Boris Johnson’s Trumpian words have consequences

The moral black hole in Number 10 Downing Street has always had some unsavoury space junk in its orbit. Men and women with more ambition than principle are commonplace in politics but they are unusually prevalent in Johnson’s circle. To their number you can add liars, hucksters and the worst kind of ideologues. And, now, as has become horribly clear, out and out thugs.

It doesn’t take much to spark them into life. A social media zapper will do the trick. So, of course Boris Johnson, under fire for boozing in his back garden while Britons died of Covid, charged one up and spat it out.

He co-opted one of their nasty little memes, the one falsely linking Keir Starmer to the failure to prosecute serial sex abuser Jimmy Savile, and he weaponised it. The fact that it incited a mob, which surrounded the leader of the opposition and shadow cabinet member David Lammy, should come as no surprise. It was inevitable. The disturbing question it raises is this: was it always Johnson’s intent?

In America, on 6 January 2021, Donald Trump stood on a podium and whipped up an armed insurrection in which more than 2,000 people smashed up the Capitol, killing police officers and others while they were at it.

His British mini me doesn’t exert the same gravitational pull. He’s a second rate demagogue. A contender on the new series of Trump’s political Apprentice perhaps, one with a thesaurus in his back pocket. His word salads are the only way in which he tops America’s former president – so far.

It’s also mercifully harder to obtain deadly weapons in Britain. But it only takes a handful of people to hear a dog whistle for chaos to be created. It actually only takes one. Just ask the family of Jo Cox. Don’t forget, her depraved murderer managed to get his hands on a gun.

His attempt to smear Starmer with the name of Savile wasn’t even a dog whistle. We know this because it was too much for even Munira Mirza, who must have thought she’d seen it all until he proved that there are no depths which he will not plumb. There is no low too low. She could see where it was leading, and it seems pretty clear that so could he.

Social media was made for the flash mob. It feeds on the rotting meat of falsehood. It is responsible for MPs having panic buttons in their homes. There has been a lot of noise made about the “online harms” bill intended to soften its jagged edges, with the threat of fines dangling over corporate operators. These won’t work.

Big tech is bigger and richer than even the banks, and fines never seem to bother them. The wheel cannot be uninvented. The poison that festers in the internet’s dark corners, waiting for its chance, is not going away. The sort of people who hurled Johnson’s vicious lie and other abuse at Starmer and Lammy will continue to use the internet to find each other, to plot, to vent and maybe to do worse.

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People in public life have to be aware of this. It behoves them to pay attention to it before they open their mouths. Sadly, the Big Dog lacks any sense of civic responsibility, indeed any sense of responsibility at all.

The US has witnessed still more shameful scenes pertaining to the insurrection in recent days. Johnson’s friends in the Republican Party have decided that a violent riot, an attempted coup no less, amounts to no more than “legitimate political discourse”. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – conservative members of Congress who’ve put principle first in choosing to join the committee investigating those events – have even been censured by the party’s governing body.

The Tory party hasn’t quite stepped off that particular cliff. Not quite. But Boris Johnson has put it on the same path. The attempts by his toadies to dissociate him from the vile consequences of his words come from the same place.

Conservative MPs still in possession of a sliver of principle could do worse than to trawl social media, and then look at some of the reports on CNN’s YouTube channel, before asking themselves whether this is where we want to be. Well, is it?