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Are you suffering from Boris Derangement Syndrome? | The Spectator
Another form BDS takes is to portray Boris as a rich toff who’s out of touch. ‘Boris Johnson would not live down your street, he would not let his children go to school with yours, he does not hang out where you hang out and he would not be your friend,’ tweeted a Labour MP last week.
A slightly mystifying tirade, given that, until recently, Boris lived in the same London borough as Jeremy Corbyn and Emily Thornberry and sent his children to the local primary. ‘Once you’ve been to public school, then you are from postcode POSH,’ wrote the Guardian’s Zoe Williams — an odd charge given that Zoe went to Godolphin and Latymer, a £21,000-a-year London day school.
However, the most bizarre manifestations of BDS are when Boris’s detractors accuse him of racism, misogyny and homophobia. This usually involves a Herculean amount of offence archaeology, with determined opponents sifting through every word he’s ever written to look for quotes they can take out of context and use as Exhibits A, B and C in the case for the prosecution.
A case in point is a column last year in which he used the phrases ‘letter boxes’ and ‘bank robbers’ to describe burka-wearing women. This has been widely portrayed by his enemies as an attack on Muslims and cited as ‘proof’ of his Islamophobia, overlooking the fact that he was referring specifically to the niqab and the column in question was arguing against a burka ban.
We saw another example of this misrepresentation last weekend when Channel 4 News asked the two lesbians assaulted on a London bus what they thought of him, having first explained to them that Boris was a ‘homophobe’ and a ‘misogynist’. Not surprisingly, they concluded he was unfit to lead anything, let alone Britain.
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Author: Cliff
26-11-2019 00:33:44