Boris Johnson's 'letterbox' gaffe may be his last – the Conservatives are finally tiring of him

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Wouldn’t it be amusing if Boris Johnson’s remarks about the niqab resulted in him losing the Conservative whip in the Commons thus rendering himself unable to stand for the party leadership? Who knows, such an ironic turn of events might appeal to the baser instincts of the party leadership. After all, his friends say he won’t apologise, as Theresa May has demanded. Is he allowed to bring his party into disrepute with no sanction?

Imagine for one moment if some stray Labour MP had written a newspaper article this week poking fun at Orthodox Jewish dress? Even if they said the conventional attire should not be banned, just saying it looked “ridiculous”. And then Jeremy Corbyn asked them to apologise and did nothing when they refused? I think we know the outrage that would bring – and rightly so.

If nothing else, Bozza has done his party a huge disservice in reminding people of the Tories’ own problems with Islamophobia, clearly detailed by Baroness Warsi, who claims it runs from the top to the bottom of her party, and that it had passed the “dinner table test” of social acceptability. Just as the antisemitism scandal was rightly damaging Corbyn and Labour, making the Conservatives look respectable by comparison, along comes Boris to mess it all up.

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Of course it might be different if the former foreign secretary hadn’t got form. He’s written, in the past, about “picanninies” with “water melon smiles”. He talked of Liverpool enjoying a victim mentality – not racist, but certainly so offensive that his party leader at the time, Michael Howard, ordered him to Merseyside to apologise. He went grudgingly but met few, if any, actual Liverpudlians.

I recall, too, TV footage of an official FCO visit to Myanmar, where life saving work was to be done, with Boris gently singing the old colonial era song “The Road to Mandalay” on a trip to a temple. The British ambassador could be heard begging him: please, please, not now minister.

Boris Johnson is Britain’s great lost... what? Not prime minister, but stand-up comedian perhaps. He has the wit of Winston Churchill, his hero, but no other of the old man’s qualities.

He just cannot help himself. He has to crack a gag. Rarely does he resist the temptation: his resignation speech recently was an exception. He enjoys the attention; he likes winding up lefties; and he likes to try and get away with it all like a guilty schoolboy.

He also, by the way, lacks application to his work, as everyone from his masters at Eton to his civil servants at the FCO and Michael Gove have attested. He’s not at home in politics. Journalism is a second best outlet for his humour, and high office an even less suitable one.

Back to the issue: anyone within legal limits is entitled to a view on the veil, and they can, if they don’t incite hatred or violence in doing so, declare it robustly.

In some countries – France, Denmark – they ban it. In Britain we do not, but we can still debate the issue. There’s no problem with saying that the niqab is disliked or in a woman saying she chooses to wear it. No problem, actually, with an MP saying those things either. But that does not mean that their political party has to put up with it.

The Conservatives do not have to treasure Boris Johnson like he is some gift from God. They can disown him, ostracise him, or at the very least discipline him, just as they have other less famous backbenchers in the past – and they look increasingly close to doing so. One happy consequence of having the whip withdrawn would be that Boris would never again get the chance to engage in his satirical banter in the name of this country. We don’t want him pushing the boundaries of good taste from the steps of No 10, thank you.

Boris Johnson is not even a pound shop Enoch Powell: he is a pound shop Nigel Farage, and more dangerous with it. Headmistress Theresa May should give him six of the best. I think the sheer joy of that would unite the nation, regardless of creed.