Over the past while, a politician has been issuing sound bites, making statements that should make most people think twice. But we don’t. Yet we do need to remember them, even in paraphrase.
To all of his accomplices, we will hunt you down.
What was strange about it was there was no outcry – public or international – about the harshness of tone or the impolitic language.
We need to beef up our borders.
We need to remember that such language has, in the recent past, been characterises as unstatesmanlike.
We will lock up all terrorists and throw away the key.
Perhaps it is because the speaker was not US President Donald Trump, from whom such exhalations are expected. He has voiced similar sentiments in the past.
Muslim women wearing burkhas look like letter boxes.
In each case, the speaker was UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Maybe he got a free pass in trying to deal with terrorist attacks. Or maybe what it means is that, in adopting a Trump-like persona, the present and future of Britain are orange.