The Guardian reports today that Compass, the leftwing pressure group, has compiled a dossier accusing Boris of being “Norman Tebbit in a clown’s uniform”. Well, now: I admire Norman and hate clowns with equal vigour, and so find this an intrinsically distasteful notion. But the strategy adopted by Compass – namely that Our Candidate is a crypto-fascist – is very good news for his campaign. If this is the best the Left can come up with, he has an even better chance than we thought. There are two reasons why the smear campaign will fail. First, every politically incorrect Boris quotation dredged up from the past can be matched by a much more serious error made by Ken Livingstone. Boris has never called a Jewish journalist a concentration camp guard, or cosied up to a figure as dodgy as Chavez, or eulogised hateful imams, or embraced Sinn Fein-IRA when London was still under attack by Republican terrorists. Second, one only has to look at Boris to grasp that he is the opposite of an extremist, or a hate merchant. The very essence of his appeal is his capacity to talk to and reach out to just about everybody. And I know him well enough to declare that he doesn’t have a bigoted cell in his body: it just won’t wash, and the voters won’t buy such calumnies for a second. Indeed, the problem Ken has is precisely that Boris is a uniting force, rather than the divisive figure that the incumbent Mayor has become. I call this round for Our Candidate
The Spectator
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