Boris Johnson knew he was summoning dark and undemocratic forces with his Savile comment

The prime minister bears some responsibility for the harassment of Keir Starmer

Boris Johnson knew what he was doing when he accused Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile. We know this because he discussed it with his advisers and they advised him not to do it. He went ahead and did it anyway. Yesterday’s attempt by a tiny mob to intimidate Starmer was not the direct result of the prime minister’s words, but those words added to the forces that make such ugly scenes worse.

Let us go back to the scene of the original crime: Johnson’s exchanges with Starmer over the publication of Sue Gray’s update, eight days ago, on whether Downing Street parties had broken lockdown guidance. Johnson said that Starmer had said nothing about Gray’s report, “because the report does absolutely nothing to substantiate the tissue of nonsense that he has just spoken”. He went on: “Instead, this leader of the opposition, a former director of public prosecutions – although he spent most of his time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, as far as I can make out – chose to use this moment continually to prejudge a police inquiry.”

The reference to Savile had nothing to do with the Gray report or the police investigation into possible breaches of lockdown law. Munira Mirza, who had been an adviser to Johnson for 14 years, and who had been loyal to him through scores of other controversies, advised him strongly not to do it. After he used it, she begged him to apologise. He offered a weaselly-worded explanation, but no apology, so she resigned.

He knew what he was doing, all right. He was fighting for his political life. He was summoning dark and awful forces to cause chaos. Because chaos and outrage are distractions and they destabilise. They destabilise your own side, as Johnson has discovered, but they confuse opponents too, and where there is confusion there is hope.

He knew the power of implying, as Mirza put it, that Starmer had deliberately let a child sex abuser get away with it. I wasn’t saying that, Johnson protested once the damage was done. I was just saying Starmer had to take responsibility for the failures of the Crown Prosecution Service when he was in charge of it. But the prime minister knows that paedophilia is one of the persistent themes of conspiracy myths – it is one of the few consistent components of the shape-shifting QAnon movement in the US.

He could not have foreseen that a crowd made up mostly of anti-vaxxers would end up shouting about Savile and “protecting paedophiles” at Starmer, but he knew the sort of thing that might ensue if he stirred that hornets’ nest of popular irrationalism.

The people who harassed Starmer and David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, were protesting outside the Metropolitan Police HQ at New Scotland Yard, which is next door to MPs’ offices opposite Big Ben. They had modelled themselves on the Canadian Freedom Convoy, which started as a protest by truckers against the ban on unvaccinated drivers crossing from the US, bringing Ottawa to a standstill.

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When I went past them earlier yesterday, they seemed to be espousing an eclectic collection of causes. A van with handmade signs “Don’t Jab Our Kids” also carried slogans against the “New World Order” and was parked with a car bearing two St Andrew’s flags. Piers Corbyn, the anti-vaxxer, was there. By chance, Starmer walked past with Lammy, on the way back to parliament from the Ministry of Defence, and they started to shout at him, about his failure to oppose the government, freemasons, Julian Assange, Savile, paedophiles and Magna Carta. Much of it was just “Traitor!”

These kinds of people didn’t need Johnson’s encouragement to harass public figures in the street. A crowd of anti-lockdown protesters chased Nick Watt, the BBC journalist, into Downing Street last summer. But to have the prime minister deliberately feed the paranoid worldview that is likely to make such confrontations worse is frightening. It is usually best to resist comparing Johnson to Donald Trump, but this time it cannot be avoided. A few people shouting nonsense and throwing a traffic cone is not the same as the storming of the Capitol, but Johnson and Trump were both inciting undemocratic forces for their own ends.

In Johnson’s case, the only saving grace is that his invocation of Savile seems to have been counterproductive with the very Conservative MPs whose support he needs to survive.