Ex Prime Minister Boris Johnson has paid tribute to the “heroes” who died in the Titan submersible tragedy in his second Daily Mail column. In a 1,200-word article, the former prime minister wrote: “(Hamish) Harding and his friends died in a cause — pushing out the frontiers of human knowledge and experience — that is typically British, and that fills me with pride.”
He hit out at the “Leftie Twittersphere” he said was “awash with criticism” about the trip to the Titanic before the news of the implosion. Mr Johnson argued the “mission was so important” it “should be valued by left-wingers as well as everyone else”. “Yes, there were risks, and warnings. But every great advance must inevitably involve experiment, and equipment that can seem, in retrospect, dangerously inadequate.”
Mr Johnson’s appointment as a columnist for the newspaper was ruled a “clear breach” of ministerial rules by Whitehall’s anti-corruption watchdog last week. The column gives him a platform to take shots at Prime Minister Rishi Sunak with whom he has been publicly clashing, although he has so far held back, using his first one to detail how a weight-loss drug did not work well for him.
