Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson paid tribute to the five who died in the Titan submersible disaster in his second Daily Mail column, and social media users are outraged.
In the 1,200 worded long article, Johnson wrote, “Hamish Harding and his fellows were trying to take a new step for humanity, to popularise undersea travel, to democratise the ocean floor. They knew the dangers. In the immortal words of Captain Scott, just before he died from the Antarctic cold: ‘We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint…Harding and his friends died in a cause — pushing out the frontiers of human knowledge and experience — that is typically British, and that fills me with pride.”
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He went on to call the expedition heroic by saying, “without in any way minimising the migrants’ tragedy, let me tell you how I feel about those on the Titanic expedition. I think they are heroes.”
Reading this, one social media user wrote, “Heroic’? was that the also the Daily Mail view about about a larger group of ‘risk takers’ who also perished, at sea, just last week: albeit not ultra-wealthy and not on a deep-dive sight-seeing excursion , in an extremely small vessel.”
While another user wrote, “What were they taking the risk for, I admire adventurers and explorers, we learn from new things.They weren’t going to discover anything new down there.Just the wreck of a ship that thousands of words and photographs have been produced. Vanity project because they could afford it.”
Take a look at few more tweets-
Last Monday, Whitehall’s anti-corruption watchdog found that Johnson’s hiring as a writer for the Daily Mail newspaper was a “clear breach” of ministerial guidelines. The column allows him a platform to criticize Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, with whom he has been openly feuding, though he has so far resisted, using his first column to discuss how a weight-loss medicine did not work well for him.
Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a citizen of France, were also verified as having passed in the tragedy.
The lost Titan submersible, which is reported to have collapsed while attempting to reach the Titanic debris, is missing, and Downing Street has stated that Rishi Sunak’s thoughts are with the loved ones of the dead. The official spokesman for the prime minister stated: “His sympathies are very much with the families of those who have died in this awful occurrence and they have been through an unbelievably tough ordeal in the previous few days.
