Boris Johnson in the hot seat over Muslim veil 'letter box' comments

LONDON (92 News) – Outspoken Former interior minister faces a Conservative Party investigation over his newspaper column criticising women who wore Islamic veils. Johnson faces a Conservative Party investigation after refusing to apologise for the comments. “This inflammatory language will in fact motivate and fuel hate crimes, particularly towards visibly Muslim women who wear the veil or the hijab,” Sajda Mughal, who runs the JAN Trust charity, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Thursday. She said her group, which works with marginalised women, had taken several calls from hijab-wearing women who reported being called “letter boxes”. Johnson, who leaped back into contention to replace Theresa May as prime minister after resigning his post in protest against the government’s Brexit plan, made the controversial comments in a newspaper column on Monday. Earlier in a newspaper column, Johnson said women who wear the niqab looked like “letter boxes” and “bank robbers”. He has since faced a storm of protest from inside and outside the party. Both May and party chairman Brandon Lewis said he should apologise, as did civil society minister Tracey Crouch who called Johnson’s language “intentionally provocative”.