But if we walk on egg shells then we don’t say what we mean. I want to be able to speak my mind as a politician and if someone deliberately misconstrues what I say, that should be tutted at by the listening masses, not jumped upon by everyone including the Right (formally the defenders of common sense).

No-one with any sense can believe that Johnson would welcome any exodus of people based on their skin colour and I believe Johnson knows how disingenious it would be to stereotype a colour in any case… But there you go. It’s not a sane world is it.

I suspect that you’re young enough not to remember this, but twenty years ago or so, that sort of wording – ‘let them go if they don’t like it here’ – was often used by the far right as a coded way of discussing emigration (1 m, by the way!) of former immigrants being forced not by law but by just making them uncomfortable with the life they could have here.

I am not for one second suggesting that this was what the person concerned meant – but it could have been read that way, both by people who would have nodded their heads in agreement, and by people who would have been alienated from the new Mayoral administration if nothing had happened.

Not every Tory is racist; these days the vast majority aren’t; but there are still quite a few around, and I think the Mayor was right to act to make a clear statement on where he stood vis a vis the different elements in his party.