The Naked Emperor in context: Boris Johnson’s cuttings just make his casual bigotry more obvious and egregious…
He cannot deny the words he wrote or why he wrote them, but he’ll keep trying
If Boris Johnson was truly committed to banning people who have written racist things from football matches, he’d look in the mirror before instructing someone to send back his nearly-new England shirt.
But, of course, someone who does their racism via social media is a yob who must be driven out of society, while someone who confines their slurs to national newspaper columns, unreadable novels, and speeches to the Conservative Party should be given so many second chances that they become Prime Minister.
During Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, the SNP leader in Westminster, Ian Blackford, asked Johnson:
… can the Prime Minister tell us what sanctions he thinks would be appropriate for someone who publishes racist content, and it is shocking even to have to say this out loud, describing Africans as 'flag-waving piccaninnies with watermelon smiles'?
And the Prime Minister replied:
I have commented many times about the words that I've said in the past and I think the house understands how you can take things out of context.
So let’s put them back into context and see if Boris Johnson’s use of blatantly racist imagery is somehow softened by being placed within another set of sentences composed by him.
The words quoted by Blackford come from a Daily Telegraph column from 2002, headlined If Blair's so good at running the Congo, let him stay there, which the paper still hosts on its website. At the time that it was written, Johnson was one year into his first term as MP and three years into his tenure as Spectator editor, where he published racist and anti-semitic columns by Taki among others.
A month after that Telegraph column, which is rightly quoted so often, Johnson wrote an equally odious piece on the same topic for The Spectator, headlined Africa is a mess, but we can’t blame colonialism. In it he wrote:
You would need a heart of stone not to have been moved by the little Aids-ridden choristers. We sat under a mango tree, before a dancing-space of packed red earth, and what a preposterous delegation we were. There was Mr Rod Liddle, the big white chief of the Today programme, not looking especially kempt…
… The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty.
In 2004, while shadow arts minister, Johnson was forced by Michael Howard, then-Conservative leader, to visit Liverpool to apologise in person for a Spectator editorial accusing the city of “wallowing in victimhood” over the brutal murder of Ken Bigley in Iraq.
Then in 2006, on the backbenches and out of The Spectator job but still coining it in through his Telegraph column, Johnson wrote:
For 10 years we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing, and so it is with a happy amazement that we watch as the madness engulfs the Labour Party.
Papua New Guinea’s High Commissioner in London, Jean L Kekedo reacted with understandable fury (“I consider the comments, coming from a senior British MP very damaging to the image of Papua New Guinea and an insult to the integrity and intelligence of all Papua New Guineans.”). Johnson offered an ‘apology’ that is almost a work of art in terms of its sarcasm, gall, and disrespect:
I would like to thank the High Commissioner very much for her clarification. I meant no insult to the people of Papua New Guinea who I’m sure lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity in common with the rest of us.
He later told PM on BBC Radio 4 that he wouldn’t retract his comments, thought them accurate, and claimed they were based on a “fantastic” Time-Life book he had seen which depicted tribespeople in Papua New Guinea in the 1950s or 60s engaged in “primitive warfare and killing”.
Johnson went on to snidely comment that he would be “happy to add Papua New Guinea to my global itinerary of apology”. But his next grudging apology would be delivered at home in London, during his first successful campaign to become the city’s mayor.
In April 2008, a month before the mayoral election, the newspaper New Nation unearthed several articles by Taki printed during Johnson’s era as Spectator editor. In one, he wrote:
Race is more than skin deep, no ifs or buts about it. On average, Orientals are slower to mature, less randy, less fertile, and have larger brains and higher IQ scores. Blacks are at the other pole, and whites fall somewhere in the middle, although closer to the Orientals than the blacks.
The column, available from The Spectator’s online archive, was published not in 1900 but in the year 2000. Johnson read and approved those sentiments for publication. As he did another Taki ‘stunner’: A piece in which the reliably racist writer described black American basketball players as having “arms hanging below their knees and tongues sticking out.”
Boris Johnson told The Evening Standard he was…
sorry for what was previously written as it does not reflect what is in my heart.
But we can’t interrogate what is in Boris Johnson’s heart — though I suspect it’s operated Numbskulls-style by a miniature Boris Johnson within a chamber of mirrors — we can only go by what he has written, edited, and decided was fine to publish. And that’s a teetering pile of racist statements.
