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Well, hush my mouth

Boris Johnson

Saturday, 22nd March 2003

Boris Johnson wrote for the New York Times, which found some of his words unfit to print

At every stage, he seemed to imply, he was running up against the NY Times hierarchy. It wasn't he who objected, I gathered, so much as a procession of sacerdotal figures, each in his or her glass box, each with his or her name on the masthead, sitting in judgment over correctness and style. There was nothing he would have liked more, he seemed to say, than to accede to my vulgar, unpasteurised British journalism. But the longer our conversation went on, the more I felt like that professor in the Philip Roth novel, the one who gets sacked for using the word 'spooks', and who was thought, mistakenly, to have been referring to blacks.

Some of the changes were unobjectionable. For American readers, Tony Blair leads the Labor party. The NY Times is too grand to call Rumsfeld 'Rummie', and nothing happened last autumn; it happened last 'fall'. Fair enough. But I started to get a floaty, out-of-body sensation when he said that he had made a change to a sentence about donations of US overseas aid to key members of the UN Security Council. I had said something to the effect that you don't make international law by giving new squash courts to the President of Guinea. This now read 'the President of Chile'. Come again? I said. QuZ?

'Uh, Boris,' said Tobin, 'it's just easier in principle if we don't say anything deprecatory about a black African country, and since Guinea and Chile are both members of the UN Security Council, and since it doesn't affect your point, we would like to say Chile.' In the end, I gave way on this, since it was getting cold and I was worried about the battery of my mobile. But my views of the NY Times were starting to evolve.

How craven and mealy-mouthed can you get? Why is a mild insult more bearable because it is directed at a crisis-ridden Latin American country, rather than a crisis-ridden African country? Is it, heaven forfend, because one country is Hispanic and the other is black? That was nothing, however, to the trouble I had with a sentence about the aftermath of the war.

I was trying to explain that so many people, in the commentariat and in the saloon bars, had invested so much emotional and intellectual capital in the anti-war cause that in a perverse way they would be hoping for disaster. To illustrate the point, I noted that the last Gulf war had been so amazingly free of casualties that Gulf war syndrome (a stochastically unexceptional ragbag of symptoms) had been invented to fill the void, and to satisfy the yearning of the anti-war brigade for catastrophe.

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