Brace yourselves for Britain’s Trump as the next prime minister

Yonden Lhatoo says British politician Boris Johnson is auditioning for the country’s top job by using cheap tactics such as ridiculing Muslim women wearing burkas – and it may work, given the sorry state of politics in Britain

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Boris Johnson is a cross between a head injury and an unmade bed, according to comedian Trevor Noah. Photo: Twitter

Yonden Lhatoo

Yonden Lhatoo is Managing Editor at the South China Morning Post.

Published: 2:55pm, 11 Aug 2018Updated: 5:28pm, 15 Aug 2018

Just when you were beginning to wonder if you’d heard the last of Boris Johnson’s buffoonery, Britain’s national clown is back with a bang.

After a sabbatical of several weeks following his melodramatic resignation as foreign secretary over Prime Minister Theresa May’s soft Brexit plan, he’s now causing a conniption by deliberately trolling his country’s minority Muslim community.

In a newspaper column, he presented what was essentially a liberal argument that Britain should not ape Denmark’s extreme move to ban Muslim women from wearing burkas in public, but BoJo, being BoJo, had to take it a provocative step further and share his personal bigotry as well.

“It is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes,” he wrote. “If a constituent came to my MP’s surgery with her face obscured, I should feel entitled … to ask her to remove it so I could talk to her properly. If a female student turned up at school or at a university lecture looking like a bank robber then ditto.”

Brace yourselves for Boris Johnson in charge of Britain, which will become an inward-looking island of intolerance. Photo: Twitter

While many are genuinely outraged and want Johnson’s shaggy head on a platter for ridiculing and demonising a minority group, his broadside is resonating across large swathes of the British population who feel extreme interpretations of Islamic lifestyle have no place in Western civilisation and their country is losing its identity by over-pandering to medieval migrant sensitivities.