Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Vodka, kaolin and morphine: my welcome drinks at The Spectator offices

After I’d partaken of this cocktail with Mary Wakefield, I had my first encounter with a speechless Boris Johnson

‘I couldn’t believe my good luck at falling among such a fun crowd. Twenty years on, I still can’t’: Boris Johnson, Kimberly Fortier and Matthew d’Ancona at a Spectator summer party in Doughty Street Credit: Alan Davidson/Shutterstock 
issue 25 April 2020

In 2001, aged 44, I was hired to write a weekly column for this august paper, and for the first time in my life there was a London door on which I could knock or ring, at any time of the day or evening, and be welcomed in. And what a door! To walk along the Regency terrace sun trap of Doughty Street in Bloomsbury on a summer evening, then breeze through the open door of number 56, and to know that the people to be found inside were the funniest, cleverest, most unsnobbish collection of individuals, and that booze...

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