The joke turns sour at City Hall

Boris has made a mistake. A very bad mistake. He has announced the resignation of his close aide James McGrath over remarks Mc Grath made to a black activist called Marc Wadsworth. You can read the whole exchange here. This appears to have been the bit that did the damage. Wadsworth writes:

McGrath was far from politically correct, David-Cameron-new- cuddly-Conservative Party, when I pointed out to him a critical comment of Voice columnist Darcus Howe that the election of ‘Boris Johnson, a right-wing Conservative, might just trigger off a mass exodus of older Caribbean migrants back to our homelands’. He retorted: ‘Well, let them go if they don’t like it here.’ McGrath dismissed influential race commentator Howe as ‘shrill’.

So let’s get our heads round this. To Wadsworth, a reported remark by a black columnist smearing Boris as being such a bigot that the mere fact of his election would trigger a mass flight of black Britons back to the Caribbean was apparently quite acceptable. But the robust response by an obviously irritated McGrath to such a deeply unpleasant and unfair comment, an ironic retort which merely picked up and ran with the thought voiced by Darcus Howe himself, is deemed to be racist.

McGrath’s real crime in Wadsworth’s eyes appears to have been to say

that City Hall’s new administration is not into this politically correct race relations stuff. He stated firmly: ‘Boris’s main priority is fighting crime.’

To which any sane person, black or white, would surely say ‘Hoorah!’ After all, perceiving that the race grievance industry does nothing to help black people hardly makes one a racist – quite the opposite, one might think. But no. Mc Grath’s recognition that he was up against the race inquisition sealed his fate at the hands of that inquisition:

Curtly, he added: ‘I get where you are on the radar, sunshine.’ Again, not a politically correct thing to say to a Black person.

Why in heaven’s name not?

But, hey, these Tories have not yet been running the show in London for a 100 days. They will have to learn quicker than the London traffic or fall on their sword.

Within a very short space of time McGrath appears to have been pushed onto his sword by Boris, either with or without prompting by Tory high command. This is utterly shameful. Faced with a grotesque demonstration of grievance-culture bullying, Boris has shown that he has the spine and moral clarity of a blancmange. Instead of denouncing it, he capitulated to it. Moreover, he subsequently issued a statement which added total absurdity and incoherence to insult:

James is not a racist. I know that. He shares my passionate belief that racism is vile, repulsive and has no place in modern Britain. But his response to a silly and hostile suggestion put to him by Marc Wadsworth, allowed doubts to be raised about that commitment...James's remark was taken out of context and distorted, but he recognises the need for crystal clarity on a vital issue like this. We both agree that he could not stay on as my political adviser without providing ammunition for those who wish to deliberately misrepresent our clear and unambiguous opposition to any racist tendencies.

So a decent man has been forced out of his job and had his reputation traduced effectively for being the victim of a false accusation of racism. Which Boris, the man who did the forcing, has acknowledged!

What on earth are the Tories for if they aren’t prepared to defend us against this chilling witch-hunting but instead throw us into the flames?