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Boris Johnson has been accused of plagiarising the words of a legal blogger in a Twitter thread he wrote about London Bridge attacker Usman Khan.
The Secret Barrister claimed Mr Johnson’s tweets about the “inaccuracies” of reporting on the convicted terrorist’s sentencing were lifted from a post on the author’s website.
The award-winning law writer said the blog post was written “to rebut the lies he [Mr Johnson] spent yesterday spouting”.
Mr Johnson began the 16-part thread by writing: “The terrible Khan case has highlighted a complicated area of law. There have been many inaccuracies reported about this case over the last 24 hours. Here are the details.”
He then described four different sentencing regimes which have been “confused in this case” and said, “Khan was sentenced under Labour’s old regime” which meant he would be automatically released after serving half of his sentence.
In response, The Secret Barrister tweeted: “The Prime Minister has basically copied and pasted my blogpost into a thread and passed it off as his own explanation”.
The author added that Mr Johnson’s thread was “weapons grade s***housery”.
The Secret Barrister also pointed out the PM had used the same Prison Reform Trust document he had, and repeated the observation there had been misreporting of Levenson’s comments about the Parole Board having final approval on Khan’s release.
A spokesman for the Conservative Party has said: “These claims are completely untrue.”
The original blog post was published on Saturday, November 30, the day after the London Bridge attack. His tweet calling out Mr Johnson came the next day.
The post goes through the Khan’s release from prison in 11 points, and says politicians had set out to “exploit the tragedy for their own ends”.
Referring to Mr Johnson’s comments since Friday’s bloodshed to “toughen up sentences”, the barrister said: “It is well worth reminding Mr Johnson, as he seems to have forgotten, that absolutely nothing in his manifesto would have made the slightest difference to the sentence or release in a case like that of Usman Khan.”
The Secret Barrister admitted that there was the possibility the thread was written by the PM’s legal advisors but added: “But I just can’t see it.”
He claimed that, if legal advisors had written the tweet, then they would not have made the mistake of saying there were four sentencing regimes when there is actually five.
English football coach Gary Neville was one of the first people to claim something was wrong with Mr Johnson’s tweet, he wrote: “You definitely didn’t write this tweet!”
Mr Johnson’s thread has been liked seven thousand times and has got 2.4 retweets to date. So far, The Secret Barrister’s tweet has 68.7 thousand likes and 32.2 thousand retweets.
