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What I should say sorry for

Boris Johnson

Saturday, 23rd October 2004

Boris Johnson on his penitential pilgrimage to Liverpool

All I ask of my old friend is what exactly it is that he thinks Johnson the politician is doing that betrays the integrity of Johnson the journalist. In the course of his Mail piece, Glover attacks last week’s Spectator editorial for its unwarranted slurs on the people of Liverpool. He says it was tasteless to drag in the Hillsborough tragedy, and that we should have got our facts right about this appalling event, in which 96 people died. He is right, and the only question is why he thinks it necessary to attack me for agreeing so exactly with his views. It may be that there are welfare-addicted Liverpudlians who answer to the characteristics we described in the leader but it was wounding and wrong to suggest that this stereotype could be applied to the city as a whole. It was sloppy to repeat the old canard that the Hillsborough tragedy was caused by drunken fans, when the inquiry report found no evidence for this whatever. To judge by the huge mail I have received, that mistake caused real offence and hurt. Faced with such anger, any editor would feel obliged to make amends, and that is what I do now.

It is true that if I were simply an editor, I would confine this apology to a short balanced letter. It is true that I am in Liverpool because I am additionally a politician; but my apology is different in scale, not in kind, from any other qualified editorial apology. Johnson the politician apologises for and refuses to apologise for exactly the same things as Johnson the journalist. Michael Howard, Stephen Glover and the people of Liverpool are quite right to object to parts of the article, but in so far as Michael Howard says the article is ‘nonsense from beginning to end’ I cannot agree. To do so would require me to perform a kind of auto-pre-frontal lobotomy.

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