London:
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson recommended on Tuesday that he had left journalism for politics, simply because in his original profession he typically discovered himself abusing folks in print.
Johnson, 56, has displayed a colourful, in some cases combative speaking and writing style each as a journalist and as a politician, a trait which has fuelled a lot of controversies throughout his 3 decades in the public eye.
“When you’re a journalist, it’s a great, great job. It’s a great profession. But the trouble is that you always, sometimes, you find yourself always abusing people, attacking people,” he stated throughout a stop by to a college on Tuesday.
“Not that you want to abuse and attack them, but you are being critical. You’re being critical when maybe you feel sometimes a bit guilty about that because you haven’t put yourself in the place of the person you’re criticising.”
Johnson concluded his off-the-cuff remarks by suggesting that it was these elements of journalism that had driven him to give politics a go alternatively.
The opposition Labour Party stated Johnson must apologise to journalists.
“We know from Donald Trump that these kind of assaults on the free press are dangerous and designed to stir up distrust and division,” stated Labour’s media policy chief, lawmaker Chris Matheson.
“For Boris Johnson to say journalists are ‘always abusing people’ probably says more about his own career,” he added.
As a young man, Johnson was sacked from his initially job in journalism, at the Times newspaper, for creating up a quote.
He went on to have a prosperous profession at the Daily Telegraph, exactly where he created his name as a Brussels correspondent lambasting the European Union in vivid if not usually completely precise prose.
He later pursued parallel media and political careers as editor of the Spectator magazine and as a member of parliament.
Even in more current years, when he has focused more on successive political jobs as mayor of London, foreign affairs minister and prime minister, he has written frequent newspaper columns in his trademark style.
In the most recent of a series of comparable examples, he triggered a significant public row with a 2018 column in which he likened Muslim ladies wearing burqas to letter boxes and bank robbers.
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