What the commentators said
Many senior Tories seem to have contracted a new medical condition, said Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail: “Boris Derangement Syndrome”. This makes them think that Johnson’s every utterance must be part of some “malign plan to seize power”. How else to explain the fuss over his article? In a column dashed off before going on holiday, Johnson criticised the new Danish law banning face veils. “To emphasise that he was taking the classical liberal position of accepting people’s absolute right to do things one might find objectionable”, he also had a pop at burqas. His “letter box” joke was beneath his normal standard, having been cracked by others many times before, but it hardly merited the outraged reaction.
Critics have read far too much into his article, agreed Iain Martin in The Times. As someone who used to be in charge of editing Boris’s last-minute copy, I can assure you that “planning more than five minutes ahead is not how Johnson rolls”. I don’t doubt it, said Martin Kettle in The Guardian. But if Johnson gave little prior thought to his burqa remarks, his subsequent defiance looks more calculated. It’s his “decision to dig in as the man who will not be gagged by political correctness that is the important takeaway from this row”. He is positioning himself for the next Tory leadership contest – as the “candidate of the populist Right”. Before he resigned, he was in fifth position in the Conservative Home website’s regular “best next leader” survey. He’s now back on top. But it’s “a different and more sinister Johnson”.
“We have come some way from the urban Toryism of his time in City Hall – the Boris of cycle lanes, Olympic bonhomie and professional levity at fundraisers,” agreed Anne Mcelvoy in The Observer. His recent “f*** business” comment and praise of Donald Trump represent a change in tone. Boris recognises that there’s mileage in sporting a “Ukip-lite” look these days. With the public increasingly disenchanted with what they regard as “mealy-mouthed”, ineffective politicians, the market for players who speak plainly on matters that their “polite” colleagues prefer to gloss over looks set to grow.