The Prime Minister past views have come back to haunt him on the election trail. This Thursday he was quizzed on his views about Muslim women and single mums on ITV's This Morning by Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby.
The PM claimed his words had been taken out of context: “What [the Conservative party] have to do is have an inquiry over xenophobia and prejudice of all kinds.” Johnson has faced heavy criticism for a column he wrote last year for the Telegraph.
The article argued the burqa should not be banned even though it was “absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letterboxes”.
At the time, he had repeatedly refused to apologise despite calls for him to do so from Theresa May, then Prime Minister, and Brandon Lewis, then Chairman of the Conservative Party.
His first apology came on November 27 on a visit to Cornwall, and a day after Jeremy Corbyn repeatedly declined, during a TV interview, to say sorry for antisemitism within the Labour party.
Johnson was also asked today about his article on single mothers and their children.
In a 2006 collection of journalism, entitled: ‘Have I Got Views for You’, Johnson wrote the children of poorer working mothers are more likely to “mug you on the street corner” than children with a different parentage were to do so.
He raged against women no longer being able to stay at home, saying they had been “socially gestapoed into the workplace” and it led to them raising “unloved and undisciplined children” more likely to commit crime. In the book, published before he became Mayor of London, Johnson also compared “male non-graduates” with “illiterate brickies” and suggested the group was “resentful of all these hoity-toity female graduates”. However, the PM declined to apologise for this issue, saying: “I don’t think this is the time to talk about articles written quite a long time ago.”