If you haven’t read Jemima Khan’s interviews with Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone in this week’s New Statesman, you really should. The Livingstone interview hasn’t attracted the best of headlines for the Labour candidate – “Ken Livingstone in Tory ‘riddled with homosexuals’ row” – but it is ludicrous to accuse Ken of being homophobic or bigoted on the basis of a single, ill-advised, badly-phrased comment. On the other hand, it is worth pointing out that his Tory opponent Johnson has, in the past, referred to black people as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles” and declared, in a discussion on 7/7, that “Islam is the problem“.
Boris’s interview with Jemima also contained a line that some might say was offensive to London’s Irish community:
“I’ll tell you what makes me angry – lefty crap,” he thunders in response. Like? “Well, like spending £20,000 on a dinner at the Dorchester for Sinn Fein!”
Is the mayor referring to the annual St Patrick’s Day Gala Dinner, the £150-per-ticket black tie event that ran between 2002 and 2008 and was, ahem, self-financing? The dinner that Boris cancelled in 2009 to save money despite the fact that it was, um, er, self-financing? The dinner that wasn’t held “for Sinn Fein” but at the request, and for the sake, of the Irish community of Kilburn, Cricklewood and other parts of the capital?
Now, you can agree or disagree with the idea of a special, sponsored, annual dinner for London’s Irish community but to dismiss it, out of hand, as “lefty crap” and “for Sinn Fein” isn’t just wrong but offensive. Irish footballers, television stars, singers and politicians from across the spectrum attended the dinner, including, I’m told, Pauline McLynn (from Father Ted), Dermot O’Leary, Bob Geldof, the mayor of Dublin and the Irish ambassador to the UK.
As a spokesman for Ken Livingstone pointed out, when I mentioned the Boris line to him:
To call the annual, self-financing, St Patrick’s Day dinner “lefty crap” is both profoundly ill-informed and also an attack on Irish Londoners and their contribution to this city. Irish Londoners came together to celebrate the part they play in the life of London – and Boris Johnson has slapped them in the face. He is out of touch and ignorant of the facts.
I’m not Irish but I am Muslim. I know what it’s like to be casually stereotyped – not every British Muslim is an Islamist and not every person of Irish descent is a Provo. The mayor of this great and diverse city should know better.
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