Seen the roasting given to Mayor of London Boris Johnson by BBC journalist Eddie Mair? It’s definitely worth a watch!
Mair’s questioning of Boris reminded
me of the late great Bruce Lee’s famous, one-inch punch. It didn't look much at
the time, but the effect was devastating. Mair was questioning Boris as a
trailer for the BBC 2 programme: “Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise”, to be
aired at 9pm tonight.
Boris normally, the consummate
media operator, slick funny irreverent was reduced to a bumbling wreck.
He was asked a series of
questions relating to his integrity as a potential British Prime Minister.
The
first question was about Johnson being sacked as a trainee reporter for The
Times for making up a quote from his own godfather, Colin Lucas.
Clearly shaken,
Boris ummmed and ahhhed, so Mair moved on and asked about the fact that when,
he was Tory leader; Michael Howard had asked Johnson if he was having an
affair. He denied it. However it later transpired he was lying and Howard
sacked him. “Why did you lie?” pressed Mair. Boris looked ashen and could
not respond.
Next was a
question relating to the now famous telephone conversation Johnson had in 1990
with his buddy Darius Guppy. He asked Boris to supply him the address of a
fellow journalist, so he could dispatch some goons to go and beat him up.
As Boris
flustered, Mair bludgeoned him further, "You’re a nasty piece of work,
aren’t you?"
Mair’s final
hammer blow came in the form of a statement rather than a question, “even your
friend Conrad Black, a convicted fraudster, says he doesn't trust you
completely.”
This morning on LBC
radio Johnson’s father, in a nice paternal touch, came out swinging in an
attempt to defend his beloved son.
“I thought Eddie
Mair's interview was about the most disgusting piece of journalism I've
listened to for a very long time,” Mr Johnson said. “The BBC sank about as low
as it could.
He then went on, in a statement of simply breathtaking
hypocrisy, to add,
“If grilling people about their private lives, accusing them of
guilt by association and openly abusing them is a legitimate interview, then
frankly, I don't know where we are coming.”
Chutzpah indeed,
particularly when one recalls the campaign run by the Evening Standard during
the Mayor of London elections of 2008 led by the then editor Veronica Wadley
and Andrew Gilligan, of which I was the principal victim.
Smear, innuendo,
massive intrusions into my own private life were all characteristics of that
campaign orchestrated by Boris’s campaign manager Lynton Crosby (now running
Cameron’s 2015 election team).
Of course despite
an intensive and grossly intrusive five-month onslaught, I was eventually
completely exonerated of the 143 specific charges leveled against me by
Gilligan and Wadley. As you can imagine the personal cost to my family, and me
has been immense.
So it was with a
wry smile that I saw these events unfold over the weekend. It was the late Rev
Martin Luther King who said,
“The moral arch of
the universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
As an additional
slice of irony, the guardians of the sacrosanct right of the “freedom of the
press” are today, denouncing the Mair Johnson interview as unfair.
This is laughable almost
surreal.
Boris should know by
now, that there is an immutable law of karma in politics as there is in life,
what goes around, comes around baby.
Lee Jasper
NB: Both Veronica Wadley and
Andrew Gilligan are today employed by Boris Johnson.
