I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed and so it did not go up my nose, In fact, I may have been doing icing sugar.

[Asked ‘How can somebody as fat as you get so many women to find you attractive?’] This strikes me as a trick question.

My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive. [Here there’s a deft cartoon of a Boris-faced olive, or is it an olive-faced Boris, by Tom Hughes, who decorates others of the bons mots.]

[Michael] Howard is a dynamic performer on many levels … [He] was the most marvellous Home Secretary since Peel. Hang on, was Peel Home Secretary?

Johnson reminds me of the late, great Alan Coren. He is very literary. You know this is a man who has read and read, fuelled and refuelled, before he has written. And Johnson has another Coren trait: the ability to charge off at a surreal tangent. The two carry their minds, as some men carry their heads, a little on one side. For example, when Boris was recently on the Who Do You Think You Are? television programme, probing into his ancestry, he said at one point, as some ancient scandal surfaced, ‘My ancestors have carte blanche to get up to whatever sexual antics they like’. Anyone else might say: ‘I don’t care what sexual antics my ancestors got up to’, but Boris delivers this imperious ukase, as befits the descendant of George II he turned out to be.

In another scene, finding that a marriage register proved he was in the bloodline of a German princeling, he said to the presenter: ‘Hey, you BBC chaps have planted this, haven’t you?’ Again, anyone else might have said, ‘Well, what a surprise!’, but Boris converts the revelation into something operatically comic — the presenter was forced to expostulate, ‘No, no, we found it here’.Boris also reminds me of Coren — Coren in spate — when he describes driving an Alfa-Romeo:

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