrying on apologising and carrying on making remarks and doing things that cause offence too. As one of his tutor’s at Eton noted Johnson thinks that the rules which apply to others do not apply to him. The ‘Special One’…
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