Out of control?
Boris splits the Tories
Britain’s largest Islamic organisation wrote to Theresa May this week urging her to launch an independent inquiry into the Tories’ “underbelly of Islamophobia”. The Muslim Council of Britain said there had been a spike in racist attacks since Boris Johnson’s newspaper column a week ago, in which he wrote that veiled Muslim women resembled “letter boxes” and “bank robbers”. “No one should be allowed to victimise minorities with impunity,” said the group, insisting that there should be no “whitewashing” of the disciplinary investigation into Johnson.
The burqa row sparked a new round of Tory infighting. Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader, condemned Johnson’s “gratuitously offensive” comments, while former attorney general Dominic Grieve said he would leave the party if Johnson ever became leader. Jacob Rees-mogg, by contrast, denounced the investigation into Johnson, who has refused to apologise, as a “show trial” whipped up by Boris’s opponents. The Sunday Times reported that four Cabinet ministers had privately expressed dismay at No. 10’s handling of the case.
What the editorials said
Now that he’s out of government, Johnson’s “puerile opinions and silly quips should, as far as possible, be ignored”, said The Observer. But his burqa comments, which pandered to prejudice, deserved to be called out. Like the “disgraceful” London mayoral campaign of Zac Goldsmith, which implied that Labour candidate Sadiq Khan had links to Islamist extremists, they are evidence of an “ugly, deep-seated” prejudice in Britain’s governing party. May should take the Conservative whip away from Johnson, said The Independent, to punish him for his offensive language and for defying her call to apologise.
She should do no such thing, said the Daily Mail. This is “a concocted, silly-season row, fuelled by the faux outrage of Johnson’s political enemies”. In the past, politicians such as Khan, and Tory Remainers Anna Soubry and Ken Clarke, have criticised the burqa as “insidious” or “peculiar”, without everyone screeching about racism. No. 10 should have ignored Johnson’s article, said The Sunday Times. By instead calling for an apology and launching a disciplinary investigation, it has merely stoked Tory tensions and distracted attention from Labour’s anti-semitism scandal.