At the same time as apologising for Taki’s words, Johnson insisted that he “loathed and despised” racism and brought out that line about words taken out of context to defend the “piccaninnies”/”watermelon smiles” column.
Johnson reached for the ‘out of context’ defence again in 2016 during his first press conference as Foreign Secretary. Earlier that year, during the referendum, he had written a column for The Sun — since memory-holed — that hinged on a false claim that President Obama had removed a Churchill bust from the White House. Johnson wrote:
Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire — of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.
Asked if he’d like to apologise, Johnson demonstrated the level of diplomacy that made him the worst Foreign Secretary in living memory, saying:
We can spend an awfully long time going over lots of stuff that I’ve written over the last 30 years.
Translation: “I’m a shit. But I don’t wish to talk about it.” Johnson’s attitude to his past history of cheap racism is to follow the advice he gave to his successor’s as Spectator editor in an article back in 2005:
The Spectator surrenders to no one. The Spectator is always right.
Pick up Boris Johnson’s novel to date, 2004’s almost unreadable Seventy-Two Virgins — available from all bad charity shops — and you’ll discover a blizzard of racist terms. At one point, a character uses the term ‘c**n’ four times in quick succession (the word appears six times in the text overall):
You stupid little… c**n!’ … There it was… He was a c**n, and he was stupid, and he was stupid because he was a c**n … ‘Stupid little c**n,’ he said to himself, as though reciting a passage from the Koran.
Other racist terms including “half-caste”, “bit of black”, “dusky”, “negroid” and “Hottentot” — a highly offensive term for indigenous South Africans — are littered throughout the book.
Simon Walters, who rediscovered the passages while researching his book, The Borisaurus, wrote:
Parts of the novel seem like an excuse to broadcast racist and sexist outpourings.
But Boris Johnson is never short of excuses, many of them provided to him by a media that is willing to let his long history of casual and cruel racism. We are told that he’s not racist but has merely said racist things time and time again. If it walks like a racist, burbles like a racist, and uses racist rhetoric to get elected — it’s a ducking racist.
Ian Blackwood was not alone in raising the Prime Minister’s cuttings at PMQs. Keir Starmer challenged Johnson on the way he and his Home Secretary, Priti Patel, had condoned booing of England players taking the knee, and said, "Far from giving racism the red card, the PM gave it the green light.”
But in The Daily Telegraph today, Madeline Grant dismisses questioning the Prime Minister about his record on race as “pantomime politics”. It’s not surprising that The Telegraph’s sketch writer gives the Prime Minister a pass and focuses her fire on the Leader of the Opposition. The Daily Telegraph is Boris Johnson’s once and future home; he’ll soon be back there being paid ‘properly’ after his stint as a lowly-paid Prime Minister is done.
The Daily Telegraph was the place where Boris Johnson told some of his most enduring lies as its Brussels correspondent and it’s also where he pushed some of his most racist ideas, including calling women wearing the burka “letterboxes” and “bankrobbers”. The Telegraph is so proud of the Prime Minister’s time as its star columnist — earning £250,000 a year for a weekly column — that it maintains a special Best of Boris archive for readers to revisit his shitticisms.
Henry Deedes in The Daily Mail matches Madeline Grant’s dismissive tone. He calls PMQs “a dismal shootout” and dismisses Starmer’s questions as “confected indignation”. And while he, unlike Grant, references a despicable heckle from the Tory benches…
When Starmer brought up the England player Tyrone Mings, who had attacked Home Secretary Priti Patel for describing taking the knee as 'gesture politics', an idiot from the Conservative benches cried out 'Labour member!' at the mention of Mings's name. Crass.
… he still acts as if the Prime Minister has no history of making racist remarks. Still, I suppose tactical ignorance is the biggest professional advantage a Daily Mail hack can have. It’s the only way they can sleep at night. Quentin Letts, a veteran of the Mail himself, pulls the same act in The Times.
Anti-black, anti-asian, anti-muslim, and anti-GRT racism are all tolerated and, in fact, promoted in the pages of British newspapers on a daily basis. So it’s not surprising that most of the media gives the Prime Minister a pass. He’s a journalist who trafficked his undoubted skill with racist invective into getting the biggest job in the land.