Boris Johnson has said police money spent investigating historic child abuse has been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked about police numbers amid the UK’s ongoing knife crime emergency, the former foreign secretary used the phrase to suggest the money could have been better spent.
“One comment I would make is I think an awful lot of money – and an awful lot of police time – now goes into these historic offences and all this malarkey,” Johnson said during a phone-in on LBC radio on Wednesday morning.
“You know, £60million I saw was being spaffed up the wall on some investigation into historic child abuse and all this kind of thing.
“What on earth is that going to do to protect the public now?” he added.
“What the people want is to see officers out on the streets doing what they signed up to do.”
Johnson’s choice of words are likely to spark outrage, and draw attention to his own spending record while in power.
While Mayor of London between 2008 and 2016, Johnson famously spent more than £320,000 buying and refurbishing crowd-control water cannons, which were later banned by then home secretary Theresa May. Three cannons were sold for scrap in November for just £11,000.
Questions have also been raised over the Tory backbencher’s role in the disastrous Garden Bridge project, which saw £43m of public money spent without full construction ever starting.
Johnson’s comments on LBC came just a week after an investigation was launched to examine whether political parties “turned a blind eye” to allegations of child sexual abuse in Westminster. It forms part of a wide-ranging inquiry into child sexual abuse set up in 2015 in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal.
Former chief prosecutor Nazim Afzal tweeted: “Boris Johnson thinks spending money on delivering justice to victims of child sexual abuse is wasted.
“Tell that to those whose lives were devastated by abusers,” he wrote. “Tell that [to] Frances Andrade who took her own life 30 years after the abuse she lived with everyday.”
Another listener tweeted: ”‘Spaffed’ is not a very nice word to use, is it Mr. Johnson? Particularly in the context you used it. I do hope you never, ever become PM.”