JE SUIS BORIS!

With laughable hypocrisy, Johnson’s burka row critics cried ‘Je suis Charlie’ when French journalists were killed for satirising Islam – but (surprise!) not one of them will say . . .

ANEW medical condition can be identified: Boris Derangement Syndrome. It affects senior members of the Conservative party who fear and hate Boris Johnson — chiefly those who loathe Brexit and blame Johnson for persuading the country to vote for it in the referendum two years ago.

This experience has scarred them: they now believe Johnson is plotting to become leader of their party and that his every utterance is part of a malign plan to seize power.

This, I believe, is the only explanation for the fury they have displayed over an article Johnson wrote a week ago. It was headlined ‘Denmark has got it wrong. Yes, the burka is oppressive and ridiculous — but that’s still no reason to ban it’.

As that suggests, Johnson was in fact criticising the new Danish law banning the wearing of a Muslim garment [the niqab] which leaves nothing of the wearer visible apart from her eyes; he wrote that he opposed a law which would tell ‘a freeborn adult woman what she may or may not wear in a public place when she is simply minding her own business’.

To emphasise that he was taking the classical liberal position of accepting people’s absolute right to do things one might find objectionable, he went on to say that the burka can make its wearer look like ‘a bank robber’ or ‘a letterbox’.

Deranged

This attempt at humour was beneath Boris’s normal standard, being unoriginal: we’ve heard this said countless times before. Which makes the eruption it has caused in the Conservative party all the more deranged.

Lord Cooper of Windrush — who as Andrew Cooper was David Cameron’s ‘director of strategy’ — raged: ‘ The rottenness of Boris Johnson goes deeper even than his casual racism and his equally casual courting of fascism.

‘He will advocate anything to play to the crowd of the moment. His career is a saga of moral emptiness and lies . . .’ And so, madly, on. In a tweet posted at 2.49am on Saturday morning.

If Cooper has been driven to bug-eyed insomnia by Johnson, it’s not surprising. He was the official pollster to the Remain campaign, and on the day of the referendum reassured David Cameron that Remain would win by a comfortable 10 per cent.

As one of the Remain campaign put it afterwards, rather than Cooper’s costly polls ‘we’d have been better off going out into the street and randomly stopping every fourth person and asking them what they thought’.

Another former Downing Street aide, Camilla Cavendish (head of the No 10 policy unit until the referendum result propelled Cameron from office) wrote in yesterday’s Sunday Times that what she called Burqagate ‘is not an accident. It is a deliberate bid for the leadership of the Conservative party.’

I like and respect Camilla. But this is dotty. Boris was simply dashing off his weekly column before going on holiday. It was as much a calculated leadership bid as this column is an attempt to appeal to the viewers of Love Island.

Actually, Boris doesn’t do calculated. I know, because I was his editor at the Spectator in the Nineties. He is brilliant, possibly even a genius: but chaos and muddle are his middle names (along with De Pfeffel).

That, after all, is why Michael Gove abandoned his team during the battle for the Conservative leadership after Cameron’s resignation. He couldn’t cope with Johnson’s lack of focus on the job in hand. And the fact that Boris immediately abandoned his campaign at that point suggests that he was not as singleminded about becoming leader as all his enemies suppose.

Another of those enemies in the Conservative party is its former chair and the first Muslim Tory cabinet minister, Sayeeda Warsi. She launched a furious attack on Johnson for his allegedly Islamophobic article, describing it as ‘completely indefensible . . . reprehensible.’ She also described Johnson’s actions as ‘too calculating’ to be a mere mistake. ‘His refusal to apologise supports that,’ she added.

This is the same Baroness Warsi who, three years ago, came to the defence of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo after its staff had been murderously attacked for its vicious lampooning of the Muslim faith.

Warsi wrote an admirable article for The Sun declaring: ‘We live in a liberal democracy, where giving and taking offence is part and parcel of everyday life . . . Freedom of speech and freedom of expression must be defended by us all. My faith cannot be diminished by . . . anyone poking fun.’

Offensive

Yet now she is demanding that Johnson be disciplined by the party — even though his ‘jokes’ were not remotely as scabrous as those perpetrated by Charlie Hebdo: it had published a special edition called ‘Sharia Hebdo’, with a cartoon image of the prophet Muhammad on the cover saying ‘100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter’ and another grotesque cover of heavily pregnant women in Muslim attire shouting ‘Don’t take our benefits!’

True, this is a (studiously offensive) satirical magazine, rather than a politician. But Johnson is a backbencher, speaking only for himself — which he has every right to do — not for the Government.

Talking of which, Theresa May, too, had joined in the defence of Charlie Hebdo, declaring that she supported ‘freedom of the press and the freedoms of our democracy’.

Yet now she, too, is calling on Johnson to recant, causing uproar among party members who believe he has nothing whatsoever to apologise for.

If only she had echoed what a previous PM said when his deputy John Prescott punched a voter during the 2001 general election campaign.

Tony Blair effortlessly brushed it aside with the remark ‘John is John’.

All Mrs May had to do was say ‘Boris is Boris’ and I suspect the whole thing would have blown over in a day or so. But the nervous occupant of 10 Downing Street also appears to be suffering from Boris Derangement Syndrome.