The prime minister has been accused of ‘weapons grade sh**housery’ after allegedly plagiarising a legal blogger who had written about the London Bridge terror attack.
Boris Johnson posted a 16-part thread to his Twitter profile foallowing the attack, in an attempt to clear up some of the legal questions and inaccuracies people had about the attacker.
However, the thread shows striking similarities to a blogpost made two days earlier by ‘The Secret Barrister’, an anonymous blogger and Twitter user who works as a legal expert and writes about issues in the media.
“The prime minister has basically copied and pasted my blogpost into a thread and passed it off as his own explanation,” the Secret Barrister said.
“A blogpost which I had to write to rebut the lies he spent yesterday spouting. This is weapons grade sh**housery.”
The Barrister adds: “Eg, [Boris Johnson ]links to the same Prison Reform Trust document that I link to in the blogpost, and he repeats my observation about the misreporting of Leveson LJ’s comments about the involvement of the Parole Board.”
The blogpost also criticised the prime minister for trying to “score cheap political points” in the wake of the tragedy and accused his government of “outright lying” about the background to Usman Khan’s early release, but these were not repeated.
The Secret Barrister later added: “The possibility that the PM’s own legal advisors drafted his thread without any regard to my witterings has to be carefully considered. But I just can’t see it.
“If so, it would mean a PM who has never before engaged in any form of detailed legal exposition – his style is famously broad brush and bright colour – decided apropos of nothing to publish a lengthy legal explainer on a complex issue, hours after mine was widely circulated. “
A source close to the prime minister denies claim of plagiarism, according to the Independent.
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