Bad enough to make Boris Johnson write like Sam Francis. Boris Johnson is a Member of Parliament, the "ex-sainted editor" of the London Spectator, a man so repectable that even his sex scandalwas respectable, involving as it did a person of the opposite sex.

But today I see he's writing like this:

"This case wasn't even about religion, or conscience, or the dictates of faith. At least it wasn't primarily about those things. It was about power. It was about who really runs the schools in this country, and about how far militant Islam could go in bullying the poor, cowed, gelatinous and mentally spongiform apparatus of the British state."[Telegraph The Shabina Begum case never had anything to do with modesty,By Boris Johnson, March 23, 2006]

As I say, the tone sounds somewhat reminiscent of the late Sam Francis, and things must be pretty serious to make Boris Johnson talk like that.

By the way, the controversy was over allowing Muslim schoolgirls in a Bedfordshire school to wear the jilbab, not much different from the chador or abaya. The current Islamic school uniform in the town of Luton is the salwar kameez.