Boris Obama Bigotry Busted

With Barack Obama visiting Britain right now, just to pop in at Windsor Castle and see Young Dave in Downing Street you understand, the opportunity has been taken by Cameron to make sure every body knows that The Prez favours our continuing membership of the EU. This has caused significant discomfort to the Outers, who have wasted no time slagging off the leader of the Free World.

An absolute Muppet. And Elmo from Sesame Street

Lumbering to the front of the pack of Obama bashers today has come London’s increasingly ocasional Mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who has used the platform given him by the Sun to suggest that a US Citizen whose ancestry comes from another continent should butt out of the debate. The Sun is owned by a US Citizen whose ancestry comes from another continent, but who has no problem sticking his oar in.

Under the headline “UK and America can be better friends than ever Mr Obama... if we LEAVE the EU”, Bozza tells “Something mysterious happened when Barack Obama entered the Oval Office in 2009 … Something vanished from that room, and no one could quite explain why … It was a bust of Winston Churchill – the great British war time leader. It was a fine goggle-eyed object, done by the brilliant sculptor Jacob Epstein, and it had sat there for almost ten years”. Yes? Yes yes? Yes yes yes?

“But on day one of the Obama administration it was returned, without ceremony, to the British embassy in Washington … No one was sure whether the President had himself been involved in the decision … Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender”. Some said - but not Bozza, you see.

This myth, which has been peddled since Day One of the Obama presidency, has long ago been busted. The Churchill bust in the Oval Office had been loaned to Dubya Bush, and was removed and returned along with all other loaned works of art when he left the White House. Obama probably didn’t even know it had gone.

In any case, there is another bust of Churchill in the White House residence, which was donated to Lyndon Johnson in 1965. That one is still there. So Bozza was talking out of the back of his neck even before he got to the racist dog-whistle of “the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire”.

Bozza even got it in the neck at the magazine he used to edit, as Nick Cohen concluded “Boris Johnson’s attack on Barack Obama belongs in the gutter”. Nicholas Soames, who, as Winshton’s grandson might be expected to know something about The Great Man, observed “Appalling article by @BorisJohnson in Sun totally wrong on almost everything. Inconceivable WSC [would] not have welcomed Presidents views … @BorisJohnson it is not compulsory to have head of WSC in President's office. Stupid irrelevant empty point to make #growupgetreal”. He’s got his Social Media chops sorted, too.

The Tories are having a series of what look awfully like nasty racist lapses right now. Those Sadiq Khan smears may have been a misfortune, but with Bozza’s Obama attack it’s starting to look like carelessness.