Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn today defended his article lampooning disabled student protester Jody McIntyre, saying he is an ‘equal opportunities abuser.”
Speaking on the ‘Parry & Graham’show on talkSPORT at 12.15pm Littlejohn said: ‘What we subsequently discovered [about Jody McIntyre] is that he’s not quite as disabled as everybody thinks.
‘Sky television has pictures of him trying to clamber over the railings, and we discovered this week is that on his website he actually boasts that during the Millbank invasion he climbed 18 flights of stairs whilst his mates carried his wheelchair.
‘What upset people is that I did him up like Andy from Little Britain. When I compared him to Andy I hadn’t read the idea that he’d been up the stairs in Millbank and it’s even more like Andy now.
‘The thing I made explicit in the column is that a disabled person is exactly as entitled to demonstrate as anybody else. I just thought that it might have been a good plan to keep a little safe distance rather than getting his brother to push him straight into the old bill carrying a team of riot shields.
‘What I’ve done is taken him at his own estimation, I’ve ignored his disability. I would have been just as offensive about an able bodied person – I’m an equal opportunities abuser.”
The PCC is investigating whether or not the piece breached the Editors’ Code.
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