Boris Johnson’s homophobia and racism is further exposed by newly-unearthed articles in which he opposed “gays in the military” and the “cowing of the police by the Macpherson report”, and used an earlier – and what appears to be a more deliberately offensive – version of his “letterbox” description about Muslim women.

Some of the comments, appearing in articles for The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph, and in his books ‘Have I Got Views for You’ and ‘Seventy Two Virgins’, were written while Boris Johnson was an MP.

Homophobia

• Johnson said that it was “right” that Tories would wish its leadership to “speak up more strongly against…gays in the military”
• While he was an MP, Johnson published an article that said there was a “grit of truth” in Robert Mugabe’s comment that New Labour was composed of “gay gangsters”

Racism

• Johnson spoke out about “the cowing of the police by the Macpherson report”
• In an earlier use of his “letterbox” description of Muslim women, Johnson described the burqa as “wacko women’s gear” – undermining his claim that his Telegraph article in 2018 was a “strong, liberal defence” of women’s right to wear what they choose
• Johnson said “a cynic” would say that the reason why police were unable to investigate crime was because they were “stuck on racial awareness programmes

Antisemitism

• While serving as an MP and Shadow Arts Minister, Johnson portrayed a fictional Jewish character, Sammy Katz, as having a “proud nose and curly hair”, who “relied on immigrant labour” and cruises the red light district in search of “a bit of black”. Johnson writes that he has the eyes of an “unblinking snake” and sends his son “pathetic presents, every five years, of low-denomination bills”. The book has previously been criticised for referring to Arabs with “hook noses” and “slanty eyes”, calling a mixed-raced Briton “coffee-coloured” and describing someone as “half-caste”.

Other comments

• Johnson complained that police were “deployed in desperate attempts to catch paedophiles in ancient public schools”
• Johnson wished that the former Tory leadership would speak up “more strongly against the arrest of General Pinochet…or the abolition of the hereditary peers and foxhunting”
• It follows revelations that Boris Johnson has said:
• Single mothers raise “ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate” children, and that it is “outrageous” that married couples pay for their “desire to procreate independently of men”
• That single mothers should face “sure-fire destitution on a Victorian scale” to deter them from having babies, adding that “no government…will have the courage to make the cuts in the safety net of the viciousness required to provide anything like such a deterrent”
• That “uppity and irresponsible women” had a “natural desire” to get pregnant
• That “women’s desire to be married” must be restored by “addressing the feebleness of the modern Briton, his reluctance or inability to take control of his woman and be head of a household”
• That one solution to intelligent women being “less likely to get married” would be to have “plot lines in soap operas, in which double-first girls regularly marry illiterate brickies”
• Families on lower incomes produce “unloved and undisciplined children” that are “more likely to become hoodies, NEETS, and mug you on the street corner”
• Working class men are “drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless”
• That the way to deal with advice from a female colleague was to “just pat her on the bottom and send her on her way”
• That British women have been “socially gestapoed into the workplace”

Labour’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said:

“The more we learn, the worse it gets. As well as being a danger to our NHS and a pathological liar, it is clear that Boris Johnson is a deeply unpleasant individual.

“He is a danger to women, to single mothers, the working class, minorities, LGBT+ people, and to anyone who doesn’t look like him. He thinks he is born to rule and stands against everything that holds our communities together.

“Boris Johnson is a danger to our country. He must be stopped.”