Boris Johnson is a victim of the modern inquisition

The Muslim Council of Britain wants Theresa May to subject Boris to a ‘full disciplinary inquiry’ over his comments on the niqab and burqa. Let’s call this by its true name: an inquisition. This inquiry would be a 21st-century inquisition of a man simply for speaking ill of a religious practice. May must resist this borderline medieval demand that she punish a member of her party for expressing a ‘blasphemous’ thought. She must put aside her Borisphobia and stand up for freedom of conscience against the inquisitorial hysteria that has greeted Boris’s remarks.

Burqagate has been mad from the get-go. Reading some of the coverage of Boris’s Daily Telegraph column you could be forgiven for thinking he had called for a pogrom against Muslims and even against all people of colour. He has been denounced as a racist, a fascist, and of course an Islamophobe: anyone who raises even the slightest question about Koranic ideology or Islamic dress now runs the risk of being branded a ‘phobe’, just as those who queried the Bible or Christ in the past would be denounced as heretics.