The day Boris tried to bribe me

It’s not every day that a future prime minister offers you a bribe, but that’s what happened to me 38 years ago. I was the editor of Tributary, a satirical magazine at Oxford, and Boris wanted me to pass on the editorship to him. He conveyed through an intermediary that if I did him this favour he would invite me to lots of parties. That was notable for two reasons. First, it was unnecessary — Boris was the only applicant for the job. Second, Boris hates parties.

It would be ironic if partygate is the cause of his downfall, since a love of late-night carousing is one of the few vices the Prime Minister doesn’t suffer from. He would have been cajoled into attending any social gatherings in Downing Street, forced to show his face to please his wife or staff. You wouldn’t think it to see him on telly, but he’s quite a shy man who doesn’t enjoy social interactions, particularly with other men. Indeed, I think his natural introversion and the various methods he’s developed to compensate for it are the key to his political success.

To begin with, it explains his pantomime toff persona. Too timid to face the world as himself, he decided to don a theatrical mask plucked from the dressing-up box of English stereotypes. But unlike so many others who’ve reinvented themselves as quintessential Englishmen, this grandson of a Turkish immigrant added his own brilliant twist, which was to wildly exaggerate his upper-class characteristics to make it obvious he was just pretending and didn’t expect his peers to be taken in by it.

At Eton, anyone from Boris’s background trying to pass themselves off as to the manor born would have been ridiculed mercilessly, but Al Johnson found a way to do it that avoided the usual social stigma.