A former Conservative minister has said he would leave the party if Boris Johnson were elected leader, as recriminations mounted over the former foreign secretary’s description of Muslim women in burqas.
The former attorney general Dominic Grieve, who has become a prominent advocate for a soft Brexit, described Johnson’s comments in a Telegraph column as “very embarrassing”. Meanwhile, more Tory MPs called for Johnson to apologise.
In the piece, Johnson said he would not support a ban on the face veil, but compared women wearing a burqa to “letterboxes” and “bank robbers”.
The Conservative chairman, Brandon Lewis, has asked Johnson to apologise for the remarks, which the prime minister, Theresa May, called “offensive”. Both have stopped short of taking concrete action against Johnson, who quit the cabinet last month over the government’s Brexit blueprint.
Johnson’s departure from the cabinet appears to have bolstered his standing among the party grassroots. A poll of Tory members by ConservativeHome found his popularity had quadrupled since leaving office and put him at the top of favoured successors to May.
However, Grieve said his comments showed he would not be a suitable candidate for prime minister.
“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,” Grieve told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One on Wednesday.
“He is somebody who seems to me to pursue an agenda that is entirely self-referential, doesn’t take account of colleagues. He wasn’t able to observe cabinet responsibility when he was in government.”
Grieve said the comments were symptomatic of a wider “political crisis” where people felt emboldened to repeat offensive but populist views. “If it goes on long enough then probably the foundations of our democracy will be in danger,” he said.
One of the party’s most prominent Muslim politicians, Sayeeda Warsi, wrote in the Guardian on Wednesday that Johnson had used rightwing, “alt-right” language in criticising the appearance of the burqa, which she said contributed to a view that “Muslim women are fair game”.
“I refuse to accept that these phrases were some kind of mistake, and the offence inadvertent – Johnson is too intelligent and too calculating for that. No, this was all quite deliberate. His refusal to apologise supports that,” she said.
“He set out a liberal position, but he did it in a very alt-right way. This allowed him to dog-whistle: to say to particular elements of the party that he’s tough on Muslims. Yet again, he’s trying to have his cake and eat it.”
Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, criticised the comments and said they had been calculated. “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,” she said.
“I think he should apologise for them. It doesn’t bode well, and we’ve seen it in the arguments and the debate over antisemitism in Labour, of how we’ve got to a point in 2018 where we’re supposed to be so much better at accepting and discussing and being open about different faiths, religions, backgrounds, social classes, all of these things, and actually we’ve become slightly even more siloed and treating them differently.”
On Tuesday night, the Tory peer Mohamed Sheikh, founder of the Conservative Muslim Forum, said Johnson should have the whip withdrawn. Tory colleagues, including the MP Heidi Allen and the ministers Tobias Ellwood and Alistair Burt, have said he should apologise.
The culture secretary, Jeremy Wright, said Johnson should have chosen his language more carefully and that he was “sure on reflection” that he would want to reconsider the language he had used. Eric Pickles, a former Tory chairman, also said it would be “very sensible” for him to apologise.
Friends of Johnson have said the row is politically motivated, and that other MPs, including the former chancellor Ken Clarke, had made similar remarks comparing the burqa to a bag without similar reproach.
Conor Burns, Johnson’s former parliamentary private secretary, tweeted that colleagues criticising him had not read the piece in full.
We are now into full bandwagon jumping territory on @BorisJohnson article. Seeing some of the tweets from colleagues desperate not to get left behind I can't see they can even have read it. If they did they clearly didn't understand it.
— Conor Burns MP (@ConorBurnsUK) August 8, 2018
