The hounding of Boris for his ‘Kenyan’ comment is the dumbest Twitterstorm yet

Normally, Twitterstorms, those unhinged uprisings against a politician or celeb who has dared to make an outré utterance, are best treated like tantrum-throwing two-year-olds. Stand back, let them do their foot-stomping, and wait for them to exhaust themselves. But the storm over Boris’s ‘part-Kenyan’ remark in relation to Obama is different. This Twitterstorm has been so dumb, and so destructive, that it cannot simply be allowed to pass and take its place in the bulging book of Times People Went Unnecessarily Crazy About Something. No, we need a reckoning with this Twitterstorm. We need to take stock.

As a keen watcher of Twitterstorms, I’m struggling to remember any that have been as batty and as immune to factual information as the Boris one. Boris is being put through the wringer, slurred as racist, for writing a Sun column last week in which he wondered if Obama’s ‘part-Kenyan’ heritage may have been behind his decision in 2009 to move a bust of Winston Churchill out of the Oval Office.