Name: Boris Johnson says he feels guilty about his journalism
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Boris Johnson says he feels guilty about his journalism

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This article is more than 1 year oldThis article is more than 1 year oldDuring school visit prime minister reveals doubts over ‘abusing or attacking people’ Last modified on Tue 23 Feb 2021 16.07 ESTBoris Johnson quit journalism for politics because he felt guilty about “abusing or attacking people” without putting himself in their shoes, he told a group of schoolchildren on Tuesday.“I was like a journalist for a long time, I still am really, I still write stuff,” he told pupils at Sedgehill Academy in south-east London. “But when you’re a journalist, it’s a great, great job, it’s a great profession, but the trouble is that you sometimes find yourself always abusing people or attacking people.”He continued: “Not that you want to abuse them or attack them, but you’re being critical … maybe you feel sometimes a bit guilty about that because you haven’t put yourself in the place of the person you’re criticising, and so I thought I’d give it a go.”The prime minister’s press secretary, Allegra Stratton, said Johnson was referring to the job of reporters in holding the government to account, saying: “That is the prime minister talking about the fact that you … as journalists your job is to constantly challenge and that’s something that makes all of us in government better.”But others may reflect on Johnson’s record of writing in derogatory terms about groups other than politicians without necessarily “putting yourself in the place of the person you’re criticising”.In a 2018 column for the Daily Telegraph, women who wore burkas were choosing “to go around looking like letter boxes” or “a bank robber”. In a 2002 column for the same newspaper, he described black people as “piccaninnies” and referred to “watermelon smiles”, language for which but claimed had been taken out of context. In a 1998 column, again for the Telegraph, “tank-topped bumboys” to describe gay men.By the time he finally gave up the column when he became foreign secretary, , about £4.80 a word.As well as a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, he was a Brussels reporter for the same newspaper and editor of the Spectator. As a reporter he had a reputation for filing exaggerated, if colourful, stories and was famously fired from his first job at the Times after making up a quote and attributing it to his godfather.Since changing professions, the prime minister is said to have sometimes taken umbrage when facing negative press himself. The columnist and former newspaper editor Sir Max Hastings : “I have handwritten notes from our possible next prime minister, threatening dire consequences in print if I continued to criticise him.”

This article is more than 1 year oldThis article is more than 1 year oldDuring school visit prime minister reveals doubts over ‘abusing or attacking people’ Last modified on Tue 23 Feb 2021 16.07 ESTBoris Johnson quit journalism for politics because he felt guilty about “abusing or attacking people” without putting himself in their shoes, he told a group of schoolchildren on Tuesday.“I was like a journalist for a long time, I still am really, I still write stuff,” he told pupils at Sedgehill Academy in south-east London. “But when you’re a journalist, it’s a great, great job, it’s a great...

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Archie Bland

TheGuardian.com, formerly known as Guardian.co.uk and Guardian Unlimited, is a British news and media website owned by the Guardian Media Group. It contains nearly all of the content of the newspapers The Guardian and The Observer, as well as a substantial body of web-only work produced by its own staff, including a rolling news service.

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Boris Johnson says he feels guilty about his journalism

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