‘Boris Johnson’s brain’ Munira Mirza resigns amid partygate fallout

GBNEWS24DESK//

Munira Mirza, one of Boris Johnson’s closest aides, has quit, blaming what she called a “scurrilous” attack by the prime minister on Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.

For 14 years Munira Mirza has been at Boris Johnson’s side. Through all the tribulations of his time as London mayor, Brexit campaigner, foreign secretary and prime minister, she has been a source of advice, willing and able to challenge her boss.

Ms Mirza, sometimes known as “Boris’s brain”, is far from being a lifelong Conservative, having once been a communist activist.

The 43-year-old factory worker’s daughter, brought up in Oldham, also comes from a very different background to Old Etonian Mr Johnson.

Like most advisers, she is not usually in the public eye. But in 2018 she wrote an article defending Mr Johnson after he said Muslim women wearing burkas “look like letter boxes” and was accused of Islamophobia.

“He knows far more about Islam and Islamic cultures than most of the politicians who are now lining up to attack him,” she wrote on the Conservative Home website.

But Mr Johnson’s attack on Sir Keir Starmer in the Commons last week – in which he falsely said the Labour leader, a former director of public prosecutions, had failed to prosecute the serial paedophile Sir Jimmy Savile – was not something she deemed defensible.

“This was not the usual cut and thrust of politics; it was an inappropriate and partisan reference to a horrendous case of child sex abuse,” she wrote in her resignation letter, published in the Spectator magazine.