Who is he, really? | thearticle

Worried about his “hokey-cokey” handling of the Coronavirus crisis? As criticism of the Prime Minister is growing, now may be a good time to step back and ask what sort of a character Boris

really is. In spite of his impressive list of partners down the years, it should have been obvious all along that Boris Johnson is a misogynist. After all, he is a Tory, so he must be. He

leads the party which one Conservative woman MP bitterly claimed the public saw as “the nasty party”; the one which has never come up with a single, woman Prime Minister. But it was not

until Boris became a Minister and then leader of the pack that I realised he is a racist and a bit of an anti-Semite too. Take the way in which, from the Government benches, he had rubbished

poor Jeremy Corbyn, a radical who proudly drew attention to his life-long dedication to fighting racism and anti-Semitism. The man who did so much to drive Jew-baiters from the Labour

Party. It was typical of Johnson, and utterly disgraceful. No wonder Corbyn had the vocal support of all the major Jewish groups in the country. Now consider Boris’s Cabinet appointments to

the three great offices of state. Being a WASP and an arrogant Old Etonian to boot, it would not have crossed his mind to appoint as his Chancellor a British Hindu of Indian heritage; a man

who moreover retains strong connections with that country. Or a woman (yes a woman) of Indian origins, as Home Secretary. Finally he surely would not have found it appropriate to make the

son of Czech asylum seekers, a man of Jewish heritage, Foreign Secretary. (I pick my words carefully. His mother was not Jewish, so Raab is, in rabbinical eyes, not Jewish either. But he

would be the face of Britain to the world.) As for appointing a feisty Muslim woman, head of the influential Number 10 Policy Unit? Unthinkable. So what is the point of this teasing

counter-factual? There are in fact two points. The first concerns Boris directly. All right thinking people — ie left thinking — hate, loathe and despise the Prime Minister. He is a posh

boy, a mini-Trump, bombastic and economical with the truth. It is a visceral  hatred and so not susceptible to the truth. The important truth. This is that Boris is at ease in our racially

and gender diverse society, in a colour blind sort of way. And that is going to be important, post-Covid. He is more interested in promoting talent than in imposing quotas. Forget the odd

self-indulgences in the list of 36 new peers. Blair, Cameron and Wilson before them, did much the same. You need only look at Boris’s Cabinet ministers to realise that the women and those of

the BAME (ugh!) communities are there on the basis of ability, rather than to signal virtue. You could not say the same of all Labour’s diverse Shadow Cabinet members in recent years. Even

Johnson’s ill-considered joke about women in the full Islamic veil, looking as if they are peering out of letter boxes, came in the course of a brave and liberal-minded article. He was

defending the right of Muslim women to take the veil, at a time when a campaign was building to Ban the Burka, (in fact the niqab, a full face and body covering). Fifteen countries including

France, Belgium, Denmark and Austria had already done so. And his defence of Priti Patel earlier this year was a delight. She had been accused of bullying her powerful and allegedly

obstructive senior civil servants (males, poor dears) who had supposedly been jogging her elbow at the Home Office and attempting to undermine her policies. That, remember, was the

Department successive Governments branded “not fit for purpose”. Perhaps those entitled white men who ran it needed a little tough love. The second point is more general. Words have meaning.

We should not allow small groups to hijack them. For example, some male trade unionist militants, the sort who declare themselves ardent backers of the feminist cause, made foul jokes when

Margaret Thatcher died. There were cracks about street parties and dancing on her grave. They felt able to insult a newly dead woman, Britain’s first female Prime Minister because, by being

a Tory and a strong supporter of union reform and the capitalist system generally, she had abdicated her duty as a woman. She was not a Lefty, and so could not qualify as a feminist.

Genderwise she was the Marxist equivalent of a “class traitor”. In much the same way, Black and Asian people who accept Conservative Cabinet posts are called “coconuts” by many activists. A

racist insult which means they are black or brown on the outside but white on the inside. Thus their appointments are not to be regarded as a welcome sign of tolerance and decency. They are

dismissed as a reward for a shameless betrayal, and certainly not a cause for celebration. They too are the equivalent of  “class traitors” because they have cut themselves off from their

roots. Only those who take the knee to the full woke agenda have the right to call themselves members of the BAME communities. When Martin Luther King addressed the 1963 March on Washington,

he referred to his dream of a time when people “will be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.” But when King used the word character, I doubt he

meant ideological rectitude of the sort modern activists demand. I think King meant… well… _character_. And for all his faults, Boris has character in spades.