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Boris Johnson Criticized Over Comments About Jo Cox Women Lawmakers Call Out Boris Johnson for His Incendiary Language on Brexit
(about 11 hours later)
LONDON — Prime Minister Boris Johnson has come under severe criticism for his response to female lawmakers who asked him to calm his incendiary language in Parliament on Wednesday evening, and particularly for his reference to Jo Cox, an anti-Brexit member who was murdered a week before the 2016 referendum. LONDON — One after another, women rose in Britain’s House of Commons and pleaded with Prime Minister Boris Johnson to stop calling his opponents traitors, lest a madman take his words to heart.
One after another, women rose to ask the prime minister to modulate his remarks. Instead, he dug in. “I’ve never heard such humbug in all my life,” he said after a Labour lawmaker, Paula Sherriff, spoke of getting death threats from people who quoted words Mr. Johnson had used to describe his opponents: ‘‘surrender act,’’ “betrayal” and ‘‘traitor.’’ But time and again on Wednesday night, Mr. Johnson pulled new slurs from his lexicon, accusing those who disagree with him of humiliating Britain, surrendering to Brussels and betraying their own constituents in phrases that evoked war with the European Union, not a wonky three-year negotiation.
But what elicited the greatest outrage — and no small measure of disbelief — was Mr. Johnson’s response to a plea for moderation from Tracy Babin, the Labour lawmaker who was elected to the seat formerly occupied by Ms. Cox, who was stabbed and shot by a man shouting “Britain first” and “death to traitors.” As rowdy as Britain’s Parliament has been in recent months, Mr. Johnson’s eruptions marked a new front in the culture war over Brexit. Especially for the roster of women lawmakers who begged Mr. Johnson to calm his incendiary language, the outbursts were chilling, exposing the anger that pervades the Brexit project and the nastiness that lawmakers say Mr. Johnson has often reserved for women who stood up to him.
Far from calming things down, Mr. Johnson repeated his harsh words, accusing lawmakers of an act of “surrender” and “capitulation” for trying to stop him from pulling Britain out of the European Union without a deal governing future relations. The prime minister’s remarks dampened hope of opposition lawmakers voting for a revamped Brexit deal and stirred alarm across Europe, where diplomats despaired over the prime minister’s bellicose tone and warned of his words fueling political violence.
“The best way to honor the memory of Jo Cox and indeed the best way to bring this country together would be, I think, to get Brexit done,” Mr. Johnson said. In the run-up to the 2016 referendum, Jo Cox, an anti-Brexit lawmaker, was murdered by a man shouting “Britain first!” and “death to traitors.” Since then, women say they have gotten an avalanche of threats for standing in the way of Britain leaving the European Union without a deal governing future relations — and all the dire repercussions that could cause.
“I don’t know why I’m ever shocked at how low Boris Johnson can go,” Jess Phillips, a Labour member of Parliament, said in a television interview about what he had to say about Ms. Cox. “For him then to use the memory of my dead friend, who was murdered in the street, to try and hammer home one more time his point — the only person who has surrendered anything is Boris Johnson and he’s surrendered his morality.” Mr. Johnson has only stoked the flames, lawmakers said.
Brendan Cox, Ms. Cox’s widower, expressed dismay about the comments from the prime minister, but he also issued a plea on Twitter for all sides to tone down their language. One threat sent to Jess Phillips, a Labour lawmaker, quoted a line of Mr. Johnson’s about preferring being “dead in a ditch” to delaying Brexit. “That is what will happen to those who do not deliver Brexit,” the threat to Ms. Phillips read.
“Feel a bit sick at Jo’s name being used in this way,” he wrote. “The best way to honor Jo is for all of us (no matter our views) to stand up for what we believe in, passionately and with determination. But never to demonize the other side and always hold onto what we have in common.” On Wednesday night, looking weary after the Supreme Court forced him to end the parliamentary shutdown he imposed to push through his Brexit plans, Mr. Johnson dismissed concerns about death threats mirroring his language as “humbug.” He said lawmakers had only themselves to blame for the hostile political climate, suggesting that they were inviting the threats by not acceding to his hard-line Brexit tactics.
For a prime minister known for provocative and sometimes intemperate comments and behavior, and who built his career on newspaper columns that observers said sometimes veered into racism and sexism, the eruption was not entirely out of character. “The best way to honor the memory of Jo Cox and indeed the best way to bring this country together would be, I think, to get Brexit done,” Mr. Johnson said, eliciting no small measure of disbelief.
But having dressed up the sort of language he once used in a right-leaning newspaper column in all the ceremony of Parliament, Mr. Johnson still startled most onlookers. Bridget Phillipson, a Labour lawmaker, said in an interview that women in Parliament routinely received vile messages calling them, among other things, witches. She said that while Theresa May, the former prime minister, had kindled some anger at lawmakers during her leadership, the mood darkened when Mr. Johnson took office.
Opening the House of Commons on Thursday morning, the speaker, John Bercow, spoke somberly about the raucous scenes the night before. “There was an atmosphere in the chamber worse than any I’ve known in my 22 years in the House,” Mr. Bercow said. “On both sides, passions were inflamed. Angry words were uttered. The culture was toxic.” “It’s treachery, treason, betrayal and, added to it, a healthy dose of misogyny,” Ms. Phillipson said, describing the threats. “It’s a deliberate strategy of Boris Johnson to fuel these divisions, to pit the public against Parliament and their politicians.”
He said lawmakers would be given time specifically to discuss Mr. Johnson’s inflammatory language later on Thursday, and closed by asking lawmakers “please to lower the decibel level, and try to treat each other as opponents, not as enemies.” Responding in a television interview on Thursday, Mr. Johnson said, “I totally deplore any threats to anybody, particularly female M.P.s.” But he defended comparing his opponents’ strategy to an act of surrender, saying a Brexit delay gave Brussels too much power to decide Britain’s status in the bloc.
