Boris Johnson’s comment that Muslim women who wear burkas look like bank robbers does not reach the “bar” to be considered a hate crime, the head of the Metropolitan police said today.
In an unusual intervention, Cressida Dick said that she had spoken to specialists officers about the former foreign secretary’s comments and had judged that they did not constitute a criminal office.
However, speaking to the BBC’s Asian network she admitted that many people had found them “offensive” while others supported his right to make the argument.
She said: “I spoke last night to my very experienced officers who deal with hate crime and, although we have not yet received any allegation of such a crime, I can tell you that my preliminary view having spoken to them is that what Mr Johnson said would not reach the bar for a criminal offence. He did not commit a criminal offence.”
Mr Johnson faces mounting pressure to apologise, including from the prime minister, after an article in which he also compared women in face-covering veils to letter boxes.
However, writing in a letter to The Times, Dr Taj Hargey, Imam at Oxford Islamic Congregation, said that the former Mayor of London should “not apologise for telling the truth” and argued he did not go far enough.
The theologian said there is “no Koranic legitimacy” for female facial masking, adding instead that it is “a nefarious component of a trendy gateway theology for religious extremism and militant Islam.”
Dr Hargey said: “The retrogressive Islamic clergy has succeeded in persuading ill-informed Muslims through suspect secondary sources that God wants women to cover their faces, when in reality it is a toxic patriarchy controlling women. Is it any wonder that many younger women have internalised this poisonous chauvinism by asserting that it is their human right to hide their faces?
“Johnson did not go far enough. If Britain is to become a fully integrated society then it is incumbent that cultural practices, personal preferences and communal customs that aggravate social division should be firmly resisted. For this reason Britain must emulate France, Belgium, Austria, Bulgaria and Denmark in banning the burka.”
The Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson joined the chorus of senior Tory politicians yesterday calling for Mr Johnson to say sorry for his “gratuitously offensive” comments.
Ms Davidson said that the language used by Mr Johnson was offensive and calculated, in spite of her agreeing with his wider argument in his article for The Daily Telegraph.
Speaking in East Lothian, she said: “I think it’s also not been shown through history that when men make sweeping statements about what women should or shouldn’t wear that it goes well for them. I think that this wasn’t an off-the-cuff slip, he wrote a column, he knew exactly what he was doing and I think it crossed from being provocative and starting a debate and actually it became rude and gratuitous.
“If you use the analogy of Christianity, would you ever write in the Telegraph that you should have a debate about banning Christians from wearing crucifixes? It’s the same argument but it’s in a different faith, so why are the parameters different for one faith and not the other?”
Mr Johnson has stayed silent on the issue, despite this week being urged by Theresa May to apologise. Aides say he will not apologise.
Yesterday afternoon more senior MPs joined in, with Robin Walker, a Brexit minister, calling on the “attention seeking” Mr Johnson to apologise for his “stupid” remarks.
Dominic Grieve, the former attorney-general, described Mr Johnson’s comments as “very embarrassing” and vowed to leave the party if Mr Johnson became leader. “If he were to become leader of the party, I for one wouldn’t be in it. I don’t regard him as a fit and proper person to lead a political party and certainly not the Conservative Party,” he told the BBC Radio 4’s The World at One.
The party faces demands to formally investigate Mr Johnson after the Tory peer Lord Sheikh, who founded the Conservative Muslim Forum, wrote to the party chairman Brandon Lewis insisting that action be taken.
Should the party investigate, an official would obtain written statements from the complainant and notify Mr Johnson, who would then be offered an opportunity to set out his evidence. If he were to be found in breach of the party’s code of conduct, punishments could include suspension of membership or expulsion. Mr Johnson would have a chance to appeal against such a decision.
Other prominent Conservative politicians who have criticised Mr Johnson’s comments include Jeremy Wright, the culture secretary, Lord Pickles, a former chairman of the party, and Baroness Warsi, a Muslim peer and former Tory chairwoman.
The Tory MP Nadine Dorries is one of the few to have come out in Mr Johnson’s defence, saying his comments did not go far enough. “Any clothing a woman is forced to wear which hides both her beauty and her bruises should be banned and have no place in our liberal, progressive country,” she said.
