Wild smears against Boris’s wife and a crude bid to kill the one man who can swing Brexit

Boris Johnson is a wild man with no judgment who has lost the plot. so say his many remain critics, who are doing their utmost to discredit and debunk the de facto leader of the Leave camp.

The former deputy PM and lifelong Euro-fanatic Michael heseltine has described recent comments by Boris as ‘obscene’ and suggested that the former Mayor of London made ‘near-racist allegations’ about President obama. This from one Tory about another!

is there any truth in the grave accusations being heaped on Boris? only a tiny smidgen. Most of what he says is fair and reasonable and properly thought out, though the newspaper columnist in him striving for effect sometimes tends to edge out the sober statesman.

The fact is that if there is a leading politician who has been an incontinent fount of outrageous and unsubstantiated claims, it is not Boris Johnson but David Cameron. Yet heseltine ignores the Prime Minister’s sometimes almost lunatic excesses, and loftily claims that Boris’s ‘judgment is going’.

really? i’m afraid i don’t accept that Boris’s supposed gaffes were gaffes at all. his suggestion that Barack obama’s ‘part-Kenyan’ ancestry might have made him anti-British, and that an ‘ancestral dislike of the British Empire’ had contributed to the president’s removal of Churchill’s bust from the oval office, may have been mistaken, but it wasn’t racist.

After all, during Mr obama’s first term of office he was much less friendly towards Britain than his predecessor George W. Bush. There had been an antiBritish undertow in the president’s 1995 autobiography, particularly in references to the imprisonment of his Kenyan grandfather by the colonial authorities.

As for Boris’s more recent observation that the EU is pursuing the same goal of unification as hitler though by different means, perhaps that could have been more delicately phrased. But it can hardly be contested that such diverse figures as Philip ii of spain and napoleon and hitler have wanted to impose a united Europe on its constituent nations.

Doubtless Boris somewhat over-egged the pudding as is his wont, but nothing he said justifies the exaggerated outrage and general caterwauling from remain supporters. Just look at the many ridiculous things Mr Cameron has said which have been received with infinite indulgence.

His most recent egregious assertion is that the murderous islamic state terror group would be happy if Britain left the EU. The implication is that is would find it easier to blow us up. This is a view challenged by many knowledgeable people, including ex-Mi6 boss sir richard Dearlove.

in the past few weeks our trigger-happy Prime Minister had suggested that Brexit would undermine security on the Continent and possibly lead to a resurgence of war and even genocide. isn’t this pretty barmy? it is nato which has kept the peace in Europe, and will continue to do so.

With olympian certainty, Mr Cameron has also peddled the line that Brexit will lead to a fall in house prices, higher unemployment and reduced GDP. he and George osborne are adamant that household income in 2030 will be a ludicrously precise £4,300 less if we leave the EU than it would be if we stay in.

Perhaps most questionable among a welter of shaky propositions is the oft-repeated statement that the EU is ‘reformed’. That’s bunkum. Mr Cameron has wrung a few paltry concessions from our partners. But far from being ‘reformed’, the EU will continue down its existing path towards greater integration.

Do voters believe Mr Cameron’s crazy assertions? i don’t think so. one recent poll suggested that twice as many people trust Boris Johnson as do the Prime Minister. They can see through the scare stories. if i were Mr Cameron, i should be worried that i was destroying my hard-won reputation for truth-telling.

it can’t be denied, though, that the notion that Mr Cameron is circumspect and analytical, and Boris wild and flaky, has some traction outside Mr heseltine’s mind and the remain camp.

Ten days ago, Boris delivered a long and thoughtful speech about the EU, arguing with great attention to detail that the single Market had not produced the economic benefits it was supposed to. in order to lighten the mood, and establish that he was no Little Englander, he sang a few lines of Beethoven’s ode To Joy towards the end of his speech.

on the BBC and much of the broadcast media, what was reported was not the serious stuff — which went deeper than anything i have heard from Mr Cameron during this campaign — but Boris’s knockabout act. Maybe the humour was misplaced. he seems to have a fear of being thought boring.

his latest joke — a rude limerick which he composed at the drop of a hat about Turkey’s President Erdogan — will doubtless provoke howls of condemnation from the prim and politically correct. But most people will be on the same wavelength as Boris in thinking Erdogan a nasty man who closes down newspapers he doesn’t like and locks up his enemies.

no, Boris is simply funnier, more irreverent and more honest than David Cameron, and he knows more history. For Mr heseltine to accuse him of being out of control and a bit loopy, while sparing Mr Cameron’s excesses, is hard to swallow.

LET’s remember that the Michael heseltine superciliously impugning Boris’s judgment is the same Michael heseltine who, in 1976, seized the Mace in the house of Commons, and waved it above his head like a demented lout.

This is the madly ambitious man who stomped out of the Cabinet in 1986 over a minor issue (the future of Westland helicopters), and then spent the next four years plotting the political assassination of Margaret Thatcher. he succeeded in getting rid of the greatest peacetime Tory prime minister of modern times but, mercifully, failed to win the crown himself.

Above all, heseltine loves the European Union. so great is his devotion to the euro as the central symbol of the EU that as recently as 2014 he was cheerfully predicting that we will one day have to join the doomed project.

needless to say, he was put up to his brutal attack on Boris by number 10, which regards the Blond Bombshell as public enemy no. 1 — far more so than poor, ineffectual Jeremy Corbyn. The BBC, which has so far been surprisingly even-handed in its coverage, gave the old bruiser prominent billing.

i don’t think Boris should be downcast. if anything, he should be exultant that the Cameroons so fear and loathe him that they are striving to finish him off. They realise he is the only Tory who reaches people no other Tory can reach. They know he alone could swing Brexit. They want his scalp.

so frantic are the wilder fringes of remain that, according to the sun newspaper, desperadoes are smearing Boris’s wife Marina to derail his campaign. Utterly false claims are swirling around that she was the high-profile QC caught in a drunken clinch with a fellow lawyer at Waterloo station last summer.

This is a dirty business — and it will become dirtier still before the referendum on June 23. There will be further attempts to blacken Boris’s name, and paint him as some sort of deranged extremist. i fear the BBC may collude more in these assaults.

Despite his public persona, i know Boris Johnson is a sensitive soul deep down who yearns to be loved. My only prayer is that he does not lose his nerve. his country really does need him now.