"Every part of the burqa/letterbox furore is about political warfare. Johnson knew exactly how to rattle the left and it’s working".
Those are very wise words, written by the Iranian-born comedian, Shappi Khorsandi, in the Independent, one day ago. When Boris published his column in the Telegraph, I was somewhat puzzled at the uproar it caused. After all, he stated quite clearly that he thought the ban on the burqa in Denmark was wrong, and he did not want to see it banned here. What offended so many Muslim women were his remarks that the burqa made the wearers look like letter boxes and bank robbers. All this is common knowledge now, but there is reason to believe that it was a tactic on Boris' part. There were strident protests on the Left, which Boris must have expected. He's appeared to have put his foot in his mouth before, and weathered the storm.
The word "tactic" is usually used in a military sense, but, as the old monster, Mao Zedong said:
"Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed".
Mao may have been responsible for the deaths of 70 million of his people, but he got that observation right. Boris is no fool either. He must have judged that his jokey remarks would trigger argument, knowing that it would become an issue of free speech. If he guessed that opinion polls would show that the wider populace would support him, he got that right also.The Sun says:
" A ComRes poll for the Sunday Express found the majority of Britons don't think Mr Johnson should be punished for the remarks made in a newspaper column."
My first instinct was that Boris had employed a diversionary tactic - stirring up trouble as a means to distract our attention from the Brexit debacle. In fact, I described it on Facebook as a Tory tactic. Now, I accept that it could well have been a manoeuvre without bloodshed by Boris to improve his chances of becoming Tory leader. Mao would probably have described this as being part of a civil war. And he would have been right, it seems. The Prime Minister herself has said that Boris should apologise for his remarks, and there have been rumblings among senior (and grass roots) Conservatives against this. Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said:
“If Boris is suspended it will be open warfare in the Conservative Party".
That paragon of modernity and tolerance, Jacob Rees-Mogg, suggested:
"...the attacks on Mr Johnson's were a reflection of "envy" felt towards him because of "his many successes, popularity with voters and charisma".
I don't know how the Tories will resolve this matter but Boris, I am sure, will survive to fight another day.
Another reason I believe that Boris is engaging in political manoeuvring is his previous cock-up over Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, which leads me to doubt his concern for the rights of Muslim women. As Shappi Khorsandi says:
"Nazanin, a British citizen, has been imprisoned without charge in Iran for almost two and a half years. Much to the horror of her husband Richard and the rest of us who are desperate for her release, when Boris finally spoke out against her detainment, he said she was “teaching journalism” in Iran. She wasn’t. Boris actually made things worse for her. Did he simply not care about this mum with a funny name who wasn’t born here?"
Ominously, Boris has received support from Steve Bannon, the ex-White House chief strategist. I have no doubt that Bannon is advising Boris as sagaciously as he advised Donald Trump. Today's papers endorse this view.
I hope that the outraged commentators, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who understandably condemned Boris in the most vitriolic terms, come to regard him as what I believe him to be: a political operator. He knows that his position in his party is not really threatened, because, as the Guardian says:
"Conservative MPs’ support for Boris Johnson over his comments comparing Muslim women in burqas to bank robbers has “shone a light on the underbelly of Islamophobia” within the party, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) has said."
Boris must have known this Islamophobia existed, and was able to launch his apparently blundering, but actually calculated, attack. Had Mao Zedong been a Tory, he would have been in his element, engaging in this bloodless civil war.
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