Boris called me a terrorist but I’d still probably vote for him

My infinitesimally small claim to fame in the UK’s upcoming elections is that the prime minister once called me McVeigh, as in ‘Timothy McVeigh.’ The year was 2001. I was a college student looking to pay the bills with punditry dollars and pounds. Boris Johnson was a sitting Member of Parliament for Henley and the editor of this journal.

Timothy McVeigh was scheduled to be executed that summer for bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 men, women, and children. I wrote an article calling for a retrial and submitted it to The Spectator. It wasn’t a defence of McVeigh. Rather, it was a defence of procedural justice. The US government admitted that it had misplaced about 100 boxes of evidence in the case. Mistakes happen but that seemed about 99 boxes too many to overlook. McVeigh’s defence counsel were deprived of a treasure trove of information they could have used in the case.