Boris Johnson - Troll of the Month
The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrongly accused Labour leader Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute the BBC presenter Jimmy Savile for child sexual abuses, dating back when Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013.
A few days after this accusation, expressed by Johnson in the House of Commons, Starmer was attacked by a mob shouting “paedophile protector,” “nonce” (British slang word for paedophile), “traitor,” “Jimmy Savile,” “you should be hung,” and “Do you enjoy working for the New World Order?”
The footage of the protesters surrounding and shouting at Starmer was picked up by groups of conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers online, including former nurse Kate Shemirani and Resistance GB. In these online spaces, the Labour leader was labelled “a controlled Zionist”.
The prime minister’s political attack to Starmer attracted immediate criticism from some Conservatives. Several organisations also fact-checked Johnson’s claims, finding no evidence that the current Labour leader was directly involved in failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile.
Where do Boris Johnson’s wrong suggestions come from and why did they gain quick traction among conspiracists?
False claims on Starmer’s failure to prosecute Savile have been circulating online for a few years, but they were limited to far-right groups. More recently, prominent British far-right figure Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) shared it on his Telegram account to his 155,000 subscribers, research by Hope Not Hate revealed. Then, at the beginning of February, Boris Johnson uttered those accusations in the House of Commons, under "parliamentary privilege" giving MPs certain legal protections over what they say.
With Boris Johnson’s accusation, an antisemitic far-right conspiracy narrative became mainstream.
As Joe Mulhall of Hope Not Hate writes, “It is unlikely that Johnson was scrolling through Tommy Robinson’s Telegram channel and came across the Savile slander. Rather, conspiracy theories and talking points circulate within far-right spaces, and the ones that gain the largest traction are spread incrementally via mainstream hosts such as rightwing commentators, until they are picked up by people who often have no idea where they originate.”
The accusation against Keir Starmer of protecting a paedophile echoes QAnon’s accusations against US Democrats of running a secret cabal, where they abduct children, kill them, and harvest their blood. This conspiracy ideology has widely spread the message of “freeing” children from some alleged evil, recently reaching not only mothers on Instagram but also anti-vaxxers.
The fact that Starmer was accused of being “a controlled Zionist” and “working for the New World Order” are not an accident. The roots of this conspiracy ideology are antisemitic.
Accusations of abducting children for their blood and, more generally, of harming them, fall within centuries-old false allegation that Jews murder Christians – especially children – to use their blood for ritual purposes. This antisemitic trope often goes alongside the New World Order conspiracy ideology alleging that a global elite (of powerful Jews) are manipulating world events to gain power and implement a tyrannical regime.
In his role as the UK’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, should not enable this rhetoric and promote dangerous conspiracy ideologies. Back in 2017, his comparisons of veiled Muslim women to “letter boxes” and “bank robbers” prompted a spike in Islamophobic hate crimes in Britain. Words have consequences. We would have hoped that Boris Johnson learnt his lessons.
