Boris Johnson and Liverpool...

mike65

As some will know Boris Johnson is both the Tory MP for Henley and the editor of the weekly mag The Spectator. A couple of weeks ago the mag published a piece which was critical of the wallowing in sentiment after the death of Ken Bigley in Iraq. There was uproar in Liverpool Bigleys home town. Boris unusually for both an editor and a politician put his hand up and said sorry. In most worlds this would be enough I suspect, but no not Liverpool.

Paul Bigley the increasingly strident self-appointed voice of Merseyside is now challanging Johnson to dissapear from public life. Something I fancy doing to Bigley.

From The Guardian

The brother of murdered British hostage Kenneth Bigley today rejected any apologies from the Spectator editor Boris Johnson for offending Liverpool and its people, calling the journalist and MP "a self-centred, pompous twit".

As part of Mr Johnson's day of repentance in the 2008 City of Culture, where he has been apologising for offence caused by an article attacking the city's culture of grief - over both Mr Bigley and the Hillsborough stadium disaster - the Tory MP for Henley did several radio phone-in shows.

There he repeated his apologies to the Bigley family, saying: "I cannot say anything that will alter your opinion of me.

"In the leader we did extend our sympathies to you and your family and condemn the appalling sufferings that your family has endured."

But Paul Bigley dismissed Mr Johnson and told him to "get out of public life".

Earlier in the day Mr Johnson visited the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts - the fame school set up by ex-Beatle Sir Paul McCartney.

He observed a ballet class and chatted with students and staff at the school about the problems of financing arts education.

In an attempt to evade the media spotlight Mr Johnson had checked into a small hotel in the Sefton Park suburb of Liverpool last night. He is understood to have used the pseudonym Mr Birkenshaw.

The MP was rounding off his day with a series of interviews for local TV and radio stations before flying back to London this afternoon.

A huge posse of Fleet St journalists have been in pursuit of Mr Johnson, whose itinerary was kept under wraps.
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Mr Johnson later said the reason for the cloak of secrecy which surrounded his visit was to prevent the event becoming a "media jamboree".

The Tory MP told the Liverpool Echo: "One of the sad things about today is that it is a complete media jamboree. The police have said I can't go to any of the museums and that's very, very sad. I'm going to have to come back when I'm less likely to be pelted with eggs."

He also confirmed that he would not be resigning as editor of the Spectator.

He added: "I don't feel I should resign. I think that would be a kind of admission that the whole point of the leader was wrong. I would have to kind of perform a full frontal lobotomy on myself.

"I can't resign over something I don't fundamentally dissent from."

Mike.

flogen

I've always liked Boris Johnson, he seems like one of the more forward thinking conservatives (an oxymoron, I know ).
I'm not sure if Johnson has retracted the statement or just apologised, but at least he is making it quite clear that he meant no offence. Frankly this kind of tour is unprecedented, as is an editor/politician unambiguously apologising!

I don't know much about Liverpool's current mental state, so I don't know if Johnson was right or wrong to say what he said. Paul Bigley is entitled to feel hurt by the comments, and entitled to his opinion, however.

flogen

Alana

Sorry but have you ever seen Boris on for example "have i got news for you"...the poor guy doesnt seem to have a clue as to whats going on.

the only thing i can say is-plonker..and i may not like what tony blairs doing in government at the moment but im damn glad the flaming tories arent in power, what with insensitive gob****es like Boris around as party members, whos silver spoon is so large that it obstructs their perception/view of reality...

mike65

It seems you can't spot a clever faux persona when you see one!
Boris is no fool and proved it with his response.

Here's the full offending article

The soccer international between England and Wales last Saturday managed to display in an instant two of the most unsavoury aspects of life in modern Britain. A request by the authorities for a minute’s silence in memory of Mr Ken Bigley, the news of whose murder by terrorists in Iraq had broken the previous day, was largely and ostentatiously ignored. Yet the fact that such a tribute was demanded in the first place emphasised the mawkish sentimentality of a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood. There had been a two-minute silence for Mr Bigley that same morning in Liverpool, according him the same respect offered annually to the million-and-a-half British servicemen who have died for their country since 1914.

