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Saturday 22 November 2008

'I'm prejudiced in his favour'

Some advice for Boris from a proud father

Stanley Johnson says that his son is no buffoon, that his ability to make people laugh doesn’t mean he’s a lightweight, and that he should not get bogged down in ‘consultation’

I have been in Greece for the last few days, so I have had to follow the mayoral saga at long distance. I knew that Boris was thinking about standing for mayor and, for what my tuppence was worth, urged him to do so. When I checked into the internet café in Milina, Pelion, Greece, on Monday morning, I learnt from the BBC website that he had taken the plunge.

Over the years I have learnt not to be surprised by Boris. As a parent, I remember attending a performance of Richard II in the Cloisters at Eton where Boris was playing the title role. It was fairly obvious that he hadn’t learnt the part, but he winged it splendidly, inventing on the

hoof a sequence of nearly perfect Shake­spearian pentameters.

There have been many streaks of sheer precocity in Boris’s career. A few years ago, when most of us would have hung up our boots, I watched him score a brutally efficient try from a line-out (the Daily Telegraph rugby team was playing some north London side). He once wrote a superb parody of Dr Seuss’s Cat in the Hat which is worth digging up from the archives. He takes after his mother in being a talented artist. Of course, I was thrilled when he won Henley to become a Conservative MP, less thrilled when Michael Howard sent him to Liverpool. Whatever else you may say about Boris, he is not a plodder.

Which is the reason the news about his running for mayor is so, well, newsworthy. One may go to Greece for a holiday but, in these days of mobile phones, it’s difficult to be out of touch. Around Monday lunch­time, when I already knew the news, a charming lady from the Press Association called to ask, among other things, what I thought about Boris the ‘buffoon’.

My instinct always is to be tremendously polite to the press. What on earth would we do without them? There would be no viable alternative to the Today programme. So I was only too happy to refer Aislinn to Andrew Gilligan’s perceptive recent comment in the Evening Standard about how it was ‘better to have a serious man being a buffoon (Boris Johnson), than a buffoon pretending to be a serious man (Ken Livingstone)’.

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