After “racist” was scrawled on a Churchill statue during protests over the killing of George Floyd, Mr. Johnson has spoken up for his political idol.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain on Friday stirred a fraught debate over symbols of his country’s past, accusing protesters of seeking to “censor our past” and telling them it was “absurd and shameful” that a statue of Winston Churchill needed to be covered to protect it from being vandalized.
In series of eight Twitter posts, Mr. Johnson lavished praise on the wartime leader and responded to those who recently tore down the statue of a 17th-century slave trader in Bristol by insisting that the country’s imperial history should not be censored or edited.
Mr. Johnson has been on the defensive since the killing by the police of George Floyd in Minneapolis, an act that prompted demonstrations in Britain, including one in London in which protesters daubed the words “was a racist” after Churchill’s name on a statue near Parliament.
Regarded by many as Britain’s greatest leader because of his stewardship of the country during World War II, Churchill was also a fervent imperialist and many historians acknowledge that he expressed racist views.
“Churchill clearly made racist statements,” said Steven Fielding, a professor of political history at the University of Nottingham, while adding that the wartime leader is such a popular and prominent figure in Britain that Mr. Johnson stands to gain politically from defending him.
Though Churchill sometimes expressed opinions that would be “unacceptable to us today,” Mr. Johnson wrote, his statue “is a permanent reminder of his achievement in saving this country — and the whole of Europe — from a fascist and racist tyranny.”
But Mr. Johnson has used racist language himself in the past, making him at best a tainted arbiter on race issues.
