Rarely has there been such a flagrant display of hypocrisy and cant as there was in the House of Commons last night. Opposition MPs stood up one after the other to denounce Boris Johnson for his use of apparently toxic and dangerous words like ‘surrender’ and ‘sabotage’. Such language is polluting the public sphere and making life hell for politicians, they claimed.
Their ostentatious offence-taking would be a tad more convincing if they had ever said anything about the bile heaped on Brexit voters these past three years.
Where were these people when it became positively vogue to refer to lower middle-class Brexit blokes as ‘gammon’? Where were they when Brexit voters were being branded xenophobes, fascists, the facilitators of the most hateful period in Western Europe since the 1930s?
Where were they when Lord Adonis compared seeking a clean Brexit to appeasing the Nazis, or when David Lammy said the ERG are as bad as Nazis? When asked to retract that comment, Lammy said that, if anything, his comment had not been ‘strong enough’.
Get Britain's best politics newsletters
Register to get The Spectator's insight and opinion straight to your inbox. You can then read two free articles each week.
Already a subscriber? Log in
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in