Boris was spot on… but he should have gone even further
Since 1951, when my parents bought a hill-farm on Exmoor, I have regarded the remote Exe river valley, where I am writing this article, as my real home. It is about as far from the Westminster bubble as you can get. I like to spend August shut away in a centuries-old Somerset longhouse, “far from the madding crowd”.
I only leave the valley if I absolutely have to. The Exford Horse and Exmoor Pony Show, held on high ground overlooking our valley, is a “not-tomiss occasion”. As I wandered earlier this week among the tents and stalls, I found myself being greeted with enthusiasm by people I hadn’t seen for years. Could they have been watching the latest episode of The Real Marigold Hotel, I wondered? Had they tuned in to I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!?
We all of us have our little vanities and recently I have been rather taken with the idea of having some kind of reality-TV career. At my age (I will be 78 on Saturday), you have to do something.
But, of course, I was totally wrong in my assumption. The good people of Exmoor weren’t thinking about my recent TV appearances at all.
“Great article, Stan,” Col “Paddy” King-Fretts, ex-SAS, shouted. “Hit the nail on the head!”
I’m getting a bit deaf, too. And it was a blustery day. So I shouted back: “What article, Paddy?”
“Boris’s article about the burka! Spot on!”
Col King-Fretts’s comment was just one among many. I realise that the several hundred people who each year attend the Exford Show are not necessarily a statistically valid sample of the UK population as a whole, but none the less the spontaneous and I would say near-universal recognition among the good people of west Somerset that Boris was on to something set me thinking.
Of course, I must declare an interest here. I am, and as far as I know always have been, Boris’s father. I have followed his career with interest. Until I started on this TV caper, I was happy to be known by the wider public (in so far as that wider public existed at all) as “Boris’s dad”. Sometimes, people have actually mistaken me for Boris, for example when I’m bicycling around Hyde Park Corner reading messages on my mobile phone.
But that doesn’t mean I am totally uncritical about anything and everything Boris has done. It is not a case, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it, of the “willing suspension of disbelief ”. We were on different sides in the Brexit debate, for example. That disclaimer made, I, too, do indeed – like so many other people down here – think Boris was “spot on” with his now famous “burka” article in The Daily Telegraph last Monday.
Back in our valley after the Exford Show, I re-read the article. Then I read it again. Yes, Boris used some colourful language. That’s called “freedom of speech” or it was in my day. But he said what needed to be said. As a matter of fact, I would have liked him to have gone a bit further. He was against “banning the burka”. But surely, there are circumstances where a ban or appropriate restrictions would be in order. Shouldn’t female schoolteachers, nurses or doctors be seen as well as heard?
At least, the House of Commons could have a sensible debate on this issue. So why the all furore? Why has this disastrous “blue-on-blue” warfare broken out?
The chairman of the Conservative Party is setting up a committee of inquiry into whether Boris’s use of the word “letterbox” breaches party rules. If that isn’t an own-goal, I don’t know what is. Mr Corbyn must be rubbing his hands with glee.
Maybe it’s just the silly season. Seventeen years ago, John Prescott punched a protester who threw an egg at him and lightened the national mood overnight. Where are you, John, today when we need you?
‘Surely, there are circumstances where a ban or appropriate restrictions would be in order’
Stanley Johnson’s new novel, Kompromat, is now out in paperback, published by Oneworld Publications.