‘I laughed until I cried, then retched’: Boris Johnson on the wit of Simon Hoggart

I really can’t remember exactly how I came to appoint Simon Hoggart the wine correspondent of this magazine, but I have a feeling that it must have been in the aftermath of one of those long lunches at which it was then — and I hope and believe still is — the privilege of the staff to get sozzled at the expense of the wonderful and benevolent proprietors.

It might have been a parliamentary awards judging lunch. Perhaps it was just a lunch. At any rate Simon was there, and he started doing impressions of some of his favourite House of Commons characters.

I am pretty sure Sir Peter Tapsell cropped up. But the star turn was what he claimed were the exact words of a monologue he had recently heard at another such lunch from the lips of another great man: a Conservative minister, as he then was, a prodigious figure well known to readers of this magazine but whom there is no need to identify.

This was a continuous discourse, but in two modes. In the first, this MP would harangue the company at large about all the copper-bottomed ocean-going shits on the Tory backbenches who were being disloyal to John Major; and in the second, he would turn to his neighbour on his left — a young female journalist — and ask her, ‘But WHY won’t you go to bed with me, xxxxx?’ before returning to the theme of the chateau-bottled shits who were undermining the Prime Minister, and then back, without drawing breath, to his fortissimo importuning of his neighbour.

OK — so perhaps you had to be there. I am conscious as I write this that the gag loses a bit on the page. But I laughed so much at Hoggart’s impersonation that first I started crying and then retching and then I thought I would pass out.