No one can make light of the appalling fate suffered by the hostage. His imprisonment, his witnessing of the shocking murders of his two fellow hostages and his own hideous decapitation by the psychopathic criminals who kidnapped him provide an object lesson in human depravity and barbarity. But we have lost our sense of proportion about such things. There have, as a correspondent to the Daily Telegraph pointed out this week, been no such outbreaks of national mourning whenever one of our brave soldiers is killed serving his country in Iraq.

The extreme reaction to Mr Bigley’s murder is fed by the fact that he was a Liverpudlian. Liverpool is a handsome city with a tribal sense of community. A combination of economic misfortune — its docks were, fundamentally, on the wrong side of England when Britain entered what is now the European Union — and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians. They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it. Part of this flawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society. The deaths of more than 50 Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough in 1989 was undeniably a greater tragedy than the single death, however horrible, of Mr Bigley; but that is no excuse for Liverpool’s failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon. The police became a convenient scapegoat, and the Sun newspaper a whipping-boy for daring, albeit in a tasteless fashion, to hint at the wider causes of the incident.

Now, part of the disproportionate convulsion of grief for Mr Bigley is prompted by the assertion that the Prime Minister has the hostage’s ‘blood on his hands’. That is nonsense. None of us can say with perfect confidence how we would behave in such circumstances, and facing such psychological pressures, but in so far as Mr Bigley chose to blame Tony Blair or the British government, he was wrong. Only those who killed him have blood on their hands. The truth is that Ken Bigley sought to make a living by undertaking work in one of the most dangerous areas on the planet. He went there against the express advice of the Foreign Office. He chose to live with a pair of Americans and seemed unconcerned about his personal security. His motives and misjudgments do not lessen the horror and injustice of his death; but they should, without lessening our sympathy for him and his family, temper the outpouring of sentimentality in which many have engaged for him. It is a form of behaviour that was kick-started in this country after the death of an even more ambiguous figure, the late Diana, Princess of Wales. As a manifestation of our apparently depleted intelligence and sense of rationality, it bodes extremely badly for this country.

Mr Bigley might not have read the last entries in Captain Scott’s journals, but they have a resonance for him: ‘We took risks. We knew that we took them. Things have turned out against us. Therefore, we have no cause for complaint.’ Captain Scott’s mentality used to be the norm for chancers and adventurers. Now, after generations of peace and welfarism, and in a society where the blame and compensation cultures go hand in hand, our modern-day buccaneers seem determined to go about their activities not merely unprepared for the likely consequences, but indignant about them. It is time we recognised that, in such a situation, it is not a breach of natural justice that the Lone Ranger does not come galloping over the horizon; it is exactly how life is. In our maturity as a civilisation, we should accept that we can cut out the cancer of ignorant sentimentality without diminishing, as in this case, our utter disgust at a foul and barbaric act of murder.

Mike.

growler

It's a very thought provoking article and I find it difficult to disagree with the sentiments expressed in the article, if you chose to work in Iraq then you have to have some understanding of the risks you are undertaking ( and being handsomely rewarded for by your employers).

The crux of the matter though is the sentimentality issue , personally I agree with the author, that the sense of sadness expressed by the british public is wholly disproportionate to the events / personalities involved. While I felt sorry for Ken Bigley and his family I felt a lot worse for the kids in Beslan who had no choice in their ultimate fate. I really struggled to understand the grief people expressed when Diana died, you'd swear they knew her or that she might have given a flying xxxx about your average british pensioner.

I think that much of this sense of pseudo-mourning is created by the tabloids , I'm not sure that a huge section of society here knows what is important anymore and is willing believe what the media tells them is the national flavour (or emotion) of the week.

Fair play to Boris for not apologising for the intellectual point the article makes, it's very sad that Michael Howard saw fit to instruct him , as an editor, to go to Liverpool to try and deflect any public backlash from the Tories.

mike65

growler wrote:

Fair play to Boris for not apologising for the intellectual point the article makes, it's very sad that Michael Howard saw fit to instruct him , as an editor, to go to Liverpool to try and deflect any public backlash from the Tories.

