Dan Wootton: To suggest Boris incited the Starmer mob is dishonest - the media should hang their heads in shame

If you have watched any of the mainstream broadcast media coverage or read many of the newspaper reports about the protesters coming for Keir Starmer at Westminster last night, you would probably believe Boris Johnson had personally ordered the mob to round on the Labour leader.

Of course, the opposite is true.

The inconvenient reality is that this group of anti-authority protestors are just as angry with the government and would have come for the Prime Minister himself or any Tory minister if they had encountered them outside parliament. Boris himself immediately condemned the violence.

But the media witch hunt against Boris continues at pace, so facts are out the window at this point. It’s all about optics as the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky News, The Guardian and the Daily Mirror scent blood.

In this instance, the media establishment remains deeply unhappy that while responding to the Sue Gray report Boris raised the fact that Starmer was running the CPS at the time they decided not to prosecute Jimmy Saville – even though he was not personally involved in such a decision.

Johnson has come under great pressure to apologise but has refused to do so, even when it resulted in his close ally Munira Mirza quitting as his policy chief. If Starmer thinks Boris should be responsible for every party that went on at Number 10 Downing Street on his watch, is it wrong for the PM to expect the same standards about his rival’s past roles?

But there is another side to this story, one you won’t hear from any other broadcaster, despite their claims of impartiality. And in the House of Commons Starmer has regularly taken the credit for CPS successes, as the Guido Fawkes website pointed out today.

As Guido Fawkes said: He quite cynically wants to take the credit for the successes, yet we are now expected to accept he isn’t responsible for the failures.

So that’s why I believe it is right for Boris to stand his ground and refuse to apology. If he did so now, no one would accept it as sincere anyway. But, as a result, most of the craven broadcast media won’t let the issue rest, resulting in their dodgy interpretation of last night’s incident.

So yes, you can hear one reference to Savile, but they are also yelling at Starmer about a host of other issues, including Julian Assange, freemasons and the new world order.

That’s not what the coverage would have led you to believe…

And in the media’s parallel universe, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves was unchallenged when making this ludicrously over the top attack on the Prime Minister via the BBC earlier today.

All violence against our political leaders and the media must be condemned – and I do so in the strongest fashion, as I always have.

But it’s interesting to me that there wasn’t the same mainstream media outrage when newly promoted Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and his young son had to be escorted by police as Remoaners screamed at him he was a “traitor” and a “Nazi” not all that long ago or when five people were arrested when Iain Duncan Smith was attacked by a traffic cone at the Conservative party conference in Manchester last October, days after Angela Rayner had branded members of the party Tory scum.

I repeat: All violence and threats against our politicians are wrong. Sir David Amess was killed just four months ago.

But to suggest in any way that Boris incited this rabble is intellectually dishonest and the media who know what they’re doing should hang their heads in shame.