You don’t hear the outraged of Twitter going on about the BBC and the Guardian mocking the burka. Stephen Fry made the same joke as Boris on Have I Got News For You, before Ian Hislop and Paul Merton joined in:

Stephen Fry: “I just posted something in that.” Ian Hislop: “We must stop meeting like this, Camilla.” Paul Merton: “Prince Charles is surprised when a pint of Guinness looks at him in a funny way.”

This was Polly Toynbee in the Guardian:

Something horrible flits across the background in scenes from Afghanistan, scuttling out of sight. There it is, a brief blue or black flash, a grotesque Scream 1, 2 and 3 personified – a woman. The top-to-toe burka, with its sinister, airless little grille, is more than an instrument of persecution, it is a public tarring and feathering of female sexuality. It transforms any woman into an object of defilement too untouchably disgusting to be seen. It is a garment of lurid sexual suggestiveness: what rampant desire and desirability lurks and leers beneath its dark mysteries? In its objectifying of women, it turns them into cowering creatures demanding and expecting violence and victimisation. Forget cultural sensibilities

Steerpike has found this Guardian piece offering an alternate use of the Burka, as a ‘relaunched postbox’.

So when lefties joke about the burka it’s funny, when Tories do it it’s a five day news story…