I suspect part of Howards annoyance (apart from poss political damage) was the stuff about Hillsborough which the Taylor Report can show is quite wrong, the Tory leader is a long-time Liverpool fan.

Mike.

The Muppet

Boris is a very affable character but I would question his suitability for public office, He appears to be detached from reality a lot of the time , some would say that should make him ideal material for public office but for me his ability to put his foot in it means he is not cut out to be a politician. He should stick to the journalism and he was very funny when presenting have I got news for you.

growler

Mike, surely Howard's affinity with Liverpool is even less of a justification for the leader of a political party to order a fellow party member ( who was in no way representing the conservative party) to apologise to the masses for comments made by another journalist writing in the Spectator ?

It's more a question of political interference with the (free) press than anything.

shotamoose

The Spectator article touches on a subject I personally find quite interesting, namely the development of these periodic events of 'national mourning' focused on one person alone.

But the author can't resist taking a dig at the completely unrelated issue of 'welfarism', and I lost any sympathy whatsoever when I read that mind-bogglingly stupid, uninformed and insulting third paragraph which essentially links the Hillsborough disaster with some inherently Liverpudlian psychological flaw.

If Boris can't see what's wrong with the Spectator complaining about others exploiting Ken Bigley's death while doing exactly the same thing to score party-political points and spread repellant, ignorant stereotypes, then he shouldn't be editor, 'nice guy' or not.

growler

How did the Spectator exploit Ken Bigley's death to score party political points ?

The Spectator and Tories are separate entities. The article , if anything, cost the Tories points through a tenuous guilt by association.

The comments regarding the scouser victim psyche is a sweeping generalisation and I personally don't see the connection between that and Ken Bigley's violent death and the subsequent apparent outpouring of grief by the city.

I think it was unhelpful to single out Liverpool in the article , it appears to me to be a more national phenomenon.

shotamoose

growler wrote:

How did the Spectator exploit Ken Bigley's death to score party political points ?

By using it as an excuse to complain about the welfare state, which, in general, the Tories want to reduce.

The Spectator and Tories are separate entities.

You don't say. The Spectator generally favours the Tories though.

The article , if anything, cost the Tories points through a tenuous guilt by association.

It unintentionally cost them.

flogen

to be fair shootamouse, The Spectator is going to be Tory bias, given its editor is a very well known Tory MP. To expect the Spectator to be fair is like expecting the same from An Phoblacht.

Now, while it may have been an excuse to complain about the welfare state, I find it hard to see how anyone expected his comments to aid the tories... maybe think it wouldnt have any effect, but thats about it. (Unless he was appealing to people outside of Liverpool who feel that they do whine about things like Hilsbourogh and Bigley, but I imagine there to be very few of these)

flogen

growler

some interesting points made by Private Eye in relation to this story and how the very media that villified the comments in the Spectator were guilty of much the same stereotyping themselves in days gone by , such as the Guardian
" the intimidatory self pitying issuing from Liverpool if anyone suggests that the idle, violent city is , well, an idle violent ciy and not a citadel of delightful scouser wit"

or "scousers' propensity to linger over every misfortune until another comes along to replace it makes them uniquely suited to the demands of Bulger mourning marathon"

The Times , directly after Hillsborough described Liverpool as the "world capital of self pity"

and goes on to quote the editor of the Liverpool Daily Post who had attacked the Spectaor article as being "outdated, unfair and unpleasant" but who just a month earlier had praised the candour of the Liverpool City Council's chief executive when he admitted that Liverpool can be "...the most mind-bogglingly awful whingeing place where the glass is always half empty".

Just another example of the terrible lack of editorial integrity or consistency even the broadsheets when faced with a bandwagon they can hop on board.

Sorry I can't link to this story , not even sure if Private Eye publish their stories on their site, at present however i can't even access
their site at www.private-eye.co.uk

The Muppet

Poor Old Boris has been sacked from the Tory front bench because he has alledgedly lied when questioned by Michael Howard about allegations about his private life that are to appear in the sunday papers.