Jailed - To Save Bozza’s Skin

Some ministers know when it is time to go, and resign accordingly. Even the Tories’ dead cat slinger supreme Michael Fallon got that one. And, given sufficient heavy hints, doing the decent thing spread to self-promoting nobody Priti Patel. But for one well-known minister, such niceties are out of the question, for he has no shame, no principles, no self-awareness, and all too often no conscience to tell him he has fouled up.

A total Muppet. And Elmo from Sesame Street

To no surprise, that minister is London’s formerly very occasional Mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who enjoys the unwanted distinction of being that rarest of creatures: someone who has been sacked by the Murdoch press for lying. He’s also been sacked from a previous Tory front bench for lying. Now, having been made Foreign Secretary when he did not deserve it, he should once again be on his way for lying.

The problem is that Theresa May dare not sack the SOB. And Bozza is not man enough to do the decent thing. Worse, sacking him would probably be the only way to recover the situation in which he has left British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Bozza the clown has effectively condemned her to another five years in an Iranian jail, thanks to his lying, coupled with an inability to withdraw his lies and say sorry.

As the Guardian has reported, “Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested in April last year when she and her young daughter, Gabriella, were about to return to the UK from Iran after what her husband has said was a family visit. Since then, she has spent most of her time in Evin prison in Tehran … Tehran’s prosecutor general said in October that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was being held because she ran ‘a BBC Persian online journalism course which was aimed at recruiting and training people to spread propaganda against Iran’”.

But she was on holiday. Sadly, instead of getting his facts straight, blundering Bozza “gave a misleading statement to a parliamentary committee that Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been ‘simply teaching people journalism’”. Iranian media lapped that up.

They “referred to Johnson’s comments as evidence that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was conducting illegal affairs in Iran. The Iranian judiciary’s news website also carried a news article on Wednesday with the headline: ‘Spy or human rights activist[?]’ … The news broadcast, which was entitled ‘Confession’, said: ‘Mr Johnson’s inadvertent confession meant that [she] was teaching some Iranian journalists – it was a gaffe that can not be covered up’”.

An exasperated Tulip Siddiq, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s MP, told “The country has put up with blunder after blunder from Boris Johnson over the years, but the joke has stopped. He is supposed to be the country’s top diplomat, but is instead a laughing stock. His role is to protect British citizens abroad, and he has failed in the gravest way. This is about a young mother’s life, and he must now resign”. But he won’t. He isn’t up to resigning.

The people at the Mirror, who have put Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe on their front page today, also know that. And Theresa May hasn’t got the bottle to sack him. So one woman gets an extended prison sentence to save the career of the UK’s most inept Foreign Secretary since the role was invented. Our politics is once again broken beyond repair.

Removal of this Government cannot come soon enough. End of story.