Parliament was sitting only after the Supreme Court decided on Tuesday that Mr. Johnson’s move to suspend the body for five weeks had been unlawful. The prime minister was concerned that lawmakers would meddle in his plans to complete Brexit by Oct. 31, but the judges said he had gone too far. Mr. Johnson has long courted a fan base in Britain with what critics called crude, chauvinistic language, but supporters saw as nothing more than airy banter.
Addressing Brexit while speaking to Parliament on Wednesday, Mr. Johnson said that Britain and the European Union were making progress on reaching a deal. But on Thursday, Michel Barnier, the bloc’s lead negotiator in the Brexit talks, repeated a familiar refrain: Britain, he said, had failed to present a meaningful proposal to break the deadlock. His columns in the right-wing Daily Telegraph were full of intemperate language generally, but some were particularly aimed at women.
Mr. Barnier said that he was “still ready to work on any new legal and operational proposal,” adding that four papers submitted from the British side in recent days had failed to meet the standard he was looking for. For example, he took issue with the flood of grief that followed Princess Diana’s death, ascribing it to her status as “a symbol for every woman who has ever felt wronged by a man.”
“We are still waiting,” he said. He also packed a column on cars in GQ magazine with sexual innuendo. In one review of a Ferrari, he said the English countryside “was lying back and opening her well-bred legs to be ravished by the Italian stallion.” In another, he wrote of the female voice on his navigation system: “so cool, so low, so scrotum-tighteningly thoughtful.”
As London mayor, Mr. Johnson was particularly disdainful of elected women officials in hearings, they said, so much so that the officials formally complained, attaching a seven-page document with examples from 2008 until 2011.
He often called women “dear.” He described their questions variously as “blah blah blah blah fishcakes,” “absolute drivel” and “rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb.”
“He doesn’t take criticism well, particularly from women,” Caroline Pidgeon, a London assembly member for the Liberal Democrats, said. “His default position is to mock and try to discredit you, rather than take down the arguments. It was just mock, mock, mock, and patronizing things as well.”
Ms. Pidgeon said that was years before social media seeded the political landscape with vicious attacks on women lawmakers. But even then, she said: “It has an impact on you. I think, ‘Am I actually O.K. at my job, is there something I’m not doing right?’”
Mr. Johnson’s caustic remarks sometimes got him in hot water, as when he used a Telegraph column in 2007 to compare Hillary Clinton to “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.”
But he climbed Britain’s political ladder as a leading enemy of overweening political correctness, with his air of disheveled charm and posh obliviousness helping him skate past serious accusations of racism and sexism.
“He can’t deal with women unless he wants to get them into bed,” said Sonia Purnell, who wrote the biography “Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition.” “He cannot abide the idea of women being his equal, even his superior.”
After Ms. Purnell wrote her book, packed with unflattering anecdotes about the future prime minister, she said false charges started spreading that she had written it only because she was a scorned ex-lover, a trope pulled from an “old-fashioned, Neanderthal way of attacking women,” she said.
The Brexit debate laid the ground for an even more belligerent — and male-dominated — style of politics.
A 2016 study found that 83 percent of the people featured in news coverage of the Brexit referendum that year were men. Many of the leading Brexit backers were men, too, and some of them flouted an agreement to suspend campaigning after Ms. Cox’s killing, instead urging their team to “press it harder.”
In the aftermath, some surveys found that as many as 9 in 10 women lawmakers reported being the targets of online abuse. A man with far-right ties was jailed this year for plotting to murder a Labour lawmaker, Rosie Cooper.
But with Mr. Johnson now lashing out at the Supreme Court, vowing to break the law and trashing lawmakers in his campaign to pull Britain out of the European Union by Oct. 31, “do or die,” tensions have only risen.
Ms. Phillips, the Labour lawmaker, told reporters on Thursday that a man had been arrested outside her constituency office after slamming on the doors and windows, and that her London office temporarily disconnected the phones to stop a torrent of abuse.
John Bercow, the speaker of the House of Commons, said the atmosphere on Wednesday night had been “worse than any I’ve known in my 22 years in the House.” Kim Leadbeater, the sister of Ms. Cox, said she was “mesmerized and dumbstruck.” Even Rachel Johnson, Mr. Johnson’s sister, called his comments “tasteless.”
Mr. Johnson’s allies were unbowed. Bob Seely, a Conservative lawmaker, said he had received threats, too, but “I’m never a diva about it.” James Cleverly, the Conservative chairman, chalked up the hostility to “a huge amount of temper on both sides,” and repeated that the best salve was to complete Brexit.
For now, though, there were no signs of that happening anytime soon. And analysts said Mr. Johnson, much like President Trump in the United States, seemed focused solely on motivating his pro-Brexit base for a looming election.
“His strategy now is to try to force a polarization that I’m not sure is there, wholesale, in the population,” said Paula Surridge, a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol. “It isn’t a straightforward win, because he could potentially lose those softer, more traditional Conservatives who might be quite turned off by it.”
The riotous scenes in Parliament exposed a kind of venom that lawmakers’ families said they had been living with for years. Ellie Cooper, the daughter of Yvette Cooper, a Labour lawmaker, wrote on Twitter on Thursday that the threats had left her terrified.
“I am scared,” she wrote. “I am scared when I scroll through the replies to her tweets calling her a liar and a traitor. I am scared when our house gets fitted with panic buttons, industrial-locking doors and explosive bags to catch the mail.”