Brexiteer Boris Johnson MP is facing an investigation by the Conservative Party over comments he made about the Islamic burqa, but Britain’s most senior police officer has confirmed he did not commit a ‘hate crime’.
Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) has said that they have received several complaints after the former foreign secretary compared the appearance of women in burqas to “bank robbers” or “letterboxes”, according to Sky News’s political correspondent Lewis Goodall, and the party is beginning down the path of investigating if Johnson has breached rules into discrimination or has brought the party into disrepute.
In the first instance, Johnson — a leading figure of in the campaign to Leave the European Union — will be scrutinised by a party investigator. If the investigator believes there is a case to answer, he will be referred to a panel to assess the complaint.
However, the panel would be appointed by Chairman of the Conservative Party Brandon Lewis who was one of the first people to demand Johnson to apologise, raising questions of how such an investigation could be fair.
If the panel decides that he breached the party’s code of conduct when he publicly objected to the “oppressive” garment — the face coverings were recently criticised by a prominent female Muslim doctor as “an invasion of Salafist affinities and a risk to national security and societal integrity” — he could face disciplinary actions including being suspended from the party — which would make him ineligible to lead the party and replace the faltering Theresa May as Prime Minister.
A source close to Johnson told Sky News’s Lewis Goodall that “the world has gone mad, or specifically the people at Matthew Parker Street [the home of CCHQ] have gone mad. They and No 10 would be very, very wise to calm this down very, very quickly.”
The repercussions could exasperate the party’s growing civil war, where the debate over Johnson’s comments has developed into a proxy war between Brexiteers and Remainers in the parliamentary party.
Meanwhile, London’s Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick has weighed in on the comments, saying that so far no complaints against the MP for ‘hate crime’ have been reported.
Speaking to the BBC’s Asian Network, Dick said that “some people have clearly found it offensive” but added that specialist hate crime officers have deemed that the former two-time Mayor of London “did not commit a criminal offence”.
“I’m not a Muslim woman… I know that many people have found this offensive,” Dick told the publicly-funded radio station, which caters to Britain’s ethnic South Asian community.
“I also know that many other people believe strongly that in the whole of the article, what Mr Johnson appears to have been attempting to do was say that there shouldn’t be a ban — and that he was encouraging legitimate debate.”
Conor Burns MP criticised the London police chief for wasting time and police resources on investigating Mr Johson’s comments whilst London is in the grips of a crime wave, calling it “bizarre”.
“With everything else going on in London to be diverting resources into an even cursory investigation into an article is bizarre,” Mr Burns said according to The Telegraph.
“You have a member of Parliament writing an article using the colourful language for which he is renowned.
“You have the head of the Met Police diverting precious resources when we are in the grip of a knife crime epidemic. It is a complete waste of police time and resources.
“We are in the grip of a politically correct tidal of wave of nonsense.”
Tory Remainers, in an effort to scupper Johnson’s rise in the party, have threatened to resign from the Conservative Party should the Leave campaigner become leader — betraying the extent to which the establishment is out of touch with the people, who in the majority back not only Johnson’s comments, but an outright ban on the burqa.
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