I recently reported on Camden New Journal's account of Mayor Johnson's celebrated and highly commendable rescue of Age of Stupid director Franny Armstrong from a group of aspiring young muggers. This had interested me because it contradicted every other account of the event in saying that Armstrong's assailants were boys, not girls. CNJ even quoted Armstrong saying so:
"I was minding my own business, sending a text, when I heard three boys shouting swear words."
The article continued:
Reports elsewhere said her attackers were girls but Franny insists they were boys.
Couldn't really be clearer, could it? But Armstrong responded to my drawing attention to this gender reassignment with a couple of tweets (which I'm afraid I didn't pick up for several days) on 6 November. First, this one, which concluded with a link to my post:
Sorry, Boris Johnson rescued me from girls, not boys. The Camden New Journal made that up & wrongly quoted it to me.
Then this:
@DaveHill Sorry, but the Camden New Journal got that wrong & attributed it to me (nice). It was definitely girls, not boys
That settles it for me: Armstrong's assailants were indeed, female, as originally reported. I cannot, though, even begin to understand why or how the CNJ came to insist that Armstrong had claimed differently. Very strange.
Update, 19 November. The mystery is solved. I gather from "sources close to" that the CNJ's reporting that Franny Armstrong's assailants were not girls but boys resulted from a sort of constellation of minor cock-ups. I've been told the whole tale. It wasn't wholly unfamiliar. Been there, done that, have T-shirt etcetera. And, yes, they were girls, they were girls, they were girls...
